As U.N. Grapples With Bosnia, World Looks for U.S. Leadership

By Richard H. Curtiss

"Bosnia is the seminal issue of our time."
—CNN correspondent Christiane Amanpour on CBS's "60 Minutes,"May 14, 1995.

"The value of Western diplomacy over the last year has been zero. Diplomacy is a very weak weapon if it is not backed up by the credible threat of force."
—Former U.S. Ambassador to Yugoslavia Warren Zimmermann, quoted in Washington Post, May 14, 1995.

Francis Fukuyama, a former fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, the think tank spun off by the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) which has become an inexhaustible fountain of misconceived ideas, got things backward when he wrote that the end of the Cold War marked "the end of history." At that time he was in the State Department, where Washington Institute fellows go in order to mold their misconceptions into national policy.

(Washington Institute founder Martin Indyk authored the Clinton administration's Middle East policy of "dual containment." Another former Institute fellow, Dennis Ross, is presiding on behalf of the Clinton administration over the Israel-assisted suicide of the Bush administration's Middle East "peace process.")

Fukuyama overlooked the fact that, "with the end of the Soviet Union," America's fractious allies no longer need U.S. protection. Therefore, enlisting them in any mutual effort to make the world a safer and more orderly place has become, in the words of writer Walter Russell Mead, "a lot like herding cats."

In fact, although you can't drive cats in any direction, they will follow if you have something they want. That's how the U.S. and Saudi-led coalition was built in Saudi Arabia to eject Saddam Hussain's occupation army from Kuwait. A new book released this month by U.S. Gen. H. Norman Schwarzkopf's co-commander, Saudi Gen. Prince Khalid Bin Sultan, describes vividly how the coalition dealt with the French, who didn't want their forces to serve under an American commander and didn't want either their aircraft or ground forces to enter Iraq, even though the strategy called for a wide sweep through the indefensible desert wastes of that country to minimize casualties while outflanking the Iraqis in Kuwait. The Syrians made the same objections.

So the two coalition commanders assigned French and Syrian aircraft to targets in Kuwait and put most of the French and Syrian ground forces off to the left flank, giving the Iraqis the impression that at least they were safe on that front. However in the final hours before the attack, virtually all the armored forces that were to launch the attack also were shifted to the left and the main flanking attack was launched from there—with extremely low coalition casualties and dramatically successful results.

In effect the two commanders said, "We're going in to do what has to be done and those who wish can follow." Everyone followed, including the French and Syrians, whose air and ground forces did, after all, enter Iraq. That was leadership, and that's what's been so conspicuously lacking in Bosnia. For example, after a May 7 barrage on the "U.N.-protected" city of Sarajevo culminated in the killing of 11 people by a Serb mortar, the U.N. commander (since January) in Bosnia, British Lt. Gen. Rupert Smith, called for a NATO airstrike against the Serbs. The planes, based in northern Italy, already were airborne when Yasushi Akashi, the U.N. civilian in charge of U.N. operations in Bosnia, countermanded the order from Zagreb and the planes returned to their bases even as the last of the bodies were arriving at the morgue, and the last bleeding, moaning patients were being carried into hospitals. Asked what he thought of Akashi's action, the U.N. military chief for all of former Yugoslavia, a French general, said Akashi had "good reasons."

Ironically, at that same time, French U.N. troops were told they could fire back at anyone who fired at them. This implies that it's okay for foot soldiers to shoot back when they are outgunned, but not okay for aircraft to get into a fight when they have the edge. Like most French strategy to date in Bosnia, it seemed to be a gesture designed to placate members of the French public who are tired of Serbs targeting French peacekeepers, but not designed to make the Serbs stop.

Akashi's "good reasons" were that an airstrike might interfere with ongoing political negotiations over Croatia. But Akashi and his predecessors have been engaged in such negotiations since May 1992, when the first U.N. forces arrived to deal with Serb attacks a month after Bosnia declared its independence from former Yugoslavia and was recognized by the United Nations (and by the U.S.).

In that time the Serbs with whom Akashi has been negotiating, Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic in Belgrade and Bosnian Serb leaders Radovan Karadzic and Ratko Mladic, all have been described as war criminals by American officials and a case now is being built against Karadzic and Mladic by the U.N. war crimes commission. The Bosnian Serbs also have have occupied 70 percent of Bosnia, although the 1992 population was 44 percent Muslim, 31 percent Serb and 17 percent Croat. They also still are receiving fuel, arms and ammunition from Milosevic's Yugoslavia, despite his pledge to cut off such shipments.

U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. Madeleine Albright, who would take a much firmer stand on Bosnia if she were allowed to by Secretary of State Warren Christopher, supported the airstrikes and deplored the show of U.N. indecision. At the same time U.N. Secretary-General Boutros Boutros-Ghali called for a "complete review" of the disastrous U.N. mission and "what the international community wants the U.N. to do there."

There must be nothing more difficult than being U.N. secretary-general with 185 bosses and no treasury or troops of his own. But a good place to start his review might be with Mr. Akashi. From peace negotiator Lord David Owen through former U.N. forces in Bosnia commander Lt. Gen. Michael Rose, no one has been more pusillanimous in Bosnia than the British. So why, when a British commander on the spot called for an airstrike on the Serbs shelling "U.N.-protected" Sarajevo, did the U.N. civilian official on the spot countermand him? Perhaps most U.N. members don't know what they want the U.N. to do in Bosnia, but Akashi's incredible negativism clearly is what they don't want.

In fact, what the Muslims, Croats and Serbs of the still-multisectarian state of Bosnia want is a halt to the slaughter. What Boutros-Ghali wants is direction on how to go about halting the slaughter. What the ever-fractious European NATO countries want is leadership to halt the slaughter. What the non-European countries, particularly the Muslim countries who have contributed troops to the U.N. effort, want is military leadership to halt the slaughter. What the Republicans and Democrats in the Senate, and the State Department officials courageous enough to resign and the State Department officials who have stayed put want is political and military leadership to halt the slaughter.

However, that political and military leadership the whole world desperately wants can only by provided by Bill Clinton, president of the world's only remaining superpower, who's still trying to herd cats. Uncomfortable, ill-informed and basically uninterested in foreign affairs, he isn't going to provide any kind of leadership unless his foreign affairs advisers tell him what he needs to do. Fat chance!

White House National Security Adviser Anthony Lake is that slightly disheveled and out-of-focus figure you see lurking on the margins when the president is posing with foreign leaders, just in case his boss forgets the other guy's name. An aide, not an adviser. Assistant Secretary for European Affairs Richard Holbrooke zig zags at full speed from one position to another without following a chart or leaving a wake. Strobe Talbott subordinates all else to keeping the volatile Russians pacified while the human species-threatening inventories of U.S. and Russian nuclear warheads gradually are reduced. That leaves only Warren Christopher. But he apparently is so fatigued from 11 futile "Middle East peacemaking" trips to Israel and its neighbors, in addition to traveling with the president, that he hasn't had time to fill in Clinton (or perhaps learn himself) how vital it is for world stability for the U.S. to supply the leadership in the Balkans that no one else can.

U.S. national interests are, indeed, deeply involved. First, it's in the U.S. interest to halt, not merely contain, the smouldering war in Bosnia before it erupts into a Balkan-wide conflagration. It's also in the U.S. interest to have a U.N. that works, not one whose image already is deeply eroded by extravagance, pomposity, and ineffectiveness, with no offseting image of accomplishment.

Finally, as the Muslim fifth of humanity watches largely Muslim Palestine and largely Muslim Bosnia being destroyed by U.S. active complicity in the first case and benign neglect in the second, it is reaching very negative conclusions. Such conclusions are going to make doing business extremely difficult, even precarious, for Americans in that strategic, energy-rich and heavily populated Islamic swath running across much of the inhabited world from Morocco to Indonesia. Unlike the Russians and some of the former colonial powers, the U.S. has no historic enemies or conflicts of interests there. If we continue in our present ways, however, we will.

Two years ago, in our June 1993 issue, we predicted that, sooner or later, "the Yanks, at their own pace, probably are coming" to Bosnia. By now, many already are there at great personal risk. We think it's important that the next to arrive be at the controls of aircraft able to put the Serb snipers and gunners who prey on peacekeepers and civilians, and those who provide the logistical support to those human vultures, out of commission.

The Christian Science Monitor, perhaps the only remaining major daily newspaper in the United States still motivated by public morality, American national interest and, yes, a Christian conscience, eloquently described contemporary Bosnia in a May 12 editorial. With permission, it is quoted in full below.

Richard H. Curtiss is the executive editor of the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs.