To End a War

by Richard Holbrooke

  Izetbegovic and Tudjman at the Waldorf. The day after Hyde Park, October 24, President Clinton met Izetbegovic and Tudjman together at the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel in New York. Seeking to put the Dayton talks in a larger framework, the President began on a high note. “We have seen things in the last few years that we never expected to see,” he said. “Israel and the PLO sitting down after thirty years of fighting; the IRA laying down their arms. But what the world wants most is the end of the war in Bosnia.” The President praised the Muslim-Croat Federation as essential. “Without the Federation,” he said, “I am not sure that the NATO bombing or Dick Holbrooke’s diplomacy would have worked.”

  Seated on both sides of President Clinton, the two Presidents barely acknowledged his point. Rather, Izetbegovic immediately complained about the Croatians. “All parties here support the Federation in words,” he said, “but the process of implementation has not taken place as it should.” He then listed areas in which the Croatians had failed to live up to their commitments. Tudjman ignored Izetbegovic, and made another strong pitch that eastern Slavonia had to be part of any deal at Dayton. The President agreed. Then the two men took a few more shots at each other, and the meeting ended. Its main value was that it had given the President and his senior advisors a rare firsthand sense of how much these two men disliked each other, and how difficult Dayton would be.

  With the formal meeting over, President Clinton asked me and Sandy Vershbow to join him and the two Presidents in a corner. “I want to ask you to do something for the peace process that I know will be hard on both of you,” he said to Izetbegovic and Tudjman. “I want to ask you both to go to Moscow before Dayton. It would be better to get the Moscow visit over with before the Duma elections, and that means before Dayton.” The main purpose of the meeting, President Clinton concluded, would be to allow Yeltsin “to send a signal to the Serbs, and to allow the Russian people to see that he is part of the process.” Despite their previous misgivings, Izetbegovic and Tudjman agreed immediately. To ease the physical strain on Izetbegovic, President Clinton offered an American plane for the trip; Tudjman had his own plane.

  The pre-Dayton Moscow summit, which would delay the start of Dayton by one day, was announced by the Russians and confirmed by the White House on October 25. Two days later, on October 27, Perry and Grachev agreed to put two thousand Russian troops directly under General Joulwan.

  This arrangement told a great deal about the complicated mind-set of the Russians in the fourth year of the post-Soviet era. The great World War II alliance of Americans and Russians still echoed in the minds of the Russian military. Having regarded themselves as our only “fellow superpower” for fifty years, they seemed to be ready to accept the U.S. military as a worthy superior or commander in Bosnia. The negotiations over Russia’s role in Bosnia thus helped us understand how to approach the next big strategic goal of America’s post-Cold War European policy—enlarging NATO.

  This was a historic achievement. From the patient negotiating style of Perry and Talbott, strongly supported by General Joulwan, had come an unprecedented command arrangement: for the first time since World War II, U.S. and Russian troops would operate in a unified command. Even Strobe was surprised at the speed with which everything fell into place on the eve of Dayton. “The Russians were unbelievably sanguine about being under American command in Bosnia,” he observed later—“but NATO was still a four-letter word in Moscow.”

  But the same day brought stunning news that temporarily overshadowed the agreement between Perry and Grachev. For the second time in three months, Yeltsin entered the hospital with severe heart disease. Ambassador Pickering predicted that the country was entering a period of crisis and uncertainty. There was, however, a small plus from this frightening development: the pre-Dayton Moscow summit was canceled. As Chris Hill said, “If Yeltsin had to get sick, at least he picked a good time from our standpoint.” Still, we all knew that a great deal depended on his speedy recovery.

  * In March 1997, I attended a showing at the Council on Foreign Relations in New York of a powerful documentary film, Calling the Ghosts, that recounted the brutal treatment two Bosnian women from Prijedor had suffered during their incarceration at the notorious Omarska prison camp. Following the film, the two women angrily asked me why they were still unable to return to their hometown. I told them we’d repeatedly encouraged an assault on Prijedor. They were astonished; they said General Dudakovic, the Bosnian commander, had told them personally that “Holbrooke would not let us capture Prijedor and Bosanski Novi.” I subsequently learned that this story was widely believed in the region.

  This revisionism was not surprising; it absolved Dudakovic and his associates of responsibility for their failure to take Prijedor. I suspect the truth is that after the September 18 disaster at the Una River the Croatians did not want to fight for a town they would have had to turn over to the Muslims—and the Bosnians could not capture it unaided.

  * Collins succeeded Pickering as Ambassador to Russia in 1997.

  CHAPTER 15

  Decisions with Consequences

  … our theories, like the weather,

  Veer round completely every day,

  And all that we can always say

  Is: true democracy begins

  With free confessions of our sins.

  —W. H. AUDEN, New Year Letter

  Now the man who has risen to the top [of the military] finds himself with new concerns, political and diplomatic. He is not simply directing the Army or Navy or Air Force. He is consulting with his colleagues and advising his civilian superiors…. He is advising them on matters having to do with the goals and ends of peace and war. For this he has certainly not been trained.

  —BERNARD BRODIE, War and Politics

  AS DAYTON APPROACHED, THE PRESSURE INCREASED. It was the most brutal bureaucratic effort I had ever been involved in. Some bureaucratic bruises were made in the process that did not heal quickly. But in retrospect, the amazing thing was not how tough it was to get ready for Dayton, but how hard everyone worked to make it happen. The State Department was swarming with activity. Conference rooms had been turned into messy drafting rooms, where people drawn from various parts of the government were working together, minus most of the normal bureaucratic wrangling. There seemed to be a certain air of destiny, as if everyone working on the preparations for Dayton felt they might be part of a decisive moment in American foreign policy.

  The Role of IFOR. However, the Administration remained divided over the most important question it faced: if we got an agreement in Dayton, what would the NATO-led Implementation Force, IFOR, do? Of course, if Dayton failed to produce a peace agreement, such deliberations would be inconsequential. Assuming success in Dayton, however, they would define the most important action in the history of NATO—its first deployment outside its own area, its first joint operation with non-NATO troops, and its first post-Cold War challenge.

  There was no disagreement over the first two tasks of IFOR personnel: first, to use whatever force or other means was necessary to protect themselves; and, second, to separate the warring parties and enforce the cease-fire.

  But aside from separating the forces and protecting themselves, what else should the peacekeepers do? The disagreement on this critical issue between the “maximalists,” like myself, and the “minimalists,” mainly at the Pentagon, was profound. With Dayton days away, and our NATO allies sending military representatives to Washington to work out a common position, two high-level White House meetings were scheduled for October 25 and 27 to resolve these questions.

  The military did not like civilian interference “inside” their own affairs. They preferred to be given a limited and clearly defined mission from their civilian colleagues and then decide on their own how to carry it out. In recent years, the military had adopted a politically potent term for assignments they felt were too broad: “mission creep.” This was a powerful pejorative, conjuring up images
of quagmires. But it was never clearly defined, only invoked, and always in a negative sense, used only to kill someone else’s proposal.

  The debate over mission creep raised an extremely important issue: the role of the American military in the post-Cold War world. The Pentagon did not want to fragment its forces in the pursuit of secondary objectives, especially in the twilight zone between war and peace. Given budgetary constraints, the Chiefs did not think they could pursue these objectives and fulfill their primary missions as well.

  America’s modern fighting force, primarily the creation and pride of the Reagan era, had handled challenges in Iraq, Panama, Grenada, and elsewhere with courage, skill, and low casualties. But two less pleasant memories still hung like dark clouds over the Pentagon. Phrases like “slippery slope” and “mission creep” were code for specific events that had traumatized the military and the nation: Mogadishu, which hung over our deliberations like a dark cloud; and Vietnam, which lay further back, in the inner recesses of our minds.

  Vietnam had affected almost every American who had lived through the 1960s and early 1970s, including myself. But the “lessons of Vietnam” divided people almost as much as the war itself had. The leaders of the military establishment in the 1990s, all of whom had been company or field-grade officers in Vietnam, had derived a lesson substantially different from that of opponents of the war, including Bill Clinton. Colin Powell spoke eloquently for the military in his memoir. “Many of my generation,” he wrote, “the career captains, majors, and lieutenant colonels seasoned in that war, vowed that when our turn came to call the shots, we would not quietly acquiesce in halfhearted warfare for half-baked reasons that the American people could not understand or support.”1

  The power of that distant yet living memory was visible on the right shoulder of General John Shalikashvili. As Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, he was entitled to wear the patch of any military unit on his uniform. He chose the insignia of MACV—the long-decommissioned Military Assistance Command Vietnam. When I first commented on the powerful emotions the once-ubiquitous MACV shield evoked in me, Shalikashvili said he was “surprised a civilian recognized” the symbol. “I spent three years in Vietnam,” I explained, “part of it living in a MACV compound in the Mekong Delta.” He wore the patch, he said, as a silent tribute to the Americans who served and died in that faraway war.

  Despite some major successes, at least three times in the twenty years since Vietnam the military had stumbled. In April 1980, the attempt to rescue the American hostages in Tehran had failed in the Iranian desert, leaving eight Americans dead and contributing heavily to Carter’s defeat by Reagan. In Lebanon three years later, 241 marines had been killed when their barracks was bombed, Reagan’s worst moment as President. Then, on October 3, 1993, came a new disaster, which rocked the Clinton Administration and traumatized the military. Eighteen Americans, serving as part of the U.N. force in Somalia, were killed in the streets of Mogadishu while trying to capture a Somalian clan leader, Mohammed Farah Aideed. The scars from that disaster would deeply affect our Bosnia policy. Combined with Vietnam, they had left what might be called a “Vietmalia syndrome” in Washington.

  To be sure, there were fundamental differences between Bosnia and “Vietmalia.” Our goals and stakes were different. The Bosnian Serbs were neither the disciplined, ruthless revolutionaries of North Vietnam nor the drunken ragtag “technicals” who raced around Mogadishu shooting people. But discussion of such distinctions was not welcome: most officials felt they already knew the meaning of Somalia and Vietnam without giving them more than cursory analysis.

  In their hearts, American military leaders would have preferred not to send American forces to Bosnia. They feared that the mission would be “fuzzy” and imprecise, like Somalia. Tony Lake, who shared their concerns, argued against a “nation-building” role for the military, and worried aloud about the “slippery slope” in Bosnia. Of course, if they were ordered to go, they would do so quickly and successfully. But the leadership of the military would resist “tasking” for anything beyond self-protection and the implementation of the military provisions of any peace agreement. The JCS and NATO believed that these two tasks would probably absorb all their resources.

  American Casualties. Basing their predictions on another misreading of the Bosnian Serbs, as had been the case throughout the war, the military viewed the Serbs as a potent military force that would threaten IFOR as it had the U.N. Our negotiating team, including its two generals, Clark and Kerrick, believed these fears were greatly exaggerated. The Bosnian Serbs were a spent force, and we were confident that Milosevic would no longer come to their aid militarily. We believed that if sent to Bosnia, the U.S. military and NATO would be able to control the situation on the ground with little difficulty or challenge from the Serbs. In any case, we would not deploy American or other NATO troops absent ironclad guarantees from all three parties concerning their safety, access, and authority.

  I reflected my belief that American and NATO casualties would be low—far lower, in fact, than any official predictions—in meetings and in several interviews just before Dayton. On Friday, October 27, I told Rowland Evans and Christiane Amanpour of CNN that

  While we have to anticipate that it’s not a risk-free situation, we’re not going to send people into combat. This is not Somalia, and it’s not Vietnam…. We’re not anticipating the kind of casualties and body bags that your question presupposes. There is no peace without American involvement, but to repeat, there’s no American involvement without peace.

  EVANS: Well, I hate to belabor the issue, but this is what Americans are asking themselves. [General] Michael Rose, who ran the U.N. operation for at least a year—and you may disagree with him, but he certainly knows the situation on the ground—estimates that the casualties from this operation that you’re planning will exceed the casualties from the Gulf War, which were three hundred and ninety dead. Is he crazy?

  HOLBROOKE: He’s not crazy. He’s wrong. His predecessor in Bosnia, General Morillon, said, “Hit them the first time they challenge you and they won’t respond again.”*

  The Great Debate. Our team argued that after IFOR carried out its primary missions in Bosnia it should undertake additional tasks in support of peace—including keeping roads open, assisting in the election process, and arresting war criminals. Without the backing of IFOR, the civilian parts of an agreement—the test of true peace—could not be carried out. And if the civilian provisions of a peace agreement were not carried out, then withdrawal of NATO forces would be more difficult.

  In my view, this could create a self-defeating cycle: the narrower the military mission, the longer they would have to stay. But the military saw things quite differently: anticipating a huge security problem that would tie down their forces, they believed that any additional responsibilities would require additional forces, well beyond the sixty thousand troops in the plan.

  The disagreement with the military was not personal. My respect for the senior military officers with whom we worked was enormous, especially General Shalikashvili, a friend whose support of the negotiating team had been exemplary. His unusual background added to his charm. He was born in Warsaw of Georgian parents three years before Hitler invaded Poland. English was his fourth language. Once, when several Americans were describing their first memories of Berlin, Shalikashvili quieted the others by recalling his first visit there—in 1943! He and his family came to the United States in 1954 when he was sixteen years old, and he learned English from American movies (especially, according to legend, John Wayne’s). His military career had begun in the enlisted ranks, not at West Point.* Low-key but forceful, he was less imposing than Powell, and far less of a public figure. But, like Powell, he conveyed confidence and trust. With a quick smile and a disarming manner—”Call me Shali,” he would say to anyone stumbling over his five-syllable surname—he was open and friendly, and universally liked by his civilian colleagues. He never t
ried to strong-arm or overwhelm civilians in a discussion, but simply stated his position and held his ground as long as possible. That we had good personal relations was important, since we had to work together closely, whatever happened.

  With only a year to go until the presidential election, public opinion was heavily opposed to deployments—at that time some 70 percent of the American public did not want troops in Bosnia under any circumstances. The White House was understandably averse to a direct confrontation with the military. If the military openly opposed the deployment, our political difficulties would be vastly increased. We had to have their backing to get congressional and public support for the mission, which meant that they had the upper hand in the debate over what their mission would be.

  So the lines were drawn, although not precisely, between two points of view concerning the mission of the peacekeepers: on one side, a narrow approach, backed by the JCS and NATO; on the other side, a broader, more ambitious maximalist approach in which IFOR would support the civilian aspects of a peace agreement if and when it had completed its primary missions.

  Less than a week before Dayton, the battle lines were clear. Even after Sandy Berger’s Deputies’ Committee had resolved many secondary issues, there were still eleven major disagreements between State and the JCS. Some of them were fundamental, as identified in a study by Sandy Vershbow: