U.S. interests were essentially twofold: 1) protect human rights and end the conflict by finding a political arrangement acceptable to all the parties on the ground (Serbs, Bosnians, and Croats), and 2) prevent further corrosion of the transatlantic relationship.
Making U.S. policy goals possible would require convergence of U.S. and European aims. That process accelerated in 1995 as Europeans realized that the entire mission of the UN protection force, known as UNPROFOR and led by the French and the British, was becoming untenable and might require evacuation, even under fire.
There was enough concern about a humiliating departure that in July the European Union dispatched a quick reaction force to Bosnia to help protect the mandate of the UN forces.
There had been a growing chorus of complaints and outrage from the international media about the role of the European-led UN forces in Bosnia. The UN was broadly perceived as failing to protect the Bosnian civilian population from attacks by armed groups often instigated by the Bosnian Serb government.
In fact, the UN forces were in Bosnia to enforce a weak, so-called Chapter VI mandate to deliver food, not to take “all necessary means,” the much more robust mandate of the UN Charter to enforce a UN Security Council Resolution and which includes the use of force against any party to the conflict.
The difference between a Chapter VI (peacekeeping) mandate and a Chapter VII (peace-making) mandate was well-known to anyone working from the inside. But it was completely misunderstood by the general public, which could not understand how the international community’s response to genocide and ethnic cleansing could be to send soldiers in traditional UN powder blue helmets and white vehicles (to distinguish the peacekeepers from warring sides) with a mandate that they could not intervene with force or take sides except to protect themselves. The UN forces were taking a beating in the international press, even though, as their British commander tried (not so) patiently (but accurately) to explain, “One doesn’t go to war in white tanks and wearing blue helmets.”
Not all the blue helmets and white tanks were so passive and accepting of the limited rules of engagement. The British UN force commander, General Sir Michael Rose, despite his notoriety with the pro-interventionist international press, was no flower child. He told me of an incident when a Danish unit was attacked by Serb gunmen outside Sarajevo in early 1995. The Danish commander reported to Rose that they had robustly returned fire with seventy-two tank rounds.
“Why seventy-two?” Rose asked.
“That was all we had.”
The failure of the British-led and largely European-composed UN force to go to war with the Bosnian Serbs was often explained in conspiracy circles as a result of historical alignments: the relationships in World War II between the Serbs and the British and especially the French, whose senior leadership could remember the war, meant that the latter were somewhat sympathetic to the Serbs, if not necessarily to their behavior. Meanwhile, the Germans were perceived as much more “pro-Croat,” and their diplomacy (Germany at the time had still not committed troops to any peacekeeping missions) supposedly reflected it.
The dispatch of a European Union rapid reaction force was thus Europe’s effort to recoup an image harmed considerably by participation in a UN mission that looked weak in the eyes of the world. The UN force also began to regroup the small units deployed throughout the country and put them into more defensible redoubts. This would ensure that a decision to employ NATO air strikes would not be thwarted (as in the past) by the threat of hostage taking by Serb militia. A new British force commander, Major General Rupert Smith, was sent to Sarajevo. Smith, a thoroughly professional and no-nonsense general, had no time for public relations and set to work tightening up the security of UNPROFOR and preparing it for even tougher times.
As the situation deteriorated on the ground, the diplomacy in the spring and summer of 1995 was going nowhere. Bob Frasure spent weeks on end in Belgrade trying to bring Milosevic around to supporting the implementation of the 1994 Contact Group plan. Milosevic, however, continued to insist he could not speak for the Bosnian Serbs, and that any progress on the ground would depend on our direct negotiation with them. Bob sent back cable after cable explaining that there was nothing more that could be accomplished in Belgrade and that he needed to leave.
Unbeknownst to Bob, as far as diplomacy was concerned, he was it. If his mission was determined to be at an end, there would be loud cries. Neither the Europeans nor the U.S. administration was prepared at that point to support a military approach. As long as Bob was in Belgrade, the answer to any suggested new approach was that we had a diplomat in the field working the problem. Bob was ordered to stay.
When Bob was finally allowed to depart (“The lambs of Serbia will not miss me,” he wrote in a telegram from Embassy Belgrade, a sardonic reference to his being force-fed enormous traditional Serb lunches), the Europeans were prepared to launch their new peace mediator, an energetic, tough-minded, and very capable former Swedish prime minister named Carl Bildt. Carl came to Washington for a round of meetings and met Holbrooke and me in the La Chaumiere restaurant, across from the Four Seasons Hotel. He listened as Holbrooke explained the politics of Washington in the late spring of 1995, and how U.S. policy was likely to evolve in the coming months. Holbrooke was aware that if the twenty-thousand-member UNPROFOR force were to be evacuated under deteriorating security conditions, it would be the U.S. military that would take the lead in organizing the departure.
In May 1995, just before the dinner with Carl Bildt, Lieutenant General Dan Christman, the director of the Pentagon’s “J-3,” responsible for U.S. military plans and operations, had come to Holbrooke’s office to outline the UNPROFOR evacuation plan to us. Christman unfurled maps on Holbrooke’s coffee table in his dimly lit office that showed an extraordinarily well-endowed force of some twenty-five thousand U.S. troops that would swoop in wherever UNPROFOR personnel were. For example, a Bangladeshi battalion (the Bang Bat, as it was affectionately known) was located in northwestern Bosnia and would require assistance in their extraction. Holbrooke and I looked at the map and the accompanying charts detailing the strength of the mission, including the airpower that would be available.
I glanced over at Holbrooke and said to Christman, “My God, General! With that force you could take Belgrade.”
Christman began rolling up the maps and gathering the charts.
“Heck, with this force we could take Moscow.”
I stayed behind with Holbrooke. That briefing had made clear to us what we had been thinking for some time. No matter what, we were going to be militarily involved in Bosnia, so why not do so in a way that enforced a peace agreement rather than simply assisting in a humiliating withdrawal? Early on in the UN deployment, U.S. allies, including the Canadians, had asked for specific assurances that the U.S. military would be available were it necessary to withdraw under fire. We had declined to draft anything (not wanting to be obligated for every unit in Bosnia, or establishing a new practice of providing U.S. guarantees for units on UN deployments), but we knew that a failure to come to the rescue of an ally would be the end of that alliance.
Some months before, the issue of UN extraction had come up during a Contact Group meeting with Milosevic in Belgrade. The British representative made the point that if things got worse the UNPROFOR mission would have to be curtailed. Milosevic shot back that if things got worse the mission would not be able to get out. I interjected at that point that if our allies needed assistance of that kind we would help them.
“And we would help you,” added Milosevic. There were times when Milosevic’s insincerity was just too much. I shook my head and responded directly.
“We wouldn’t need your help. You just need to stay out of the way.” The British and French representatives nodded their approval.
While the public in most Western countries was focused on human rights, the concern within governments was the impact Bosnia was having on alliance relationships. European elites regar
ded U.S. reluctance to serve in UNPROFOR as reflecting an unwillingness to accept our role as a great power. We saw UNPROFOR as a flawed and ultimately doomed mission. Moreover, U.S. policy-making circles were beginning to look ahead and contemplate the future of NATO and whether “out of area” missions—and Bosnia was such a mission—could be envisioned for the future.
The summer of 1995 brought new challenges. NATO air strikes in the spring resulted predictably in the taking of UN hostages. Serb militia groups chained UN peacekeepers to a fence in the presence of international media in an effort to humiliate the European powers and dare them to support further NATO air action. In July, the Serbs overran the eastern enclave of Srebrenica in reprisal for ambushes conducted by the tiny force of Bosnian Muslim militia there. Within days, reports began to emerge from refugees streaming into Tuzla that the Serbs had murdered thousands of Muslim men, often in a macabre sport of hunting and chasing them down in the forest. Others were executed and thrown into mass burial pits, the likes of which had not been seen in Europe since World War II. The mass murder was preceded by a filmed encounter between the Bosnian Serb commander Ratko Mladic and the head of the lightly armed Dutch UN unit guarding the Srebrenica safe area, which was incapable of halting what was to happen.
Meanwhile, NATO began to flex its muscles and the alliance members began to come together with the understanding that the future of the alliance, and indeed of the entire transatlantic relationship, was being put to the test. We gathered at a conference in London in July and established the “Gorazde Rules,” designed to expand the scope of NATO air action beyond “pinpricks,” as the press had come to describe the use of NATO airpower, or the symbolic bombings in retaliation for real Serb atrocities.
Amid the deteriorating situation on the ground and the weight of NATO alliance deliberations, Bildt’s mission began to founder as both the Serbs and the Bosnian Muslims made clear they wanted to deal with an envoy who actually represented the United States, the country whose eventual direct involvement was seen as the guarantor of any peace settlement.
The person they wanted was Holbrooke, but as the winter and spring months had worn on in Washington, “le Bulldozer,” as the French described him, was beginning to amass too many detractors within the bureaucracy. One of the reasons had to do with his penchant for speaking on the record with the press. Holbrooke took the view that “on the record” was far preferable to the Washington practice of providing background material, or “deep background,” by which an unidentified “senior official” is at liberty to think out loud or even predict the future with impunity. It would involve the use of ground rules for each thought conveyed, for example, “now this next point cannot be for attribution to a senior U.S. official, so please make it ‘a senior diplomatic official’ or just ‘a person with direct knowledge of the deliberations.’ ” Worse yet, statements and insights would often be made not for any attribution at all, as if the reporter simply knew the information without any sourcing, such as “Holbrooke is distrusted by a number of senior White House officials.”
Dick Holbrooke told me many times that he preferred speaking on the record so that there would be no question as to who said it and what was said. The trouble with his approach was that it ran contrary to “message management.” On-the-record comments make much more publicity than ones attributed to unnamed sources. He may have had another motive. As an assistant secretary, a rung below undersecretary, two below deputy secretary, and rungs below the secretary and the U.S. representative to the UN, Holbrooke was fast becoming a household name around the world. “What’s he doing on CNN?” was being asked as he became the face of the administration’s foreign policy. And Holbrooke was good at it, so the more he did it, the prouder I—and everyone else in the European Bureau—was to work with him, even if it meant we sometimes got caught in the middle of things.
People got annoyed and then got even, and as the spring turned to summer, Holbrooke became increasingly frozen out of internal council meetings. Even his friends tired of defending him, especially in interagency meetings that no one wanted to attend in the first place, where Holbrooke often took the stage to offer his lengthy, professorial sweep of nineteenth-century European history. Twentieth-century Europe was fast becoming history, while nineteenth-century Europe, with the breakup of the Ottoman Empire, was fast becoming current events. Holbrooke understood that before anyone else.
I was constantly in the middle of Holbrooke’s disputes with other parts of the bureaucracy, and even with other Contact Group delegations, as when the British representative, Pauline Neville-Jones, blew up at him when he opened up a copy of the International Herald Tribune while she was speaking. (Thankfully, she didn’t notice that he was reading the sports page.) Frequently he would ask me to go “fix a problem,” usually one set in motion by his expressed impatience with the person in question. Often it was a no-win situation for me, because if I sided with his adversary, I would inevitably hear it from Holbrooke and that would undercut my influence with him.
• • •
In summer 1994 the national security staff tried to coordinate policy by convening a morning teleconference for representatives of different agencies to touch base and assess what had gone on in the Balkans the previous twenty-four hours, and what needed to be done about it. Dick saw this basic National Security Council function, governmental coordination, as an insidious effort not only to coordinate but also to direct the policy, and he would have none of it. Whenever he detected NSC fingerprints on an instruction to one of our embassies, he would pounce:
“Why are we doing this, Chris? Why are we asking Embassy Sarajevo to approach the Bosnians about this situation in Bihac?”
“It was something that came out of this morning’s teleconference.”
“ ‘Came out of the teleconference’! What does that mean? Did you suggest this at the teleconference?”
“Well, no. But everyone thought it was a good idea.”
“Who do you mean, ‘everyone’?”
To make a point about the NSC-chaired morning meeting, Holbrooke refused to allow me to attend any more of them. I started sending my deputy, Jack Zetkulic. When Holbrooke heard that Jack was going, he forbade him from being there as well. Trying to salvage our relationship with the NSC staff, I then sent our Bosnian desk officer, Phil Goldberg. Desk officer is a fairly junior level, but since Phil had gravitas that made him a real player and he was acceptable to the NSC staff. But when Holbrooke heard that Phil, one of his favorites in my office (Holbrooke knew all fifteen officers in my office by name), was going, he outlawed it. (“You sent Phil Goldberg?” he asked, as if I had dispatched Henry Kissinger.) Finally, on a summer day when many people were out, I sent the summer intern with the instruction just to take notes and not speak. At that point, the NSC staff complained up the line to the national security deputy advisor, Sandy Berger, who called over to Deputy Secretary Strobe Talbott, who took up the issue with us. Holbrooke allowed me to go once, and then it started all over again. As Talbott took the irate phone calls from Berger, I became the go-to Holbrooke handler for this kind of problem.
Dick was on thin ice with National Security Advisor Tony Lake, his deputy, Sandy Berger, and others around Washington, including even Secretary Christopher and UN Ambassador Madeleine Albright. Strobe had fought hard to keep Dick (“our thermonuclear device”) from being fired, or worse, sidelined, but his support was increasingly becoming a lonely struggle. In early summer of 1995, Dick had heard about a meeting in the White House Situation Room, only to learn on arrival at the Southwest Gate that he was not on the list of attendees. Dick had quite worn out his welcome with old friends and colleagues from the 1960s and Vietnam days.
My approach to Holbrooke was to protect him from himself. I’d often try to convince him it wasn’t worth the fight, a comment that always earned me the favorite Holbrooke put-down. “What a typical Foreign Service officer reaction. I thought you were better than that.” He brightened up when I assu
red him we never did what the national security staff wanted us to do. The staff was often out of touch with the situation on the ground, and I would regale Holbrooke and Bob Frasure with stories of the gap between the staff’s constant confusion of memos and talking points, and the situation on the ground. Frasure, no fan of senseless talking points, would mimic a Balkan warlord receiving a memo and hit the side of his head with the palm of his hand, saying, “Oh, now I understand. Now I get it, thank you, thank you.”
Sending talking points to be delivered by our embassies to various warlords reflected the limited Washington bureaucratic understanding of what motivated ruthless factional leaders. Frasure, whose laconic and ironic style had a way of defusing a problem, including an outburst of Holbrooke temper, added, “A wheelbarrow full of those talking points wouldn’t work with Milosevic unless you hit him over the head with it.”
• • •
Accomplishing something on the ground in a war zone and managing Washington anxieties were often two very distinct skill sets. Some people were good at neither, while many had one and not the other. Bob Frasure was a master at both. Being effective at the Washington end involved first of all never panicking. But it also required a keen understanding of exactly when others in the vast interagency world of Washington bureaucracy might be inclined to push the panic button. “Tell the embassy to come in with something on this ASAP” (meaning send a cable about it), he would often say, having just seen an intelligence report suggesting that an initiative of ours was about to be rejected. “This might be a problem today.”
While the Balkans were a distant part of the world, far removed from the centers of power and authority, their explosion, to say something of the human rights calamity graphically detailed by CNN’s coverage, meant that this tiny, obscure region of the world became the locus of all our fears. If Washington’s senior foreign policy leadership had learned anything in school it was how to prepare for big problems (for example, the behavior of the Soviet Union). It was ill-prepared for the issues coming out of the scruffy edges like the Balkans. Even the proxy wars of the 1970s and ’80s, which took place in odd, faraway places such as Angola, had organizing principles attached to them, such as Soviet aggressive behavior. The Balkans was a constant stream of bad news that seemed impervious to any efforts—certainly not those cooked up in Washington interagency meetings—to make it better. The resultant frustration was a tendency to blame our diplomats in the field, or more immediately, those not in the room.
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