Domestic Politics Threatening U.S. Mission in Bosnia

by Richard H. Curtiss

“Sometimes the Clinton administration’s foreign policy appears to be driven almost entirely by domestic concerns.”

Columnist Lally Weymouth, Washington Post, April 23, 1996.

Not since World War II has there been a foreign war in which Americans, at least the minority who pay any attention to world affairs, have been so united over who are the aggressors, and who are the victims. Conservatives, liberals, Christians, Jews and, of course, Muslims, are in general agreement that in Bosnia the Muslim-led but multisectarian Bosnian government forces have been the good guys, the Orthodox Christian Serbs of Bosnia (armed, financed and to a large extent directed by the leaders of Serbia itself) the bad guys, and the Roman Catholic Croats a bit of each. Even many of the muffled opposition figures in Serbia’s tightly controlled media would agree.

From the outbreak of the fighting in Croatia in the summer of 1991 and in Bosnia in April of 1992, all three sides have run true to form. Now, six months after the fighting has ended, widening inquiries into the many atrocities committed in wars in which between 250,000 and 300,000 people are dead or missing only confirm the popular impressions. Well over 90 percent of the atrocities were committed by Serbs, virtually all of the remainder by Croats, and the few Muslims who have been implicated at all seem to have been working with Croat forces when they committed their crimes.

So why did it take the United States so long to step in to stop the fighting that the bickering, partisan, and predictably inept Europeans seemed only able to exacerbate? The answer is American partisan politics that no longer stop at the water’s edge—the Achilles’ heel of the world’s only remaining superpower.

When some Bosnian Serbs revolted in April 1992 against results of a referendum the previous month in which a majority of Bosnian voters opted for independence from the disintegrating former Yugoslavia, the bloody fighting could have been stopped in a matter of days. A large portion of the regular U.S. military forces that had led the winning coalition in the Gulf war only a year earlier were back in their army and air force bases in nearby Germany and Italy, or patrolling in adjacent Mediterranean waters.

But George Bush was running for reelection that year and he calculated that a second foreign military intervention in one term might make him vulnerable to Democratic charges that be was exploiting foreign wars for political purposes. He lost his re-election campaign, and by then a second problem was raging out of control in Somalia where, with no central government, people were starving in the interior because rival warlords were blocking food supplies from being unloaded at the country’s major port and airport in Mogadishu.

Why did it take the United States so long to step in to stop the fighting?

As a lame-duck president, Bush chose to intervene in what looked like the simpler problem in Somalia. When things there turned out to be not so simple after all, U.S. military involvement overseas once again acquired the same bad name it had picked up in Vietnam.

When Bush handed over the presidency to his successor, newly elected U.S. President Bill Clinton withdrew U.S. forces from increasingly chaotic Somalia, and ignored the escalating war in Bosnia. With a full domestic agenda, a spectacularly disorganized White House staff, and little interest in foreign affairs or even in actually governing, Clinton’s attention seemed drawn to Bosnia only sporadically, even after three State Department officials responsible for U.S. policy there resigned, one after another, in disgust.

By the spring of 1995, the Serbs had stepped up their indiscriminate shelling of Sarajevo, overrun the United Nations-protected “safe areas” of Srebrenica and Zepa, killed all the Muslim men from 16 to 60 who fell into their hands in both places, and were closing in on two more isolated “safe areas” in Gorazde in the east and in Bihac' in the west.

Islamic countries announced they no longer would observe the United Nations arms embargo on all of the six republics and two autonomous areas that had constituted former Yugoslavia, but which seemed to be preventing only the legitimate, and landlocked, Bosnian government from obtaining the arms it needed to defend its borders. Britain and France announced, as they had many times before, that if the embargo were lifted, they would withdraw their troops, which provided the backbone of the U.N. peacekeeping forces in Bosnia.

“Lift and Strike”

Nevertheless, both houses of Congress voted, over Clinton’s objections, to drop U.S. observance of the embargo. A number of congressmembers, notably including Republican Senate Majority Leader Bob Dole, advocated instead a policy of “lift and strike,” meaning lift the embargo and strike from the air any Serb forces that tried to take advantage of the U.N. withdrawal before re-armed Bosnian troops were able to defend themselves.

It was this injection of U.S. domestic politics into the issue, plus the reminder to Clinton by his foreign affairs specialists that if the U.S. didn’t take action in 1995, Bosnia surely would become a major issue in the 1996 election year, that seemed finally to rouse the U.S. president from his Bosnia funk.

U.S. diplomats and military officers were launched into shuttle negotiations and, after three of them were killed because Serb forces forced them to take a dangerous back road into Sarajevo, indefatigable Assistant Secretary of State for European Affairs Richard Holbrooke cajoled, conned and cudgeled all parties into the so-far spectacularly successful Dayton agreement.

For a time Dole was reduced to arguing that the Clinton-backed agreement specified such a long delay before the training and re-arming of Bosnian forces was to begin that they would have fewer than six months to prepare to defend themselves after U.S., and presumably most other components of the NATO forces, withdraw.

Now new information has politicized the matter again. The Republicans charge that while Clinton was publicly denouncing their proposals to begin sending Saudi-purchased American weapons to the Bosnian forces, in fact he was turning a blind eye to heavy shipments of such weapons by Iran. Further, the Republicans charge, the U.S. let Croatian leaders, through whose territory the arms had to travel, know that the U.S. had no objection to the arrangement. The Croats, therefore, made their own deal with the Iranians to keep up to one-third of the arms for themselves, and let the rest pass as rapidly as possible on to the Bosnian government forces.

Answering Republican charges that the Democratic administration’s policy circumvented Congress, was hypocritical, and permitted the Islamic Republic of Iran to gain a dangerous foothold in the Balkans, Undersecretary of State for Political Affairs Peter Tarnoff was evasive about who in the Clinton administration had authorized it. Nevertheless, he defended the policy vigorously in testimony before the House International Relations Committee on April 22.

“At that point, especially in eastern Bosnia, the government of Bosnia forces were under intense pressure,” Tarnoff testified. “They were outgunned, they were outmanned, they were ceding territory, and we were very concerned at that moment that a military debacle might well have ensued.”

Tarnoff said at the time the Clinton administration had only three options: to block all arms shipments, thereby further weakening the Bosnian government; to unilaterally lift the embargo, thereby triggering the withdrawal of United Nations forces and “the introduction of U.S. forces” into Bosnia; or to approve foreign arms being funneled through Croatia to the Bosnian government forces.

“That’s why the hard decision was made, but we believed the correct one at the time, to issue instructions to our ambassador basically that he should not have an official position” on the arms transfers, Tarnoff said.

Further congressional hearings undoubtedly will further politicize the issue, with Republicans seeking to turn what may be Clinton’s best claim for a foreign policy success into a case of deception and evasion comparable to the Irangate scandal of the Reagan administration.

In fact the two cases are in no way comparable. In the case of the secret Israeli-brokered sales of U.S. arms to Iran in 1985 and 1986, the U.S. not only undermined the underdog Iraqis, whose forces the U.S. and its Arab allies were supporting, but it also undermined U.S. credibility throughout the Middle East—possibly contributing to Saddam Hussain’s subsequent aggression against Kuwait. In the case of the arms shipments to Bosnian government forces, the only legitimate issue is whether the policy of direct arms shipments advocated by Senator Dole or the policy of clandestine shipments countenanced by President Clinton was the better policy. Either policy was designed to get the arms to the right party, the Muslim-led Bosnian government, in time to enable it to save itself.

It is important in this election year that both Republicans and Democrats concentrate not on what would have been the best course of action to launch U.S. intervention, but on finishing the job successfully in the time that remains. This involves getting promised U.S. and European financial and technical assistance to the Bosnians as soon as possible in order that the recently demobilized soldiers turn their efforts to much-needed reconstruction. It also involves getting the accused war criminals before the United Nations War Crimes Tribunal before the parties in Bosnia trigger renewed fighting by trying to take the law into their own hands. Finally, it involves staying in Bosnia, in force, until national elections are completed late this year and a new popularly elected government has assumed its duties.

To date U.S. forces have been careful not to repeat the mistakes of “mission creep” in Somalia—trying to do too much too soon. It is important for politicians of both parties to remember, however, that the final mistake in Somalia was to pull back U.S. forces so abruptly that the job they had come to do was never completed.