Fortunately, Carter’s main contact with Washington on Bosnia was Harry Barnes, a respected former Ambassador to India, Chile, and Romania with whom my colleagues and I had worked for many years. Barnes understood that opening a direct channel to Pale at such a critical moment would undermine our strategy. After talking to Tarnoff and me, Barnes drafted a reply from President Carter to Karadzic that kept him at arm’s length and ended this channel for the time being.
Pale’s third and oddest effort to make direct contact came through Mike Wallace, who called me in Paris. He told me that he was in Pale, where he was taping a profile of Karadzic for 60 Minutes. He said that they had been watching CNN together—the thought made me laugh—when an interview with me appeared and Karadzic told Wallace he would like to meet me. When Mike told him we were old friends, he asked Wallace to try to arrange a meeting the following day in Belgrade to discuss peace.
One of the toughest people in television, Wallace was trying to promote a good story, an exclusive. I laughed and told him that I would love to help him win another award, but that we would no longer meet with Karadzic unless he were part of a delegation headed by Belgrade. Mike repeated our position to Karadzic, sending a useful signal through an unexpected channel.
In view of what was about to happen, it was more than fortunate that we rejected these three probes from Pale. Had we opened any of these doors, the course of the next three months would have been significantly different.
Dîner Chez Harriman. In New York, Ambassador Albright continued her vigorous campaign with those United Nations officials she could round up; fortunately, Secretary-General Boutros-Ghali was unreachable on a commercial aircraft, so she dealt instead with his best deputy, Kofi Annan, who was in charge of peacekeeping operations. At 11:45 A.M., New York time, came a big break: Annan informed Talbott and Albright that he had instructed the U.N.’s civilian officials and military commanders to relinquish for a limited period of time their authority to veto air strikes in Bosnia. For the first time in the war, the decision on the air strikes was solely in the hands of NATO—primarily two American officers, NATO’s Supreme Commander, General George Joulwan, and Admiral Leighton Smith, the commander of NATO’s southern forces and all U.S. naval forces in Europe.
I asked our Ambassador in London, Admiral William Crowe, who had been Chairman of the JCS under Presidents Reagan and Bush, to make the case to his senior British counterparts for bombing, while at NATO Ambassador Robert Hunter and General Joulwan carried the case forward with our allies. We also gained vital support from the NATO Secretary-General, Willy Claes. This mattered: Claes, the former Foreign Minister of Belgium, was relatively new to his job, and this was a major decision for him; he was, after all, now advocating the biggest military action in the forty-five-year history of NATO, amidst a notable lack of enthusiasm from most of his fellow Europeans. Claes made one of those bureaucratic decisions whose importance is lost to most outside observers. Instead of calling for another formal meeting of the NATO Council to make a decision, Claes simply informed the other members of NATO that he had authorized General Joulwan and Admiral Leighton Smith, the commander of all NATO forces in the Mediterranean, to take military action if it was deemed appropriate. As it turned out, Claes’s bureaucratic maneuver was vital; despite the decision of the London conference in July, the NATO Council would have either delayed or denied air strikes.
Izetbegovic would be busy with official events until after a dinner speech, so, to fill our evening, Ambassador Harriman put together a last-minute dinner for the delegation and a few French and Bosnian officials, including Sacirbey, who brought with him several friends, one of whom was the popular French philosophe and writer Bernard-Henri Lévy.
Although dinner was served, as always, in the impeccable manner that was Pamela Harriman’s hallmark, it quickly degenerated into what must have been one of the most disjointed soirées ever held at the residence on the Rue du Faubourg St.-Honoré. The telephone never stopped ringing, and Wes Clark and I were constantly called from the table to discuss with Washington, Brussels, or New York some new problem in the effort to start the bombing. Finally, just as Lévy was leaving, he noticed an unannounced visitor in khakis and a paramilitary beret sitting quietly in a corner in one of the grand reception rooms.
With a keen and cynical Gallic eye, Lévy described the dinner in his best-seller Le Lys et la Cendre, published a year later. Because Lévy was one of only two or three outsiders who ever saw the negotiating team in action, his journal notes are worth quoting in some detail—although I hope that Lévy, whom we found engaging as well as engagé, later understood that we were not, in fact, as crazy as we seemed to him that frantic evening:
Sacirbey and I both went to the residence of the American Ambassador, the lovely Pamela Harriman. I knew Pamela Harriman slightly…. I had had an opportunity to appreciate her pleasant intellect, her attentiveness to others, her way of feigning ignorance to force you to talk and reveal yourself to her. And her charm. Her strange beauty that evaded the attacks of age.
At my table were two people whom, I must say, I couldn’t place right away. Facing me, stuffed into an olive-green uniform dripping with decorations that seemed to have come from the wardrobe department of Platoon or Full Metal Jacket, was General Wesley Clark…. On my left was a civilian in his fifties, jovial, athletically built, with wire-framed eyeglasses…. He called Mohammed “Mo” and Sacirbey, in turn, unfailingly called him “Dick.” At first I found him rather rude, since he was constantly leaving the table to go and answer the phone. This was Richard Holbrooke himself, the head of the peace mission, the “bulldozer diplomat,” who, it was said, might be in the process of stopping the war in the Balkans….
After Holbrooke had gotten up for the eighth or ninth time to answer telephone calls … I remember saying to myself, “What is going on here anyway? Does he have St. Vitus’ dance? And who is he trying to impress, getting up eight times in a row in the middle of dinner?” …
It was now midnight. Pamela Harriman, who up to now had been the perfect host, began to look pointedly at her watch, as if she were suddenly in a hurry for us to leave…. We let ourselves be swept along in the commotion, almost a rush for the door, the reason for which we had absolutely no idea…. And whom did we find, lost in the immense [formal living room] that was even more imposing because it was otherwise empty? Over there, under the Renoir, perched casually on the arm of a chair, talking on the phone in a low voice—a small scrawny guy, wearing a sort of loose-fitting jacket that looked from a distance like a painter’s smzock or a pajama top … was Bosnian President Izetbegovic….
The Ambassador came over, utterly embarrassed. She let us talk for two or three minutes more … and then took him gently by the arm and led him over to join Holbrooke, Clark and the others…. My last image was of Pamela Harriman, very dignified, strangely earnest, followed in silence by Izetbegovic in his quasi pajamas and the American diplomats, all of them seemingly in awe, bathed in a wan light that made them look like conspirators caught in the act.
Of course, the next day, I had the key to this strange scene. I then realized that the Bosnian president had left the [official French] dinner, dropped by his hotel to shower and change, and then had come to join the other main actors as the major air strikes against the Serbs were launched.
I then understood that this was what Holbrooke had had on his mind during dinner, while we had been somewhat annoyed at what we perceived to be his self-importance … when in fact he was probably in the process of settling the last details of choreography….
The time will come when those few hours will say much about war and peace in Bosnia, the role that the United States played in the outcome, the real importance of France, and perhaps the world order that will reflect it.1
Lévy was almost correct. The final decision to start the bombing had not yet been made, but was fast approaching—hence the drama and tension of the evening. After Lévy left
, Clark spread out on the floor of the residence huge maps of Bosnia. Under Harriman’s van Gogh and Picassos, Izetbegovic wandered aimlessly over the maps, trying to orient himself, while Clark’s aides tried to keep the corners of the map panels aligned. The mere sight of maps, as Jim Pardew put it, “energized” the Bosnians into a deeply emotional state. Izetbegovic told us that the territorial issues—”the map”—would be far more difficult to resolve than the constitutional issues. At the time, I did not fully appreciate what he meant, but when we finally got down to serious map discussions more than two months later he was proved all too correct.
Just after midnight, after another telephone call from Washington, I pulled Izetbegovic aside. “Mr. President,” I said, “we have some good news. Acting Secretary Talbott asked me to inform you that NATO planes will begin air strikes in Bosnia in less than two hours.” I shook his hand warmly, but either because he was exhausted or because he had seen previous NATO bombing “campaigns” turn out to be meaningless pinpricks, he just smiled his strange smile, and slipped out into the Paris night.
The Bombs of August. Operation Deliberate Force began on August 30 at 2:00 A.M. local time. More than sixty aircraft, flying from bases in Italy and the aircraft carrier Theodore Roosevelt in the Adriatic, pounded Bosnian Serb positions around Sarajevo. It was the largest military action in NATO history. French and British artillery from the Rapid Reaction Force joined in, targeting Lukavica barracks southwest of Sarajevo. Unlike earlier air strikes, when the U.N. and NATO had restricted themselves to hitting individual Serb surface-to-air missile sites or single tanks, these strikes were massive. Planned by Admiral Smith and his brilliant Air Force commander, Lieutenant General Michael E. Ryan, the targets had been picked months in advance. General Ryan had prepared his forces for a possible bombing campaign for several years. I had examined the bulky photoreconnaissance books during a visit to Smith’s headquarters high in the hills above Naples over a year earlier, and knew that NATO had photographs of thousands of targets, ranging from tiny bunkers to the new, sophisticated Serb surface-to-air system that had significantly increased the danger to NATO pilots in recent months. When the assignment came, he and Smith carried out the mission with great skill and astonishing success.
Press and public reaction was highly positive. Izetbegovic, his doubts temporarily erased, said, ‘The world has finally done what it should have done a long, long time ago.” Senator Dole, calling the attacks “long overdue,” backed them fully. Roger Cohen, The New York Times’s Sarajevo bureau chief, began his article: “After 40 months of awkward hesitation, NATO today stepped squarely into the midst of the Bosnian war.” The Wall Street Journal began its news story: “The U.S. and its NATO allies, after four years of disagreement and feckless intervention …” The Financial Times, whose coverage of Bosnia had been unsurpassed, editorialized that “Western policy would not have had a shred of credibility left if there had not been a tough response.” Rethinking its editorial policy overnight, The New York Times decided that the bombing was “a risk worth taking in this particular situation and for the purpose of sustaining the specific diplomatic initiative now under way.” A Times article by Steven Greenhouse especially caught my eye, since it attributed to unnamed senior Washington policy makers a view at variance with mine: that “it would not be the smartest thing [for Mr. Holbrooke]… to show up in Belgrade this week to meet with President Slobodan Milosevic of Serbia right after NATO planes bombed his Bosnian Serb brothers … [because] the large-scale bombing might cause Serbian nationalists to pressure Mr. Milosevic to tell Mr. Holbrooke to go away—and derail the peace initiative.”
The most insightful commentary came from the Paris-based American columnist William Pfaff. He saw instantly what it would take others months to discern: that the NATO bombing marked a historic development in post-Cold War relations between Europe and the United States. “The humiliation of Europe in what may prove the Yugoslav endgame has yet to be fully appreciated in Europe’s capitals,” he wrote on September 1 in the International Herald-Tribune. “The United States today is again Europe’s leader; there is no other. Both the Bush and Clinton administrations tried, and failed, to convince the European governments to take over Europe’s leadership.”
Operation Deliberate Force came after a magnificent effort, quarterbacked by Berger, Talbott, and Albright on the civilian side, and Admiral Owens, John White, and Walt Slocombe for the Pentagon. When it was all over and we could assess who had been most helpful, my Washington colleagues usually singled out Kofi Annan at the United Nations, and Willy Claes and General Joulwan at NATO. Annan’s gutsy performance in those twenty-four hours was to play a central role in Washington’s strong support for him a year later as the successor to Boutros Boutros-Ghali as Secretary-General of the United Nations. Indeed, in a sense Annan won the job on that day.
The President, who was still in Wyoming, did not make any telephone calls himself, but he made it clear that he wanted a military response. He told Sandy and Strobe that he wanted “to hit them hard,” and was ready to make calls if necessary. This evidence of the President’s own determination was vital in persuading the Europeans and the U.N. that action was unavoidable.
After all the years of minimal steps, the historic decision to “hit them hard” had been made remarkably quickly. What, therefore, had caused such a sudden and dramatic change of heart, after months in which there had been no NATO action, even in response to the horrors of Srebrenica and Zepa?
Different vantage points may produce different answers to this question. When I asked my colleagues later, they cited four factors: the sense that we had reached the absolute end of the line, and simply could not let this latest outrage stand; the grim, emotional reaction of Washington after losing three close and treasured colleagues on Mount Igman; the President’s own determination; and the strong recommendation of our negotiating team that bombing should take place regardless of its effect on the negotiations.
From the vantage point of the Europeans, the issue undoubtedly looked different. They had opposed massive bombing in the past because they feared their soldiers would be taken hostage by the Serbs, and because they saw the stakes in Bosnia differently. The last British troops had been removed from the Gorazde enclave just before the bombing began, thus extracting the most vulnerable forces from positions where they could be taken hostage. But because many other U.N. peacekeepers remained vulnerable, there was still great concern about, even opposition to, the bombing as it began. Despite the rule changes for bombing that came out of the London conference, I have no doubt the Europeans would have blocked or minimized the bombing were it not for Washington’s new resolve. We knew from the moment the bombing started, therefore, that there would be a continued disagreement with our NATO allies and the U.N. over its duration and its scope—and that the United States would have to keep pressing.
History is often made of seemingly disparate events whose true relationship to one another becomes apparent only after the fact. This was true of the last two weeks of August. As our negotiations gathered momentum in the weeks following the bombing, almost everyone came to believe that the bombing had been part of a master plan. But in fact in none of the discussions prior to our mission had we considered bombing as part of a negotiating strategy. Lake himself never mentioned it during his trip to Europe, and in private he had shown great ambivalence toward it. The military was more than skeptical; most were opposed. Later, the Administration was praised for—or accused of—having planned what the Chinese might have called a policy of “talk-talk, bomb-bomb.” In fact, this would not have been a bad idea—both Frasure and I had long favored it—but it simply did not happen that way. It took an outrageous Bosnian Serb action to trigger Operation Deliberate Force. But once launched, it made a huge difference.
By 3:00 A.M., with the bombing under way for almost an hour, I tried to get some sleep, but General Clark came to my room with a distressing piece of news: the U.S. Air Force did not want us
to travel to Belgrade because of the danger of flying in or near the war zone. Clark explained that the Air Force was especially worried that we might be shot down by Serb missiles.
This was absurd, I told Clark, and asked him to ensure that, one way or another, we got to Belgrade in the morning, even if we had to fly around the combat zone. We simply had to get there immediately to see the effect of the bombing on Milosevic and the Pale Serbs.
I rose at 7:00 A.M. on August 30 to find that during the night Clark—who seemed to operate on even less sleep than the rest of us—had persuaded the Air Force to take us to Belgrade. After a one-hour delay to coordinate a new flight path with NATO, I told him that we should start for Belgrade without confirmation that we would be able to land, and divert to Zagreb if necessary. The flight east toward the Serbian capital was very tense, even after we received word that we would be cleared to land. We spent the journey trying to figure out a response to every possible contingency we might face in Belgrade. Would Milosevic refuse to see us? Keep us waiting for a day or more? See us but refuse to discuss anything except the cessation of the bombing? Negotiate more intensively? We covered every possibility—except the one that actually occurred.
One historical analogy, however inexact, came to mind: the gamble Nixon and Kissinger had taken when they mined the harbor of Haiphong just before the May 1972 Moscow summit. Even though they felt they were putting the summit, the centerpiece of their global diplomatic strategy, on the line, they decided to proceed with the attacks on North Vietnam. While I did not agree with the action, I respected the cool calculation involved in taking such a risk, and the fact that it had succeeded—that is, it did not wreck the U.S.-Soviet summit. Without overdramatizing the comparison, I mentioned it to my colleagues as our plane began to descend toward the military airport outside Belgrade.
To End a War Page 15
