1995

by Campbell, W. Joseph

  Still, IFOR was roundly criticized for having stood by in March 1996 as Bosnian Serb thugs evicted fellow Serbs from homes and apartments in Serb-populated suburbs and enclaves of Sarajevo before they were to come under the jurisdiction of the Muslim-Croat Federation. “We must not allow a single Serb to remain in the territories which fall under Muslim-Croat control,” declared the head of the Bosnian Serb Resettlement Office.166 The disaster, Holbrooke wrote, “could have been easily prevented if IFOR had taken action.”167

  An even greater failure was the reluctance of NATO forces to seek out and arrest suspected war criminals such as Mladić and Radovan Karadžić, Bosnian Serb leaders indicted in 1995 for war crimes in Bosnia. Mladić and Karadžić were “most vulnerable after Dayton,” Holbrooke wrote in 2005, “but the opportunity [to arrest them] was essentially lost after the NATO commander in Bosnia, U.S. Admiral Leighton Smith, told Bosnian Serb television, ‘I don’t have the authority to arrest anybody.’” Smith’s statement, according to Holbrooke, was “a deliberately incorrect reading of his authority” under the Dayton accords.168 Mladić remained a fugitive until Serbian police caught up with him in 2011; Karadžić was at large until 2008, when he was captured in disguise in Belgrade, where he had worked as a doctor. Like Mladić, Karadžić is on trial at The Hague for war crimes.

  Some analysts have argued that the Bosnian war was ended not so much by the imaginative and assertive U.S. diplomacy as by the sheer exhaustion of the warring parties. “The true lesson of Dayton is this,” journalist Michael Goldfarb wrote in 2010. “When it comes to conflict resolution the United States is still the indispensable, international head cracker—but only when people are too tired to feel the pain.”169 The exhaustion thesis is appealing but untenable. Croat and Muslim forces were resurgent in the summer of 1995, reclaiming hundreds of square miles of territory that had been taken by Bosnian Serbs during the war’s early days. Before the ceasefire took effect in October 1995, a joint Croat-Muslim offensive had threatened the Serb stronghold of Banja Luka.170 An attack on the city never developed. But had it fallen, all of Serb-held western Bosnia was at risk. So Bosnia’s warring parties were hardly played out by late summer 1995. Indeed, a persuasive case can be made that the pre-Dayton ceasefire halted the Croat-Muslim advances prematurely. Moreover, some of the war’s most grievous atrocities—the massacre at Srebrenica, the deadly mortar attack on Sarajevo, and the “ethnic cleansing” of Serbs rousted by Croat forces from the Krajina—all occurred within a few weeks in the summer of 1995. Another year of war, wrote Carl Bildt, a former Swedish prime minister, probably would have been “even more brutal and horrific than the terrible year of 1995.”171

  Dayton is more accurately understood as the first major successful foreign policy initiative of Clinton’s presidency.172 After the fiasco in Somalia and the mortification of standing aside as genocide swept Rwanda, the Clinton administration finally found its bearings and a formula: robust if measured application of U.S. military force, especially air power, could be instrumental in ending conflict and in pursuing policy objectives.173 Although Clinton certainly can be faulted for diffident and ineffective responses to attacks by Islamist extremists on U.S. interests abroad during the late 1990s, his foreign policy after Dayton was noticeably more aggressive. The Dayton accords led Clinton to realize, as Kerrick said, that the United States sometimes had to put its “power and prestige on line to do things.”174

  Success in ending the brutal war in Bosnia was bracing. It emboldened U.S. foreign policy,175 helped shake off the “Vietmalia syndrome,” rekindled “American Exceptionalism,” and fired ambitions abroad. Bosnia was the first in a succession of ever-more ambitious military operations overseas.176 As Richard Sale has observed, after the first years of his presidency, Clinton “was not in the least dainty about using force.”177 In December 1998, Clinton ordered an extensive four-day bombing of Iraq to punish Saddam’s regime for failing to cooperate with U.N. inspectors investigating the country’s suspected stocks of chemical and nuclear weapons.178 Clinton at that time was about to be impeached on charges of lying under oath and obstructing justice, upshots of a sex scandal discussed in the next chapter. The timing of the bombing campaign stirred suspicions that the attacks were principally a diversion from Clinton’s serious troubles at home.

  Britain joined the attack on Iraq, a campaign that was undertaken without U.N. endorsement. The objective was to degrade Iraq’s capacity to produce weapons of mass destruction and to weaken Saddam’s grip on power.179 Six weeks before the bombing, Clinton signed the “Iraq Liberation Act of 1998,” which committed the United States to supporting efforts to remove Saddam and “promote the emergence of a democratic government” in Baghdad.180

  Less than a year later, Clinton ordered the bombing of targets in Serbia to pressure Milošević to end the persecution of ethnic Albanians in the province of Kosovo. After more than ten weeks of NATO air strikes, Milošević gave in and withdrew Serbian troops from Kosovo, a first step toward the province’s gaining political independence. The brief Kosovar War was won without U.S. casualties and fought without U.N. approval.181 It was, in some ways, a preemptive war—a war “justified less by what Milošević had already done in Kosovo than by what Americans believed he would do there in the future, judging by his behavior” in Bosnia, Peter Beinart observed in The Icarus Syndrome, his discerning book about trends in U.S. foreign policy.182 Moreover, Beinart wrote, the war in Kosovo “nudged open an intellectual door, a door George W. Bush would fling wide open four years later,” in invoking preemption as a justification for the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq.183

  Post-Dayton interventionism—and a willingness to deploy U.S. military power in pursuit of foreign policy objectives—lived on after the Clinton administration. As Derek Chollet and James Goldgeier have noted, “Clinton’s policies and the George W. Bush administration’s ideas about using military power to defend values [overlapped] more than many Americans have perceived, or partisans on both sides care to admit.”184 Both administrations were willing to apply that power without securing prior endorsement of the United Nations.

  U.S. foreign policy was decidedly more activist after Dayton: it was embroidered by “American Exceptionalism” and accompanied by what Beinart has termed a “hubris bubble” that expanded as military success encouraged even more ambitious undertakings. “The more confident America’s leaders became in the hammer of military force,” Beinart wrote, “the more closely they looked for nails” in projecting force abroad.185 Bush administration officials were hardly enamored of Clinton, but, “when it came to foreign policy,” Beinart noted, “they stood on his shoulders.”186 The “hubris bubble” expanded with the swift destruction of the Taliban regime in Afghanistan after the devastating September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on the United States. In 2003 came the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq. In his book about the Bush administration, New York Times reporter Peter Baker anonymously quoted an official in the administration as saying: “The only reason we went into Iraq . . . is we were looking for somebody’s ass to kick. Afghanistan was too easy.”187

  The “hubris bubble” burst in the aftermath of the invasion of Iraq. After taking Baghdad and toppling Saddam’s Baathist regime, the United States was thoroughly unprepared for the grinding insurgency that followed. The puncturing of the “hubris bubble” did not necessarily foreclose American ambitions abroad. But it led to a decided retrenchment. As if chastened, the United States in recent years has been far less inclined to apply force to diplomacy and far more content to lead from behind. Twenty years after Dayton, “muscular” is seldom invoked to describe U.S. diplomacy. The “American Exceptionalism” that embroidered the post-Dayton rhetoric of the Clinton administration has fallen decidedly out of fashion among policymakers—a subject of wincing discomfiture and scorn,188 if seriously mentioned at all.189

  Holbrooke left the State Department three months after the Dayton accords, saying he wanted to spend more time with his wife and family. He came to
regret the decision, saying later that he realized “too late that I had left too early.”190 His departure removed a singular force for implementing the terms of the Dayton agreement. But he returned to the Clinton administration as special envoy to the Balkans and later became U.S. ambassador to the United Nations. He also served two mostly unhappy years in the administration of President Barack Obama as a special representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan,191 a post he held at his death, after emergency surgery for a torn aorta in 2010.192

  Dayton was Holbrooke’s major achievement in public life; he relished the accomplishment and kept a dutiful watch on postwar Bosnia.193 He also was known to overstate the significance of the agreement, asserting for example that, without the Dayton accords, al-Qaeda might have planned the terrorist attacks of September 2001 from a safe haven in Bosnia instead of Afghanistan.194 That is a highly debatable, speculative, and in the end an unlikely thesis. The Dayton agreement did require the removal of some 3,000 Islamist fighters who entered Bosnia from Afghanistan, Iran, and Arab countries to join Muslim forces. These fighters constituted a battalion that was disbanded in 1996.195

  It is highly improbable that al-Qaeda militants would have operated in Bosnia as freely as they had in Afghanistan before 9/11. Had the talks at Dayton failed and fighting resumed in Bosnia, Islamist extremists surely would have drawn the attention of Serb and Croat forces.196 Moreover, Bosnia’s Muslim leaders were moderate and had shown little affinity for radical Islam. They would have been less-than-eager hosts to an al-Qaeda affiliate in the Balkans.

  5

  Clinton Meets Lewinsky

  Until the Dayton peace accords were reached, 1995 had been a mostly lackluster—even forgettable—year for Bill Clinton and his presidency. It was a low-tide kind of year.

  Resurgent Republicans led by Newt Gingrich, the pugnacious speaker of the House of Representatives, had come to power in Washington at the start of 1995, following their sweeping victories in midterm elections the year before. Once in office, they pressed an ambitious agenda to trim federal spending, lower taxes, reduce government regulation, and balance the budget. Gingrich called it the “Contract with America.”

  By the spring, the tide of power and influence was flowing decidedly to the Republicans in Congress and away from Clinton. The one-sidedness was so stark that the president was moved to pleading his relevance in Washington. “The Constitution gives me relevance; the power of our ideas gives me relevance; the record we have built up over the last two years and the things we’re trying to do give me relevance,” Clinton declared at a primetime news conference on April 18, 1995. “The president is relevant here, especially an activist president.”1 It was hardly a stirring assertion of presidential authority. No troops, the New York Times wryly observed, would be inspired to march “to battle under a banner that reads, ‘The President is relevant.’”2

  The following day, the federal building in Oklahoma City was attacked, and the resolve Clinton demonstrated in response was impressive. He was praised for giving voice to the grief and anger that Americans were feeling and for vowing that “justice for these killers will be certain, swift and severe. We will find them. We will convict them. And we will seek the death penalty for them.”3 Within days, though, Clinton picked a needless fight with the voices of conservative talk radio, denouncing them for inflaming the public debate. He said the airwaves too often were used “to keep some people as paranoid as possible and the rest of us all torn up and upset with each other,” and he urged Americans to speak out against “the purveyors of hatred and division.”4 His remarks carried special resonance in the wake of the Oklahoma City bombing. Clinton did not specifically mention the likes of Rush Limbaugh, but Limbaugh recognized himself as a target of the president’s insinuations and said they threatened “a chilling effect on legitimate discussion.”5

  The controversy soon passed, but Clinton continued to be dogged by periodic gaffes and missteps, which lent a sense of unsteadiness and even clumsiness to his administration. Former senator Eugene McCarthy criticized Clinton for acting like “the governor of the United States.”6 The administration’s dithering on what to do in Bosnia was mocked by Jacques Chirac, the French president, who declared in July 1995 that the position of leader of the free world had fallen “vacant.”7 In September, Clinton spoke informally with reporters aboard Air Force One about the “funk” he thought Americans were in, an off-hand but ill-advised comment that invited comparisons with the sense of “malaise” that came to be associated with the beleaguered administration of President Jimmy Carter in the late 1970s.8 A few weeks later, at a fund-raising dinner in Texas, Clinton shocked fellow Democrats by seeming to repudiate a deficit-reduction package he had signed two years before, saying he had raised taxes “too much” in that deal.9

  Even Clinton’s friends and sympathizers in the news media wondered whether his presidency was adrift or out of its depth. A columnist for the Washington Post referred to “the terminally clumsy Clinton administration,”10 and a veteran White House reporter, Helen Thomas of the wire service United Press International, ruminated about “Clinton’s gaffe du jour.”11 In the same vein, E. J. Dionne of the Washington Post wrote that the president “makes life hardest on those who are for him.”12

  By late 1995, the prospect of a train wreck loomed in Washington—a sort of slow-motion collision that centered around a budget impasse between Clinton and the Congress, an impasse defined by the possibility of having to shut down the federal government.13 The prospective train wreck threatened to become a reality by mid-November. At issue was whether the budget should be balanced in seven years, as Gingrich and the Republicans proposed, or in nine to ten years, as Clinton favored. Also in dispute was whether old people would pay more in Medicare premiums, which the Republicans supported but Clinton opposed. The president and the Republicans also were at odds on government spending for education and the environment.

  Mike McCurry, the White House press secretary at the time, recalled “there was an utter lack of confidence at the White House that we would prevail in that showdown. There were long debates about who, at the end of the day, was going to bear the blame for [a government] shutdown: The president or . . . the Republican Congress? There was certainly no unanimous view that we [would] prevail against Gingrich and the Republicans.”14

  The train wreck—or what the Washington Post called the “Great Government Shutdown of ’95”15—happened on November 14. The night before, Clinton had vetoed two spending measures that would have kept the government open, objecting to provisions that would raise Medicare premiums and trim spending on education and the environment. In Washington and across the country, about 800,000 federal employees deemed “non-essential” were sent home or told not to come to work. The government shutdown was partial but its effects were far-reaching. The Centers for Disease Control suspended disease surveillance.16 Applications for U.S. passports and for visas to enter the United States piled up by the tens of thousands every day.17 Ticket holders were turned away from the National Gallery of Art and the largest exhibition of the masterpieces of Johannes Vermeer since 1696.18 The shutdown postponed the opening at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library of an exhibit of watercolors by Britain’s Prince Charles.19 The country’s 368 national parks, monuments, and recreation areas—including the Statue of Liberty, Independence Hall, Yosemite, and the National Zoo—all were closed.

  “Only Washington Would Try to Close the Grand Canyon,” a headline in the Washington Post declared.20 And in that, Washington succeeded: an unusual calm replaced the noisy throngs of visitors at the Grand Canyon, a national park since 1919. Fife Symington, the governor of Arizona, showed up at the Grand Canyon with some fifty unarmed National Guardsmen, in what to some observers appeared to be an incipient state challenge to federal authority.21 Symington’s conduct later was described as his “best John Wayne” imitation.22 That may have overstated matters, but the governor proposed calling on the guardsmen and state employees to keep at lea
st a portion of the park open to tourists. He was rebuffed by officials of the Interior Department.23

  The most jaw-dropping moment of the shutdown came on November 15, when Gingrich, ever voluble, told journalists at a breakfast meeting in Washington that he had toughened up the interim spending measure that Clinton vetoed in part because he felt the president had treated him badly. Clinton, Gingrich said, had ignored him aboard Air Force One during a trip to Israel to attend the state funeral of Yitzhak Rabin, the Israeli prime minister who was assassinated in Tel Aviv on November 4. Not only did Clinton pass up an opportunity to negotiate the budget impasse during the long flight home, Gingrich said, but he and Senate Majority Leader Bob Dole were made to leave the aircraft by the rear stairs after landing at Andrews Air Force base in Maryland.

  “This is petty,” Gingrich told the journalists, but “you land at Andrews and you’ve been on the plane for twenty-five hours [for the round trip to Israel] and nobody has talked to you and they ask you to get off the plane by the back ramp. . . . You just wonder, where is their sense of manners? Where is their sense of courtesy?” The perceived slights and rude treatment, Gingrich said, were “part of [the reason] why you ended up with us sending down a tougher” spending bill,24 making Clinton’s veto a certainty.

  The speaker’s rambling, almost stream-of-consciousness remarks qualified as the year’s most astounding political gaffe25 and invited a torrent of ridicule that helped tilt the shutdown battle in Clinton’s favor—even perhaps rejuvenating his presidency.26 Within hours of Gingrich’s remarks, McCurry released a photograph of Clinton, Gingrich, and others at a conference table aboard Air Force One, during the trip to Israel. McCurry said he had done so “sort of mischievously,” to lend an impression that “Clinton did talk to Gingrich on the plane, so what’s Gingrich griping about?”27