Contrasting Policies in Bosnia and Palestine Reveal U.S. Motivations

by Richard H. Curtiss

A year ago the U.S. belatedly did the right thing in Bosnia, putting its troops into the country as part of an international force to stop the sectarian slaughter. It worked. This month President Bill Clinton did the right thing again, promising to keep some American troops in Bosnia until June 1998 in an attempt to head off a resumption of the fighting. It very likely will work again.

By contrast, in Israel/Palestine the U.S. tried to do the right thing last May, indicating its strong backing for an election victory by Israel’s Labor Party Prime Minister Shimon Peres. But Likud Party leader Binyamin Netanyahu won, despite Clinton's efforts. Now that Clinton himself has been safely re-elected, he may try again to do the right thing by confronting Netanyahu over his reluctance to carry out Israel’s Oslo accord commitments. But in challenging Netanyahu, the U.S. almost certainly will fail again.

If they examine why the Clinton administration succeeds in Bosnia but fails in Israel, Muslim states may learn how to deal realistically with the world’s only current superpower. The causes of the Muslims of Palestine and the Muslims of Bosnia are similar. Both are defending the lands their ancestors have occupied for centuries.. So the fact that the U.S. government consistently tilts against the Muslim Palestinians and toward the Muslim Bosnians clearly has little to do with American attitudes toward Muslims. In fact, the American attitude is not based on religion at all. The opponents of the Muslim and Christian Palestinians are Israeli Jews. But although fewer than 2.5 percent of Americans are Jewish, U.S. support goes to Israel.

The irrelevance of religion is further demonstrated in Bosnia. There the enemies of the Muslim-led pluralist government are Serbian or Croatian Christians. But although more than 90 percent of Americans are of Christian heritage, and no more than 3 percent of Americans are Muslim, U.S. support goes to the Muslims.

To understand why, one must examine the Clinton administration’s record in Bosnia, whose pre-civil war population was about 44 percent Muslim, 32 percent Serb, and 17 percent Croat, with the remainder consisting of Hungarians, Gypsies, Jews and other small minorities. U.S. sympathies, insofar as any existed, were extended to the legitimate, Muslim-led government. By contrast, Britain and France tended to be pro-Serb, based on ties dating back to World War I. German sympathies, also based on historical ties, went to the Croats.

The moral is that U.S. foreign policy is domestically driven.

Blocked by its NATO allies from supporting the Bosnian government, the U.S. resorted to subterfuge. It refused to use U.S. forces to enforce the United Nations arms embargo against all parties in Bosnia. When it was accused by France and Britain of ignoring or even facilitating Turkish, Saudi, Iranian and other Muslim arms shipments to the Bosnian government through Croatia, or by air directly to the Bosnian Muslim forces, the U.S. blandly denied it. Eventually, when arms from Germany to Croatia and from Muslim countries to the Bosnian forces enabled them to halt and even push back the Serbs, the U.S. intervened diplomatically, halted the fighting at agreed cease-fire lines, and committed 20,000 American troops for one year as part of a 60,000-person NATO force to maintain the peace.

Now, with both Bosnian and American elections behind it, the Clinton administration has committed itself to providing 8,500 troops for another 18 months as part of a NATO force of 30,000 to maintain stability while Bosnia conducts municipal elections and seeks to put into place institutions that will halt the breakup of the country. Whether or not it works, the Clinton administration’s strategy makes sense and the Republican opposition has done nothing in Congress to derail it. Nor did the American media seek in the past to expose the clandestine aspects of U.S. support for the Bosnians, or to criticize Clinton’s obvious ploy to delay committing further U.S. troop support to Bosnia until after the U.S. elections.

Contrast this with the torrent of U.S. media criticism that followed Clinton’s unsuccessful attempt to influence Israel’s elections. As the administration knew it would, Israel’s victorious Likud government now is dismantling the land-for-peace agreement that was the product of endless negotiations during the administration of U.S. President George Bush, and nearly 30 trips to the Middle East by Clinton’s outgoing secretary of state, Warren Christopher. A breakdown of the Middle East peace process will halt a political and economic normalization effort in which the U.S. has invested vast political and financial capital, and will immensely complicate U.S. diplomacy and trade in the region.

Counting on Clout

Clinton therefore is obligated to confront Netanyahu over his breaking of Israel’s formal obligations undertaken at the White House in September 1993 and again in 1995. But when the U.S. president does so, neither Congress nor the American media nor the Republican opposition will support him. So, regardless of America’s superpower status, Netanyahu will ignore any Clinton initiative and probably get away with it. The Israeli prime minister is counting on his clout in Congress to keep U.S. aid to Israel at the present high level, and his support in the U.S. media to ensure that gradually the American people forget that it was the Israelis, not the Arabs, who derailed the peace train by renouncing their solemn agreement to trade land for peace.

The moral is that U.S. foreign policy is domestically driven. Where there is no domestic special interest involved, as in the case of Bosnia, where neither Serbs, Croats nor Muslims have effective U.S. lobbies, any U.S. president is free to pursue American national interests. And the U.S. national interest in the Balkans is to extinguish ethnic or sectarian fires that might re-ignite rivalry with a nuclear-armed Russia.

In the Middle East, however, a potent domestic lobby, based on America’s Jewish community, plays a key role not only in supporting Israel but also in complicating U.S. relations with the Arabs and with Muslim countries as distant as Iran, Pakistan and Malaysia. Until all Islamic countries acknowledge this, and begin to develop unified countermeasures both in terms of trade policies and cultivating positive relations with America’s own six to eight million Muslims with the aim of developing an effective American counter lobby, there will be little to offset the all-powerful Israeli influence in the U.S. media, Congress and political establishment that drives, and distorts, U.S. Middle East policy.