124. See Chollet, The Road to the Dayton Accords, 177.
125. Christopher, Chances of a Lifetime, 266.
126. Ibid.
127. Holbrooke, To End a War, 305–6.
128. Quoted in ibid., 306. Kerrick recalled that Milošević told him: “General, please do not give up. This is too important.” Kerrick said he replied, “We’ve done all we can. It’s up to you to get in touch with these other leaders and say . . . ‘we need to solve this.’” Kerrick, interview with author.
129. Kerrick, interview with author.
130. See Christopher, Chances of a Lifetime, 266.
131. Holbrooke, To End a War, 308.
132. Quoted in ibid., 308.
133. Chollet, The Road to the Dayton Accords, 179. Warren Christopher, in his memoir, offered a slightly different version of Izetbegović’s comment, quoting him as saying, “It is not justice, but we need peace.” Christopher, Chances of a Lifetime, 266.
134. Holbrooke, To End a War, 309.
135. “Clinton’s Transcript on Peace Accord,” United Press International, November 21, 1995, retrieved from LexisNexis database.
136. Izetbegović detested “Republika Srpska,” likening it to a “Nazi name.” See Holbrooke, To End a War, 130. Holbrooke conceded in To End a War that allowing the Bosnian Serbs to use that name was a defect of the Dayton accords (361).
137. Ibid., 309.
138. Ibid., 322.
139. Ibid., 318. “There was a lot of animosity behind the scenes” between the French and Americans, Mike McCurry recalled. He said some Clinton administration officials privately referred to Alain Juppé, the French prime minister, as “the skirt”—a play on Juppé’s name. “Jupe” is the French word for skirt. McCurry, interview with author (September 1, 2013).
140. Craig R. Whitney, “Balkan Foes Sign Peace Pact, Dividing an Unpacified Bosnia,” New York Times, December 15, 1995.
141. See William Drozdiak and John F. Harris, “Leaders Sign Pact to End Bosnia War,” Washington Post, December 15, 1995.
142. See, for example, Bass, “The Triage of Dayton,” 96. Bass wrote that the Dayton agreement brought Bosnia “ominously close to partition.”
143. As many as 430,000 combatants were under arms in Bosnia at the end of the war. Most of them quit their units within a few years, in what was more a disintegration than a demobilization of armed forces in postwar Bosnia. See Tobias Pietz, “Overcoming the Failings of Dayton: Defense Reform in Bosnia-Herzegovina,” in Bosnian Security after Dayton: New Perspectives, ed. Michael A. Innes (London: Routledge, 2006), 157.
144. Ted Galen Carpenter, “Holbrooke Horror: The U.S. Peace Plan for Bosnia,” Cato Institute Foreign Policy Briefing No. 37, October 27, 1995, 1–2.
145. Ibid., 2.
146. Bass, “The Triage of Dayton,” 104.
147. As Warren Christopher wrote in his memoir, the imperfect peace achieved at Dayton was preferable to a resumption of war. Christopher, Chances of a Lifetime, 267.
148. Stephen Sestanovich, Maximalist: America in the World from Truman to Obama (New York: Knopf, 2014), 262. Sestanovich also wrote: “The United States had mobilized and used military power where its allies had only dithered. It had brought a bloody ethnic war to a close through focused, purposeful diplomacy. It punctured the idea that there was nothing to be done about barbarism and disorder.”
149. For example, a New York Times/CBS News poll conducted in December 1995 reported that 55 percent of Americans opposed sending U.S. troops to Bosnia as part of NATO’s peacekeeping force. A Time/CNN poll conducted at the same time produced similar results: 55 percent of Americans opposed deploying U.S. troops to Bosnia. Data cited here were retrieved from the “Polling the Nations” database.
150. See Richard Holbrooke, “Foreword,” in Chollet, The Road to the Dayton Accords, xii.
151. Holbrooke, To End a War, 217.
152. Holbrooke, “Foreword,” xii. Holbrooke wrote that “the exact number” of body bags “was a closely guarded military secret.”
153. “Clinton’s Words on Mission to Bosnia: ‘The Right Thing to Do,’” New York Times, November 28, 1995.
154. Ibid.
155. Ibid.
156. Ibid.
157. See “Excerpts from President Clinton’s Victory Address at Arkansas Statehouse,” New York Times, November 6, 1996.
158. See “In His Own Words: Clinton’s Speech Accepting the Democratic Nomination for President,” New York Times, August 30, 1996.
159. See “Text of Al Gore and President Clinton after Winning Re-election,” Associated Press, November 6, 1996, retrieved from LexisNexis database.
160. Quoted in Barry Schweid, “Albright Says There Will Be Civilian Casualties,” Associated Press, February 19, 1998, retrieved from LexisNexis database.
161. For a succinct discussion about the United States in a unipolar world, see Timothy J. Lynch and Robert S. Singh, After Bush: The Case for Continuity in American Foreign Policy (Cambridge, Engl.: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 52–53.
162. Holbrooke, To End a War, 216.
163. Ibid., 217. Holbrooke wrote that scars from the Somalia disaster, combined with memories of the quagmire of Vietnam, “had left what might be called a ‘Vietmalia syndrome’ in Washington.”
164. Within two years, U.S. troop strength in Bosnia had been drawn down to about 8,500.
165. As it turned out, the “biggest challenge for U.S. army doctors in Bosnia . . . were sprained ankles and pulled muscles” that soldiers suffered while playing sports, as Gerald Knaus, a foreign policy analyst, later observed. Knaus, “The Rise and Fall of Liberal Imperialism,” in Can Intervention Work? ed. Rory Stewart and Gerald Knaus (New York: Norton, 2011), 179.
166. Quoted in Stephen Kinzer, “Bosnian Serbs Pressed to Flee Area near Sarajevo,” New York Times, February 21, 1996.
167. Holbrooke, To End a War, 336. To critics of the Dayton accords, the violence signaled that Bosnia never would become a functioning multiethnic state. See Gilles Peress and Kit R. Roane, “Savage Spite,” New York Times, April 28, 1996. See also Roger Cohen, “After the Vultures: Holbrooke’s Bosnia Peace Came Too Late,” Foreign Affairs 77, no. 3 (May–June 1998): 109.
168. Holbrooke, “Foreword,” xiii.
169. Michael Goldfarb, “Analysis: 15 Years since Bosnia Tired of War,” GlobalPost, November 1, 2010, accessed January 14, 2012, www.globalpost.com/dispatch/worldview/101101/dayton-accord-lessons.
170. See Holbrooke, To End a War, 160. In mid-September 1995, Holbrooke said he encouraged Tuđman to press the Croat military offensive “as far as you can, but not to take Banja Luka.” The city, Holbrooke wrote, “was unquestionably within the Serb portion of Bosnia.” See also Rohde, Endgame, 340.
171. Bildt, Peace Journey, 155.
172. Bosnia, after all, was the most pressing and insistent foreign policy issue of Clinton’s first years in office. See Chollet, The Road to the Dayton Accords, 201.
173. For example, Madeleine Albright, the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations at the time of the Dayton peace talks, wrote that the accords “showed that the limited use of force—even airpower alone—could make a decisive difference.” Albright with Bill Woodward, Madam Secretary: A Memoir (New York: Miramax, 2003), 192.
174. Kerrick, interview with author. Clinton biographer John F. Harris observed that the president “emerged from the fall of 1995 as a vastly more self-confident and commanding leader.” Harris, The Survivor: Bill Clinton in the White House (New York: Random House, 2005), 221.
175. “Dayton’s greatest impact . . . was felt beyond the Balkans,” Sestanovich noted in Maximalist: “The United States was reinvigorated as a global force” (262).
176. Knaus makes this point in “The Rise and Fall of Liberal Imperialism.” He wrote that “the experience of Bosnia was to frame the debate on every [U.S.] intervention that followed” (127).
177. Sale, Clinton’s Secret Wars, 429.
178. The weapons inspectors lef
t Iraq shortly before the aerial attacks began.
179. See William M. Arkin, “Desert Fox Delivery: Precision Undermined Its Purpose,” Washington Post, January 17, 1999.
180. See “Iraq Liberation Act of 1998,” U.S. Government Printing Office, October 31, 1998, accessed August 19, 2013, http://www.gpo.gov/fdsys/pkg/PLAW-105publ338/html/PLAW-105publ338.htm.
181. In Kosovo, Sestanovich observed, “The United States had done exactly what it wanted, launching a military campaign against another member of the United Nations without the support of the Security Council. It then won a multilateral seal of approval when the fighting stopped. This was a stupendous result.” Sestanovich, Maximalist, 269.
182. Beinart, The Icarus Syndrome, 288.
183. Ibid. See also Jacob Heilbrunn, “Man of the World,” New York Times Book Review, January 1, 2012, 14. Heilbrunn observed that “the efficacy of air power in the Balkans led inexorably to the delusive belief that it would be a simple matter to wage war in Iraq.”
184. Derek Chollet and James Goldgeier, America between the Wars: From 11/9 to 9/11 (reprint, New York: Public Affairs, 2009), 321.
185. Beinart, The Icarus Syndrome, 288. This is not to say Clinton and Bush were eager to commit the U.S. military to conflicts abroad. As Fouad Ajami noted: “The leaders of the past two decades who sent American forces to Bosnia, to Kosovo, to Afghanistan, to Iraq, were not thirsting for foreign wars. These leaders located America, and its interests, in the world.” Ajami, “Obama Is Lost in the Mideast Bazaar,” Wall Street Journal, September 13, 2013.
186. Beinart, The Icarus Syndrome, 320.
187. Quoted in Peter Baker, Days of Fire: Bush and Cheney in the White House (New York: Doubleday, 2013), 191. Similarly, Henry Kissinger said he supported the U.S.-led war in Iraq because “Afghanistan wasn’t enough.” Quoted in Bob Woodward, State of Denial: Bush at War, Part III (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2006), 408.
188. See, for example, Oliver Stone and Peter Kuznick, “Oliver Stone: The Myth of American Exceptionalism,” USA Today, October 25, 2013, accessed October 28, 2013, www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/2013/10/25/obama-putin-american-exceptionalism-column/3181829/.
189. In 2009, President Barack Obama signaled keen discomfort with the notion of American exceptionality, saying on his first trip to Europe as president: “I believe in American Exceptionalism, just as I suspect that the Brits believe in British Exceptionalism and the Greeks believe in Greek Exceptionalism.” See “News Conference by President Obama,” States News Service, April 4, 2009, retrieved from LexisNexis database.
190. Holbrooke, To End a War, 337.
191. For a discussion about Holbrooke’s marginalization in the Obama administration, see Mark Leibovich, This Town: Two Parties and a Funeral—Plus Plenty of Valet Parking!—in America’s Gilded Capital (New York: Blue Rider, 2013), 226–31.
192. See Robert D. McFadden, “Strong Voice in Diplomacy and Crisis,” New York Times, December 14, 2010.
193. See, for example, Richard Holbrooke, “Lessons from Dayton for Iraq,” Washington Post, April 23, 2008.
194. Holbrooke, “Lessons from Dayton for Iraq.”
195. See Pietz, “Overcoming the Failings of Dayton,” 157.
196. The Islamist volunteers gained a reputation for viciousness during the Bosnian war. They were accused of beheading Serb civilians and blowing up homes with inhabitants trapped inside. See Scott Taylor, “Bin Laden’s Balkan Connections,” Ottawa Citizen, December 15, 2001.
5. CLINTON MEETS LEWINSKY
1. “William J. Clinton: The President’s News Conference,” The American Presidency Project, April 18, 1995, accessed October 21, 2013, www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/?pid=51237#axzz2iOgL87u3. John F. Harris, a biographer of Clinton, wrote that the president’s team “cringed as the words [about his relevance] escaped his lips. Plaintively arguing for relevance was hardly the best way to establish it.” Harris, The Survivor: Bill Clinton in the White House (New York: Random House, 2005), 178.
2. See “Relevance Is Not Enough, Mr. Clinton,” New York Times, April 20, 1995. The Times noted that two of the three commercial television networks declined to broadcast the news conference live—decisions, it said, that “spoke volumes about [Clinton’s] problems as the White House scrambles for a rallying cry.” CBS, which did broadcast the news conference, scored a 6.5 rating in that time slot—less than half the ratings scored by programming on the other networks. NBC had a 14.7 rating for its Frasier program, and ABC scored a 15.8 rating for its Home Improvement show. Ratings cited in John F. Harris, “The Snooze Conference; Networks, Viewers Not Tuned In to Clinton,” Washington Post, April 20, 1995.
3. Quoted in Terence Hunt, “Clinton’s Role: Voice of the Nation’s Grief and Anger,” Associated Press, April 21, 1995, retrieved from LexisNexis database.
4. Quoted in Howard Kurtz and Dan Balz, “Clinton Assails Spread of Hate Through Media,” Washington Post, April 25, 1995.
5. Quoted in Todd S. Purdum, “Shifting Debate to the Political Climate, Clinton Condemns ‘Promoters of Paranoia,’” New York Times, April 25, 1995.
6. Quoted in Jo Mannies, “Ex-Senator ‘Zings’ Washington Scene,” St. Louis Post-Dispatch, November 11, 1995.
7. Quoted in Michael Dobbs, “Bosnia Crystallizes U.S. Post-Cold War Role,” Washington Post, December 3, 1995.
8. See Andrew Rosenthal, “Seeking to Avoid Carter Comparisons, President Refines Comments,” New York Times, September 26, 1995. In seeking the next day to clarify his “funk” observations, Clinton said: “Malaise is a state of mind. Funk is something you can bounce out of.”
9. Todd S. Purdum, “Clinton Angers Friend and Foe in Tax Remark,” New York Times, October 19, 1995. Purdum’s article quoted Clinton as saying at the fund-raising dinner: “Probably there are people in this room still mad at me at that budget because you think I raised your taxes too much. It might surprise you to know that I think I raised them too much, too.” The remarks stunned Democratic lawmakers, and Clinton later sought to retreat from them by saying: “My mother once said I should never give a talk after 7 p.m. at night, especially if I’m tired, and she sure turned out to be right is all I can say.” Quoted in Terence Hunt, “Clinton Retreats on Tax Comment, Raises Questions on Budget Plan,” Associated Press, October 19, 1995, retrieved from LexisNexis database.
10. Jim Hoagland, “Standing up to China,” Washington Post, July 13, 1995.
11. Helen Thomas, “Commentary,” United Press International, November 8, 1995, retrieved from LexisNexis database.
12. E. J. Dionne Jr., “. . . And Clinton’s Blunder,” Washington Post, October 24, 1995.
13. See, for example, Doug Bandow, “Let’s Have a Train Wreck!” Washington Post, November 15, 1995. “Instead of fearing a budget train wreck,” Bandow wrote, “people should welcome it. It is time to ask the sort of questions rarely considered in Washington: Do we wish to remain a free society? Uncle Sam is too expansive and expensive. Yet over the years would-be revolutionaries in the nation’s capital have found out how hard it is to kill even the smallest program, like federal tea-tasting. So shut down Washington. Then people will realize that they don’t need the Department of Agriculture to eat food, the Environmental Protection Agency to drink water, the Department of Transportation to drive cars and the FDA to buy pharmaceuticals.”
14. Mike McCurry, interview with author (September 1, 2013).
15. David Montgomery and Stephen Barr, “Watching, Waiting—and Worrying; Federal Workers Adrift in Uncertainty over What Happens Next,” Washington Post, November 14, 1995.
16. See Clinton T. Brass, “Shutdown of the Federal Government: Causes, Processes, and Effects,” Congressional Research Service, February 18, 2011, 7.
17. Ibid., 8.
18. David Montgomery, “The Ripple Effect: Empty Halls, Lost Money, Discontent,” Washington Post, November 15, 1995. See also David Zimmerman, “Intimate, Exquisite View of Vermeer,” USA Today, November 15, 1995.
19. See Steve
Komarow, “Shutdown’s Full Effect Has Not Been Felt Yet,” USA Today, November 20, 1995.
20. Susan Levine, “Only Washington Would Try to Close the Grand Canyon; National Parks Are Turning Away Thousands,” Washington Post, November 17, 1995.
21. See David Johnston, “U.S. Rejects Use of Guard Troops to Run Grand Canyon Park,” New York Times, November 18, 1995.
22. “White House Was Ready to Federalize National Guard,” Salt Lake Tribune (Utah), February 11, 1996, accessed September 14, 2013, http://tinyurl.com/q97ahjx.
23. Kenneth B. Noble, “Canyon Becomes Peaceful, Pleasing Nobody,” New York Times, November 19, 1995. The Times report noted: “Normally, about 8,000 people a day visit [the] national treasure, and there is hardly an inch not flanked by a crush of gawking visitors.” Symington reached agreement with the Interior Department to keep portions of the Grand Canyon open during the second government shutdown in 1995. See Jeremy Duda, “Arizona’s Gov. Brewer Won’t Keep Grand Canyon Open During Shutdown,” Arizona Capitol Times, April 8, 2011, retrieved from LexisNexis database.
24. Quoted in John E. Yang, “Underlying Gingrich’s Stance Is His Pique about President,” Washington Post, November 16, 1995.
25. The cable news network CNN rated Gingrich’s remarks the top political blunder of 1995. See William Schneider, “Gingrich Tops List of 1995’s Top Political Blunders,” CNN Inside Politics, January 1, 1996, retrieved from LexisNexis database.
26. See Jeffrey Toobin, A Vast Conspiracy: The Real Story of the Sex Scandal That Nearly Brought Down a President (New York: Random House, 1999), 82. The Gingrich blunder, Toobin wrote, suddenly offered Clinton “a clear path to one of the most extraordinary political rebirths in American history.” See also Alison Mitchell, “The Fall of Gingrich, an Irony in an Odd Year,” New York Times, November 7, 1998. Mitchell wrote that Gingrich’s gamble on the government shutdown in 1995 “assured Clinton’s own reelection.”
27. McCurry, interview with author. McCurry described Clinton “as emotionally drained as I ever saw him as president, during the trip” to attend Rabin’s funeral. McCurry said “the emotional relationship that Clinton had with Rabin . . . was really important. . . . Here’s a guy who was a heroic leader with enormous courage who paid a price of his own life for what he was trying to do to bring peace. That was a pretty compelling model to Clinton.”
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