After the Vultures: Holbrooke's Bosnia Peace Came Too Late

The Bush administration had been inclined to leave the Yugoslav mess to the Europeans. Once in office, Bill Clinton made a mockery of his bold words on the stump in 1992 ("the high cost of remaining silent and paralyzed in the face of genocide") and stumbled through three years of blabber about intractable thousand-year-old Balkan rivalries. When the United States at last took the lead in Bosnia, the reason was not some abruptly discovered moral or strategic imperative. It was failure, repeated and devastating failure -- combined with the bleak prospect of fulfilling Clinton's promise to send American troops to extract the U.N. peacekeeping force -- that finally put the administration's back against the wall.

In the grim summer of 1995, the renewed Bosnian Serb bombardment of Sarajevo, the Serb capture of the Srebrenica "safe area," the Serb massacre of several thousand Srebrenica Muslims, and the lightning Croat victory over the Serbs in the Krajina revealed the utter vacuity of the West's Bosnian commitments and changed the strategic equation. Even for the cynical "this-is-the-Balkans-you-know" school of Western officials, Srebrenica was one humiliation too many. For a jittery Pentagon, the unexpected Croat triumph in the Krajina was a decisive indication that Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic and his army were not about to defend the Bosnian and Croatian Serbs they had armed, financed, and incited just four years earlier. A narrow diplomatic breach was thus opened through ethnic cleansing, cold-blooded killing, and ignominy.

Enter Holbrooke, quietly fuming. He has been sidelined as his erstwhile friend, National Security Adviser Anthony Lake, has drafted a seven-point plan for peace that, to Holbrooke's dismay, called on the Bosnian government to give up its one remaining eastern enclave, Gorazde. After Srebrenica, Gorazde cannot be abandoned, Holbrooke insists. Lake is won over. But the simmering rivalry between the two men -- and between the State Department and the National Security Council -- persists; indeed it amounts to an underlying theme in the book. Holbrooke, now a banker, clearly remains a public-servant-in-waiting, and he is not inclined to fire broadsides at administration officials, past or present. At times the book is irksomely arch in its restraint; Holbrooke seems to be hedging his bets. But his irritation with Lake is clear enough. When Holbrooke's peace shuttle -- cut unusual slack by the State Department -- gets moving, Lake wants to create an NSC committee to oversee it. When a Muslim-Croat offensive gathers momentum in September 1995, helped by NATO bombing, Lake presses for a cease-fire while Holbrooke would rather win on the battlefield land that will be "hard to gain at the peace talks." When discussion turns to what American forces will do in Bosnia if peace is made, Lake argues "against a 'nation-building' role for the military" and worries "about the 'slippery slope' in Bosnia."

In the light of advice like this, President Clinton's craven retreat from his campaign-trail promises becomes more readily understandable; so does the circumscribed approach to NATO's mission that has characterized most of its actions in Bosnia since Dayton. This policy, to Holbrooke's evident exasperation, has left free Karadzic and his longtime military commander, Ratko Mladic, despite their indictments by the U.N. war crimes tribunal in The Hague. Yet as the chief architect of the peace writes here, "Karadzic and Mladic will have to be captured. This is not simply a question of justice but also of peace. If they are not captured, no peace agreement we create in Dayton can succeed."

Of course, Lake's caution is also the Pentagon's. Some of the most fascinating passages in To End a War center on the confrontation between Holbrooke's "maximalist" view of what American forces can achieve and the "minimalist" approach of their commanders. Holbrooke was in Vietnam as a young Foreign Service officer but has deep reservations about that war's legacy in the Pentagon: an obsession with mission security and the avoidance of casualties that led some top military brass to suggest 500,000 soldiers would be needed in Bosnia; a fixation on an "exit strategy" that led to the first, unrealistic 12-month deadline for the Bosnia deployment; and an all-consuming concern with avoiding a fuzzy mission that has led American forces to eschew not only the arrest of war criminals, but also a more active role in establishing the freedom of movement and security necessary for more than two million refugees to return to their homes. The result is that no Americans have been killed in hostilities in Bosnia, but the idea of a united country still lies largely moribund.

With Admiral Leighton Smith, the first commander of NATO forces in Bosnia, Holbrooke's anger spills over. He is outraged that Smith stood by in March 1996 and allowed Karadzic's thugs to orchestrate the burning and abandonment of Serb sectors of Sarajevo that were about to be handed back to the government. A substantial share of the vestigial hopes for a multiethnic Bosnia went up in that smoke. Smith, Holbrooke comments scathingly, "considered the civilian aspects of the task beneath him."

But the Pentagon's caution was ultimately self-defeating. "Paradoxically," Holbrooke writes, "the same officials who opposed capturing Karadzic usually supported a tight deadline for American troop withdrawal. The two goals were obviously incompatible; if you wanted to reduce troop levels quickly, capturing Karadzic was essential."

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