Firm? Clinton, on Bosnia? As it happens, yes. Everyone’s Bosnia policy–as changeable as it may seem, incident to incident–turns on two firm truths. The first is that none of the Western powers has ever had the slightest intention of becoming deeply involved in a Balkan war. The second is that none of them has had the guts to say so. Instead, the politicians have waffled and lied in ways that led Bosnians to hope against hope that help might be on the way. Today’s version of the best and the brightest have said one thing and meant another; they have woven a tangled web of deceit for themselves, and are stuck in it.
Bosnia shows what happens when rational calculations of “the national interest” collide with politics. No Western power wanted to go to war in Yugoslavia because none of them deemed the place of sufficient importance. For the United States, in 1991 and 1992, Yugoslavia was neither a battleground of the waning cold war, nor (unlike Iraq) a country that threatened vital American economic interests. West Europeans, for their part, were disconnected from the Balkans. Yes, Serb nationalists had shown themselves to be brutal murderers, but the Serbs were stuck in the Balkans–comparisons with Nazi Germany seemed facile. In the late 1980s, French tourism to Thailand was bigger than to Yugoslavia. In 1990, just one quarter of 1 percent of all British exports went to Yugoslavia.
Had the United States and the Europeans been willing to conclude that what happened in Yugoslavia was none of their business, the judgment would have been cruel, but explicable. Instead, Bosnia’s fate got mixed up with politics. The Balkan war exploded during an American presidential election in which Clinton wanted to show he was tougher than George Bush (and knew something about foreign affairs), and at a time that Western Europe, negotiating the Maastricht Treaty of European Union, fancied that it could be a dynamic player on the world stage. And so Bosnia became the great powers’ plaything.
In 1992 and 1993, the United States and the Europeans secured the passage of a large stack of United Nations Security Council resolutions. They forever “reaffirm” this, “condemn” that, “authorize force” for sundry purposes. Most–perhaps not quite all–of these resolutions are not worth the paper they were written on. The U.N. forces on the ground, dominated by Britain and France, clung to the fiction that they were neutral “peacekeepers” (but there was no peace to keep). The Americans, for their part, had their own fiction to cling to. They clicked the abacus of national interest and found that there were no circumstances in which American ground troops would be introduced. But they nonetheless pressed for bombing, knowing that those who did have troops on the ground would veto anything really tough.
Through all this time, the web of deceit continued. It still does; witness the fantastic tale of Clinton’s short-lived offer last week to supply American troops for–lovely euphemism–“reconfiguring” the U.N. forces on the ground. Forget, for the moment, that only the Clinton administration could have taken so much political heat for a policy which nobody else wanted and which lasted precisely one day. Think, rather, of how the farce must have played in Bosnia, as desperate people wondered if the cavalry was coming or not. Sometimes deceit is merely that; sometimes it is surpassingly cruel.
It isn’t only the Americans who say one thing and mean another. The Europeans have been just as bad. After their troops were taken hostage, the British (especially) and French, with great bravado and breast-beating, decided to send thousands of new troops to Bosnia. The cavalry at last? Don’t bet on it. Neither the British nor the French have much idea of what to do with their troops, save that they don’t want them in harm’s way. (A poll in Britain’s Daily Mirror last week found an 8-1 majority against military involvement in Bosnia.)
Lies have a distinguished place in diplomatic history. Preparing for Harry Truman’s great 1947 speech on containment of the Soviet Union, Dean Acheson said it was necessary to be “clearer than the truth.” Yet given the catastrophic consequences of the West’s deception. Bosnians might be forgiven were they to seek meaning not from the history books, but from children’s literature. “‘When I use a word,’ said Humpty Dumpty, . . . ‘it means just what i choose it to mean–neither more nor less.’ ‘The question is,’ said Alice, ‘whether you can make words mean so many different things.’ ‘The question is,’ said Humpty Dumpty, ‘which is to he master–that’s all’.” In Sarajevo, they know one answer–not them.
