The reality of the Bosnian “resistance” was far more pathetic. The heavily armed Serb forces donned crisp uniforms donated by the Yugoslav National Army from which they descended, whereas the Bosnian Muslim forces looked as though they had pieced together their uniforms by touring a host of garage sales, plucking garments of all shapes, sizes, and colors from a variety of different neighborhoods. Nothing fit or matched. Their efforts seemed so amateur that they evoked George Orwell’s descriptions of the antifascists’ attempt to defend the town of Barcelona against an attack by Franco’s forces. The motley group in Spain had sought to shore up their positions by stacking sandbags outside their defenses and uprooting heavy cobblestones from the central plaza. Yet lacking the required mercenary instinct, they had patiently stopped to number each cobblestone with chalk so that they could return the stones to their rightful slots after the fighting had subsided.
One reason Western negotiators and U.S. policymakers succumbed to the temptation to equate all sides might be that they were equally frustrated by all sides. Diplomats quickly discerned that none of the Balkan leaders—Muslim, Serb, or Croat—were particularly concerned about the fate of their own people. With few exceptions, the political leaders did not seem moved by the ways their intransigence in negotiations doomed those on the battlefield or in the streets. This divide between warmakers and war casualties was not new. In 1917 when Siegfried Sassoon refused to return to the French front, he prepared a “A Soldier’s Declaration,” arguing that politicians who did not themselves suffer the conflict would deliberately prolong it. In the letter, printed in the Times, Sassoon said he hoped he might “help to destroy the callous complaisance with which the majority of those at home regard the continuance of the agonies which they do not share and have not sufficient imagination to realize.”126 The callousness and lack of imagination that characterized Bosnia’s wartime Serb, Croat, and Muslim leaders gave Western diplomats legitimate grounds for despair.
But American and European frustration stemmed mainly from the foreigners’ impatience with the Muslim refusal to quit. The cherished but churlish “peace process” hinged upon the Muslims’ agreeing to surrender much of the territory from which they had been brutally expelled. Many diplomats felt that the Muslims should sign away the country in the interest of peace. Because the Serbs took so much territory so quickly, they were able to portray themselves as positively pacifist, whereas the Muslims wanted to take back their homes.
A subsequent CIA study found that Serbs were “responsible for the vast majority of ethnic cleansing in Bosnia.” Croats and Muslims had committed “discrete” atrocities, the CIA found, but theirs lacked “the sustained intensity, orchestration, and scale of the Bosnian Serbs’ efforts.”127 Hardly a partisan of U.S. intervention, the CIA concluded that “90 percent” of the atrocities committed during the three-and-a-half-year war were the handiwork of Serb paramilitary and military forces.
“No National Interest”
In July 1993 the Olympic city of Sarajevo came under fierce artillery fire and looked poised to fall. The U.S. press abounded with stories on the human toll of the carnage. As the world looked to the United States for leadership and solutions, Secretary Christopher came clean with the thinking that had come to inform and justify Clinton policy. When a reporter asked what the United States would do to stop what seemed to be the imminent fall of Sarajevo, Christopher responded: “That’s a tragic, tragic situation in Bosnia, make no mistake about that. It’s the world’s most difficult diplomatic problem I believe. It defies any simple solution. The United States is doing all that it can consistent with our national interest.”128 Christopher was a veteran of the Carter foreign policy team that had helped introduce the rhetoric of human rights into foreign policy. But here only national interests, narrowly defined, would count, and Bosnia was not one. The United States would do what it could to help provide humanitarian relief, to maintain economic sanctions against Serbia, and to support diplomatic efforts. When the journalist continued to press him, Christopher bristled: “I would ask you to go back and either look at what I said or I’ll say it again. What I said was the United States is doing all that it can consistent with its national interest, and I’ve discussed before at some length what our national interest is in this situation.”
© Gilles Peress/Magnum
Muslim children injured in a 1994 shelling attack lying in the hospital in East Mostar, Bosnia.
A few of the State Department junior officials who worked daily on the former Yugoslavia were watching Christopher on television in their offices. While their boss foundered under the reporters’ continued grilling, they joked that the secretary seemed to be “scouring the room for a black or Asian face” so that he could call on somebody who might steer the discussion away from the “problem from hell.” The following day, the Bosnian Serbs fired 3,777 shells into Sarajevo in a sixteen-hour period, one of the highest counts ever recorded.129
Between the outbreak of war in April 1992 and July 1993, America’s new breed of “conscientious objectors” had continued to believe in the possibility of changing policy from inside the U.S. government. The interventionists within the ranks were not told to their faces that their ideas were off the wall. Bureaucratic ritual had become better at incorporating dissent, and they were shrewdly “domesticated” or assigned the role of “official dissenters.” They argued positions that were predictable and thus easier to dismiss. Former National Security Council official James C. Thomson Jr., who resigned the NSC over Vietnam, described the ways the Johnson administration had once “warmly institutionalized” Undersecretary of State George Ball as the “inhouse devil’s advocate” on Vietnam. Ball had been urged to speak his piece. Thomson remembered,
Ball felt good, I assume (he had fought for righteousness); the others felt good (they had given a full hearing to the dovish option); and there was minimal unpleasantness. The club remained intact; and it is of course possible that matters would have gotten worse faster if Mr. Ball had kept silent, or left before his final departure in the fall of 1966.
According to Thomson, the president greeted the arrival at meetings of Bill Moyers, his dissenting press secretary, with an affectionate, “Well, here comes Mr. Stop-the-Bombing.”130
By the summer of 1993 the Bosnia dissenters in the State Department and on Capitol Hill, too, had been “heard” and discounted. In this case Clinton and his senior officials might well have greeted a hawk like McCloskey and Dole on Capitol Hill or Harris, Hooper, and Western in the State Department as “Mr. Start -the-Bombing.”
Exit
The State Department is difficult to leave. As with most hierarchical institutions, rituals entrench the solidarity of “members.” Stiff “initiation costs” include fiercely competitive foreign service exams, tedious years of stamping visas in consular offices around the world, and dull desk jobs in the home office. Because of the association of service with “honor” and “country,” exit is often seen as betrayal. Those few who depart on principle are excommunicated or labeled whistle-blowers. U.S. foreign policy lore is not laden with tales of the heroic resignee.
A further deterrent to exit is that the very people who care enough about a policy to contemplate resigning in protest often believe their departure will make it less likely that the policy will improve. Bureaucrats can easily fall into the “efficacy trap,” overestimating the chances they will succeed in making change.131 Dropping out can feel like copping out. The perverse result is that officials may exhibit a greater tendency to stay in an institution the worse they deem its actions.
By August 1993, despite all of these factors weighing against exit, existence within the State Department had become so insufferable for a small group of young officers that they took their leave. They found the U.S. policy so timid, so passive, and so doomed to fail that they chose to disassociate themselves from the administration and to go public with their discontent.
For Marshall Harris, the Bosnia desk officer and the lead au
thor of the April 1993 dissent letter, there was nothing conscientious about objecting to a policy that would never change. In July Harris had drafted an “action memorandum” that outlined options for easing the siege of Sarajevo. By the time it had arrived on the seventh floor, however, the memo had been demoted to a “discussion paper.” Christopher’s “no national interests” pronouncement on July 21 was the last straw. On August 4, 1993, one year after the skeletal figures in the concentration camps had appeared on television and foreign service officer George Kenney had resigned, Harris followed suit. He quit only after he had lined up a job with Congressman McCloskey, who had turned criticizing the administration’s Bosnia policy into a nearly full-time pursuit. “I was lucky,” Harris recalls. “I could at least go straight to a job where I felt like I still had an official voice and might still influence policy.” In a letter addressed to Secretary Christopher, Harris wrote, “I can no longer serve in a Department of State that accepts the forceful dismemberment of a European state and that will not act against genocide and the Serbian officials who perpetrate it.”132
Harris was tired of the hypocrisy of Clinton’s rhetoric. The administration refused to lead either the American people or its European allies and then complained that its policy was constrained by a lack of support from both. Speaking at a press conference the day after his resignation, Harris, thirty-two, delivered his first public verdict on the administration:
If [President Clinton] were to lead, that would bring the American public along, that would bring along the congressmen who are reluctant to do anything, and it could inspire our European allies to do more. . . . I think the administration would be surprised what it could accomplish if it confronts this issue head on. When it adopts a defeatist mode . . . it’s going to get defeatist results.133
Like Kenney, Harris was quickly disparaged by his higher-ups. Some said he quit because he had been shut out of the policy loop. State Department spokesman Mike McCurry shrugged off the impact of the resignation, pointing out that Harris was easily replaceable and saying, “We will fill the position with someone who is interested in working on the Administration’s more aggressive policy to save Sarajevo and Bosnia from demise.”134 But Harris’s colleagues within the department congratulated him for his courage and thanked him for giving voice to their frustration.
Jon Western, the State Department intelligence analyst, was driving with his wife into work from their home in Alexandria, Virginia, when he learned the news. Glancing at the New York Times, he saw a front-page story on Harris’s departure. Western was stunned. Beneath the morning paper, he happened to be carrying his own detailed letter of resignation. Christopher’s declaration that carnage in Bosnia was not a national interest had pushed him over the edge as well. The thirty-year-old could no longer sleep at night, reading about fathers and sons orally castrating one another or preteen girls raped in front of their parents. This was not a civil war, as Christopher kept saying; it was genocide. Western had been mulling resignation for several months, as he knew the daily death beat was getting the best of him. A few weeks before the Christopher press conference, he had visited the Holocaust Museum and heard the narrator, television journalist Jim Lehrer, recite the words of the Department spokesmen from 1943 and 1944 saying they had information on concentration camps in Europe but had “no ability to confirm the reports.” Immediately he found himself transported to August 1992, when Assistant Secretary Tom Niles had said the administration did not have “substantiated information that would confirm the existence of these camps.” Western himself had supplied Niles with all the evidence he needed.
On August 6, 1993, after reading the story about Harris’s departure, Western went ahead and submitted his resignation letter. “I am personally and professionally heartsick by the unwillingness of the United States to make resolution of the conflict in the former Yugoslavia a top foreign policy priority,” Western wrote. He took the elevator from his office on the fourth floor up to the seventh floor and handed the letter to the secretary of state’s secretary. Word traveled so fast that by the time he had returned to his office minutes later, his phone had begun ringing off the hook. Harris was in Geneva when he heard about his colleague’s exit and was surprised and pleased. Western was simply exhausted. In his journal entry that day, he described himself as “thoroughly demoralized and depressed.”
Two weeks later Steven Walker, the Croatia desk officer, became the third diplomat to depart the State Department that month. On August 23, 1993, Walker wrote, “I can no longer countenance U.S. support for a diplomatic process that legitimizes aggression and genocide.”135 Criticized for his testy response to the earlier exits, Christopher had convened a meeting with Balkan officials on August 13 to clear the air. Now with yet another exit, the secretary had begun to wonder whether the cascade of resignations would ever subside. This time he was far more conciliatory. His spokesman McCurry described Walker’s exit as “an honorable form of protest” and said the Bosnian war was “just as frustrating for the secretary as it is for people at the country-desk-officer level who work on the problem.”136
Nothing like this had happened before. It was the largest wave of resignations in State Department history. The departure of so many promising young officers reflected a degree of despair but also a capacity for disappointment among officials not evident in the previous genocides. In the past, U.S. officials had internalized the policy constraints and the top-level indifference. There were few feuds. But Bosnia caused an enormous policy rift that played itself out in the morning papers, which in turn bolstered the confidence and legitimated the outrage of officials who opposed U.S. policy from within.
After the three resignations, the State Department tried to improve morale by redecorating the offices, putting in new furniture and carpet, and shortening the tours of duty. As Harris remembers, “I guess they thought if they gave us soothing blue walls, people wouldn’t be prone to fly off the handle and leave.” But it was the policy, not the interior design, that was the problem.
National Security Adviser Lake, who had himself once resigned in protest, was now architect of a policy that was causing others to flee. In his Foreign Policy article “The Human Reality of Realpolitik,” written in 1971, two decades before he became national security adviser, Lake had complained that the human dimensions of a policy were rarely discussed. “It simply is not done,” Lake wrote. “Policy—good, steady policy—is made by the ‘tough-minded.’. . . To talk of suffering is to lose ‘effectiveness,’ almost to lose one’s grip. It is seen as a sign that one’s rational arguments are weak.” He had urged that policymakers elevate human costs and benefits to the category of “one of the principal and unashamedly legitimate considerations in any decision.” In the 1990s, nearly a half century after the Holocaust and two decades since Vietnam, many believed that under Lake’s leadership the U.S. foreign policy establishment would be more sensitive to human consequences. Yet at the State Department, officials say, to talk of human suffering remained something that was “not done.” Those who complained about the human consequences of American decisions (or here, nondecisions) were still branded emotional, soft, and irrational. The language of national interest was Washington’s lingua franca, and so it would remain.
Lake says he was torn when he heard of the departures:
On the one hand, I agreed with them. They realized that the United States needed to do more, and they were willing to put their careers on the line on behalf of principle. If I had completely disagreed with them, then I could have just dismissed them as grandstanders. But I didn’t have that option. On the other hand, I thought they were making it sound easier than it was to change course. There was no unanimity within the government on the issue, never mind with our European allies.
Lake devoted much of his time at the White House to managing the U.S. response to the crisis in the Balkans. Although he chaired a lot of meetings and generated a dense paper trail, he coordinated more than he led. “If you want to take
ownership of an issue,” one senior U.S. official says, “you have to do more than hold meetings and express your moral convictions. You have to make risky decisions and prove you have the courage of your convictions.” Lake personally favored intervention, but did not recommend it to the president because he could not get consensus within the cabinet. With Secretaries Christopher and Perry as well as the chairman of the Joint Chiefs opposed to NATO air strikes, Lake opted for diplomacy and humanitarian relief, all the while attempting to reconcile these tame measures with the president’s public promises never to tolerate ethnic cleansing. The endless, seemingly fruitless meetings led another high-level U.S. official to reflect, “It wasn’t policy-making. It was group therapy—an existential debate over what is the role of America.”137 Lake did not go toe-to-toe against Pentagon officers and civilians who argued that air-power alone could not halt Serb terror. “When our senior military guys were saying, ‘This mission can’t be done,’” Lake explains, “it’s hard to say, ‘Listen, you professionals, here’s an amateur’s view of how and why it can be done.’”
A Problem From Hell Page 41
