A Problem From Hell

by Samantha Power

  The junior and midlevel officials were aided by their influential allies outside the State Department. The “dirty dozen” dissent letter was leaked, and the message of the dissenters was reinforced by a chorus of appreciative cries from elite opinion-makers. The war was dragging on, and many prominent Americans were distressed by Clinton’s passivity. Well-known hawks from across the Atlantic weighed in. In a television interview former British prime minister Margaret Thatcher, who had admonished President Bush not to “go all wobbly” after Saddam’s invasion of Kuwait, said of Bosnia: “I never thought I’d see another holocaust in my life again.” She later wondered whether she should get into the “rent-a-spine business.”107

  Senator Joseph Biden (D.– Del.) had partnered with Dole in a bipartisan Senate campaign to aid the besieged Muslims. Under President Bush, the pair had introduced legislation that would have authorized the provision of up to $50 million in Defense Department stocks of military weapons and equipment to the Bosnian Muslims as soon as the embargo was lifted. Biden visited Sarajevo in April and, on his return, his rage intensified. Sounding a lot like Theodore Roosevelt three-quarters of a century earlier, Biden accused the Clinton administration of placing relief workers and peacekeepers in circumstances in which they did not belong and then using their presence as an excuse for inaction. The new world order was in shambles, he declared, because the United States and its allies were giving a new meaning to collective security. “As defined by this generation of leaders,” Biden said, “collective security means arranging to blame one another for inaction, so that everyone has an excuse. It does not mean standing together; it means hiding together.”108

  In May 1993, as a result of pressure from inside and outside, Clinton finally agreed to a new U.S. policy, known as “lift and strike.” The president dispatched Secretary Christopher on a high-profile trip to Europe to “sell” America’s allies on lifting the arms embargo against the Bosnian Muslims and bombing the Serbs, the two measures recommended by Hooper and Johnson in their twenty-seven-page dissent the previous year and by Holbrooke and countless others in the media. The Bosnian Muslim leadership continued to stress that it did not want U.S. troops, only an end to U.S. support for a UN sanction that tied their hands and left the Serbs with an overwhelming military advantage.

  But Clinton’s support for the plan proved shallow and Christopher’s salesmanship nonexistent. According to journalist Elizabeth Drew, Hillary Clinton gave her husband a copy of Robert Kaplan’s Balkan Ghosts, a deftly written travel book that portrays people in the Balkans as if they were destined to hate and kill.109 Fearful of a quagmire in an unmendable region, Clinton reportedly “went south” on lift and strike. One NATO official who was present at the meeting between Secretary Christopher and NATO secretary-general Manfred Woerner remembers Christopher’s singular lack of enthusiasm for the policy. He never lifted his nose from his notes. “Christopher started talking about the proposed U.S. policy of lift and strike, but doing it in a way that emphasized the disadvantages rather than the advantages,” the official recalls. “There was a moment when Woerner realized what was going on: He was being invited to think the policy was a bad idea. The problem was he didn’t think it was a bad idea at all.” Christopher returned to the United States saying he had enjoyed a healthy “exchange of ideas,” with his European counterparts. There had indeed been a healthy exchange. As Richard Perle, a former Bush administration Defense Department official put it, “Christopher went over to Europe with an American policy and he came back with a European one.” The lift and strike policy was abandoned.

  In the wake of Christopher’s visit, the United States and the other powers on the UN Security Council settled upon a compromise policy. Instead of lifting the embargo and bombing the Serbs, they agreed to create “safe areas” in the Muslim-held eastern enclave of Srebrenica, in the capital city of Sarajevo, and in four other heavily populated civilian centers that were under Serb siege. UN Secretary General Boutros Boutros-Ghali told the Security Council that 30,000 troops would be needed to protect them. Thanks largely to the American refusal to contribute soldiers and fatigue among European states with troops already in Bosnia, only a tiny fraction of the forces needed to man, monitor, and defend these pockets arrived. President Clinton himself called the safe areas “shooting galleries.” The problem remained unsolved, the Serbs remained virtually unimpeded, and the outrage that had briefly focused Clinton’s attention on the tragedy gradually subsided. The world’s gaze shifted. And the safe areas were left lightly tended and extremely vulnerable.

  When the lift and strike plan surfaced, the young foreign service officers had believed that the system might reward them for their dissent. They were devastated by the safe-area compromise. They had seen the Christopher trip as the last, best hope to change the policy and save the shrinking country of Bosnia. Senator Dole, the Senate minority leader, took to the editorial pages, criticizing Clinton for finally coming up with a “realistic” Bosnia policy and then dropping it “when consensus did not magically appear on his doorstep.” Dole warned that even if it seemed that only humanitarian interests were at stake in Bosnia, in fact American interests were under siege as well. If Clinton stood by in the face of Serb atrocities in Bosnia, Milosevic would soon turn on Albanians in Kosovo, provoking a regional war. Islamic fundamentalists were using Western indifference to Muslim suffering as a recruiting device. And global instability was on the rise because the United States and its allies had signaled that borders could be changed by force with no international consequence. “The United States, instead of leading, has publicly hesitated and waffled,” Dole wrote. “This shirking and shrinking American presence on the global stage is exactly the type of invitation dictators and aggressors dream of.” He urged Clinton to summon his NATO allies and issue an ultimatum: The Serbs must adhere to the latest cease-fire accord, permit the free passage of all humanitarian convoys, place its fearsome heavy weapons under UN control, and disband its paramilitary forces. If they failed to meet the U.S. demands, air strikes should begin and the arms embargo against the Bosnian Muslims should be lifted so that the Muslims themselves could protect the vulnerable safe areas.110

  Dole was ignored right along with the State Department’s in-house hawks.

  “A Long Way from Home”

  The Clinton White House deplored the suffering of Bosnians far more than had the Bush White House, but a number of factors caused Clinton to back off from using force. First, the U.S. military advised against intervention. Clinton and his senior political advisers had little personal experience with military matters. The Democrats had not occupied the White House since 1980. General Colin Powell, who remained chairman of the Joint Chiefs until the end of September 1993, was still guided by a deep hostility to humanitarian missions that implicated no vital U.S. interests. Clinton was particularly deferential to Powell because the president had been publicly derided as a “draft dodger” in the campaign and because he had bungled an early effort to allow gay soldiers to serve in the U.S. armed forces.

  Second, Clinton’s foreign policy architects were committed multilateralists. They would act only with the consent and active participation of their European partners. France and Britain had deployed a combined 5,000 peacekeepers to Bosnia to aid the UN delivery of humanitarian aid, and they feared Serb retaliation against the troops. They also trusted that the Vance-Owen negotiation process would eventually pay dividends. With the Serbs controlling some 70 percent of the country by 1993, many European leaders privately urged ethnic partition. Clinton was also worried about offending the Russians, who sympathized with their fellow Orthodox Christian Serbs.

  Third, Clinton was worried about American public opinion. As the Bush team had done, the Clinton administration kept one eye on the ground in Bosnia and one eye fixed on the polls. Although a plurality in the American public supported U.S. intervention, the percentages tended to vary with slight shifts in the questions asked. And U.S. officials did not trust that public su
pport would withstand U.S. casualties. The more poll-conscious officials were criticized for adopting a “Snow White approach” to foreign policy. In effect, they asked, “Mirror, mirror on the wall, how can we get the highest poll numbers of them all?” And they worked to dampen moral outrage, steering senior officials to adopt the imagery and wording of “tragedy” over that of “terror.” “Many people, while sympathizing with the Bosnian Muslims, find the situation too confusing, too complicated and too frustrating,” said Defense Secretary William Perry. “They say that Bosnia is a tragedy, but not our tragedy. They say that we should wash our hands of the whole situation.” According to Perry, there was “no support, either in the public or in the Congress, for taking sides in this war as a combatant, so we will not.”111

  Americans have historically opposed military campaigns abroad except in cases where the United States or its citizens have been attacked or in instances where the United States has intervened and then appealed to the public afterward, when it has benefited from the “rally-around-the-flag” effect. In the absence of American leadership, the public is usually ambivalent at best. Six months before Pearl Harbor, 76 percent of Americans polled favored supplying aid to Britain, but 79 percent opposed actually entering World War II.112 Once the United States was involved, of course, support soared. Two months before the invasion of Panama in 1989, just 26 percent of Americans supported committing troops to overthrow military strongman Manuel Noriega, but once it came, 80 percent backed the decision to invade.113 A week after Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait in August 1990, before President Bush had mobilized support for U.S. combat, a majority of Americans opposed invading Iraq or even staging air strikes against Iraqi military bases. Four out of ten went so far as to say that the United States “should not get involved in a land war in the Middle East even if Iraq’s invasion means that Iraq permanently controls Kuwait.”114 Even after the president had deployed troops to the Gulf and demonized Hussein as “Hitler,” Americans preferred to stick with economic and diplomatic sanctions. Asked directly in November 1990 if the United States should go to war, 58 percent said no. Some 62 percent considered it likely that the crisis could “bog down and become another Vietnam situation.”115 When the prospect of U.S. casualties was raised, support dropped further.116 Yet when U.S. troops battled the Iraqi Republican Guard, more than 80 percent backed Bush’s decision to fight.117

  Instead of leading the American people to support humanitarian intervention, Clinton adopted a policy of nonconfrontation. The administration would not confront the Serbs, and just as fundamentally, they would not confront opponents of intervention within the U.S. military or the Western alliance. Clinton’s foreign policy team awaited consensus and drifted into the habits of its predecessor. Clinton himself testified to what would be his deep ambivalence about a U.S. role in the Balkans: “The U.S. should always seek an opportunity to stand up against—at least speak out against—inhumanity,” he said.118

  Thus, the administration’s language shifted from that of moral imperative to that of an amoral mess. The “futility” imagery of tribal hatreds returned. Secretary of State Christopher said, “The hatred between all three groups . . . is almost unbelievable. It’s almost terrifying, and it’s centuries old. That really is a problem from hell. And I think that the United States is doing all we can to try to deal with that problem.”119 British foreign secretary Neville Chamberlain once called the strife over Czechoslovakia “a quarrel in a foreign country between people of whom we know nothing.” In May 1993 Secretary Christopher described the war in Bosnia as “a humanitarian crisis a long way from home, in the middle of another continent.”120

  Many senior officials found it difficult to argue with their junior officers about the magnitude of the moral stakes at play in Bosnia. But as had happened with regard to the Holocaust, Cambodia, and northern Iraq, they resolved their internal conflicts by telling themselves that other interests and indeed other values trumped those involved in the Balkans. Intervention in Bosnia might have perverse consequences for the very people the United States sought to help. The more peacekeepers who were present in Bosnia helping deliver relief or deterring attacks against safe areas, the more Western policy became hostage to concerns about the peacekeepers’ welfare. If the arms embargo were lifted or the Serbs bombed, humanitarian aid would be suspended, UN peacekeepers withdrawn, negotiations canceled, and the intended beneficiaries, Bosnia’s Muslims, made far worse off.

  Some very cherished goods at home would also be jeopardized. After more than a decade of Republican rule in the White House, leading Democrats spoke about the importance of carrying out domestic reforms. Jimmy Carter had squandered his opportunity by getting mired in a hostage crisis in Iran, people said; Clinton could not forfeit this historic moment. Dick Morris, Clinton’s erstwhile pollster who liked to dabble in foreign policy decisionmaking, made noninvolvement in Bosnia a “central element” of his advice. “You don’t want to be Lyndon Johnson,” he said to Clinton early on, “sacrificing your potential for doing good on the domestic front by a destructive, never-ending foreign involvement. It’s the Democrats’ disease to take the same compassion that motivates their domestic policies and let it lure them into heroic but ill-considered foreign wars.”121 Sure, the moral stakes were high, but the moral stakes at home were even higher.122

  Atrocities “on All Sides”

  To quell the unease that lurked in the halls of Foggy Bottom, senior officials drifted into the familiar “blame-the-victim” approach invoked whenever one’s morals collide with one’s actions. No genocide since the Holocaust has been completely black and white, and policymakers have been able to accentuate the grayness and moral ambiguity of each crisis. The Armenians and Kurds were not loyal to the state. In Bosnia the Muslim army carried out abuses, too. “All sides” were again said to be guilty. President Clinton said, “Until these folks get tired of killing each other, bad things will continue to happen.” In the New Republic Anna Husarska noted the illogic of Clinton’s position. “I guess if President Clinton had been around during the 1943 uprising in the Warsaw ghetto, he would also have called it ‘those folks out there killing each other,’” she wrote. “How would he describe the brief armed rebellion in the Treblinka concentration camp?”123

  Bosnia desk officer Harris remembers his supervisor Mike Habib’s questioning reports on Serb shelling:

  He didn’t want us to be seen pointing the finger when we weren’t going to do anything. So he’d say, “How do you know it’s the Serbs?” I would say that the Serbs were positioned outside the town with heavy weapons and the town was being shelled, so the Serbs were shelling the town. That wasn’t good enough. I had to write, “There was shelling” or “There were reports of shelling.” It was as if there was spontaneous combustion across Bosnia.

  It is probably no coincidence that the less-experienced U.S. officials were likelier to let their human response to the carnage bubble over. These low-ranking officials did not allow their understanding of the slim odds of American intervention to cloud or alter their assessments of the problem. But their internal analysis and ongoing appeals met silence. They sent reports daily from intelligence officers, embassy staff, and journalists in the field up the chain of command and watched them become more sanitized at each rung of the ladder. By the time the analysis reached the secretary of state—when it did—the reports would have been unrecognizable to their original drafters. “The Clinton policy was unrealistic, but nobody wanted to change it,” says Harris. “So those who defended it consciously and unconsciously contorted the reality on the ground in Bosnia to make the chosen policy seem sensible.” Unwilling to alter the policy, officials in the Clinton administration had to reinterpret the facts.

  On May 18, 1993, Christopher delivered unfathomable remarks to the House Foreign Affairs Committee in which he stunned listeners by insinuating that the Bosnian Muslims themselves had committed genocide:

  First, with respect to the moral case that you make, one of t
he just absolutely bewildering parts of this problem is that the moral case is devastating and clear that there are atrocities, but there are atrocities on all sides. As I said in my statement, the most—perhaps the most serious recent fighting has been between the Croats and the Muslims . . . you’ll find indication of atrocities by all three of the major parties against each other. The level of hatred is just incredible. So, you know, it’s somewhat different than the holocaust. It’s been easy to analogize this to the holocaust, but I never heard of any genocide by the Jews against the German people.124

  Before this testimony, according to one State Department official, Christopher had sent an urgent appeal to the department’s Human Rights Bureau, requesting evidence of Bosnian Muslim atrocities.125

  In Bosnia, as time passed, the conflict did take on more and more of the appearances of a civil war. During the Bush era, Serb paramilitaries, police, and regular armies had rounded up unarmed civilians and hauled them into camps; they had shelled city centers, looted homes, raped women, and expelled nearly 2 million Muslims and Croats from their homes. By the time Clinton took office, the Serbs had completed much of their ethnic cleansing and occupied almost three-quarters of the country. The Muslims had gradually assembled a ragtag army. They had also developed a smuggling network that enabled them to endure the Serbs’ frequent suspensions of humanitarian aid and to begin equipping their defenders with light arms. A Serbo-Croatian expression says, “It takes two spoons to make noise.” Although the Muslims had begun to make noise by meeting Serb attacks, they mustered only a teaspoon against a shovel, and only in certain areas of the country. By the time Clinton’s cabinet began rummaging to prove parity, the Muslims had lost additional favor by going to war with Croats in central Bosnia (largely on the Croats’ instigation). This complicated the picture by creating multiple aggressors. When the Muslims had no arms, no army, and no chance against the high-powered Serbs in 1992, the Bush administration had been careful to stress there were “no good guys.” By mid-1993, when those same Muslims had acquired arms, an army, and a second front, it is not surprising that the language of “factions” and “warring parties” predominated.