The official unraveling of what had once been Yugoslavia began in late 1990, and every single participant in the drama, from all the different sides, seemed to be playing an assigned role. In Slovenia, Peter Jambrek’s DEMOS party, as he had predicted to Larry Eagleburger, won the election and a referendum in favor of independence in December 1990, and he announced plans to secede from Yugoslavia in late June 1991. The Croats immediately declared that they would follow the Slovenians.
So it began. The willingness of Slovenia and Croatia to leave the federation became, of course, the rationale for Milosevic to move against them—a brief little ten-day military flurry at the border against the Slovenians soon followed. The Serbs got a bloody nose, but that was of little consequence to Milosevic. Slovenia did not interest him greatly; there were not many Serbs there. Most assuredly it was not sacred ground. But the Serbs did covet a vast part of eastern and central Croatia called the Krajina, an area that resembled a snake about to coil and strike. Like much of the land in Yugoslavia, it was disputed terrain with a considerable number of longtime Serb residents, and Milosevic wanted it to be part of his Greater Serbia, which would also give him a chance to wrap his arms and his land around a region of the old Yugoslavia called Bosnia.
Skirmishes between Serb forces and local Croatian military units began to break out in the summer of 1991, and Serbs who had long lived in Croatia began to flee as the tensions rose and news of fighting in other towns spread. That became an even more powerful excuse for the Serbs to use the Yugoslav National Army (JNA) to attack that part of Croatia. The Serbs had from the very beginning been the dominant military force in the country. In the last few years, Milosevic had virtually turned the JNA, the third or fourth largest in Europe, depending on how you counted reservists, into a de facto Serbian army, moving out officers of other nationalities and promoting not just Serbs, but Serb officers who were in accord with his political ambitions.
The Croatians were poorly prepared for this opening phase of what would be a prolonged civil war (it would last episodically for four years), and the early Serb victories came quite easily. By the fall of 1991 the Serbs had two Croatian cities under siege, Vukovar in eastern Croatia, and Dubrovnik, the beautiful city on the Adriatic, much admired not only by the Yugoslav people, but by the many Europeans who had gone there on vacation because Yugoslavia, an attractive land with attractive people and an attractive soft currency, was a much cheaper package tour than, say, Italy. It was the brutal siege of Dubrovnik, the destruction of a city of historic reknown, that first brought the growing violence in Yugoslavia to the attention of the West.
As these early events unfolded, and as two parts of what had been a once-favored nation fought with each other, Washington essentially stood on the sidelines. The Bush administration was slow to act in Yugoslavia for two prime reasons. The first and more obvious was the ghosts of Vietnam, the immense resistance of the Pentagon to direct military involvement, the great fear of being sucked into a Balkan quagmire. As Larry Eagleburger, who was as important as any other high-level official in the decision-making—or the non-decision-making—of that time, later said, “When I thought of what might happen if we intervened, what I always feared was Vietnam—the tar baby. Something that started out small but kept growing.”1 But that was hardly the only reason, especially among the top civilian officials. George Bush, James Baker, the secretary of state, and to some degree Brent Scowcroft, the national security adviser, among others, had their own reasons for not wanting to get militarily involved on behalf of a breakaway part of a once sovereign nation. Not only were they exhausted from the complicated job of putting together the Gulf War alliance and overseeing the end of the communist empire in Eastern Europe, but the importance of dealing with Russia was constantly on their minds.
Thus a fascinating critical issue, which overshadowed the violence in Yugoslavia, came from a third country—not what was good for the people of Yugoslavia, but what was good for Mikhail Gorbachev and American-Soviet relations. Gorbachev was attempting to navigate his way through the difficult—indeed treacherous—period that came with the collapse of a once great empire. The stakes in his success as far as American policy makers were concerned were immense. That he wanted to keep Russia communist did not bother Washington at first, because the Russia that was evolving was essentially a defanged one. If Gorbachev was successful, it would mean nothing less than the end of a rival superpower and an entire forty-year era of terrifying nuclear tensions.
That consideration, therefore, dwarfed all other foreign policy issues. Washington would watch, with its fingers crossed, as Gorbachev tried to morph the Soviet Union into a new and somewhat more democratic incarnation, and above all a smaller, less adversarial one. It was the trickiest job imaginable, attempting to modernize and, indeed, even democratize an awesome, bulky, incompetent communist state that had never really worked—other than in its military and secret police operations. But the question for the Bush administration from the start had been, how far could Gorbachev go? What, in the opinion of his potentially powerful domestic enemies in Moscow, constituted Russian soil, and what parts of the old Soviet empire could be let go without paying too high a political price? What would Moscow do, for example, about Ukraine, a part of the Soviet Union and perhaps even of Russia that nonetheless thought of itself as historically independent? It was, Gorbachev was learning, a lot easier to build an empire than to hold one together. In addition, the pace of change tended inevitably to accelerate toward warp speed as different parts of the empire, their own independence long suppressed, looked around, saw changes elsewhere, and began to sense weakness in Moscow and demand their own freedom.
At a time when the first sure signs of the Yugoslav breakup became clear, and when American influence there might have been at its greatest, we were wedded to Gorbachev. The Soviet Union, and then eventually Russia, as far as Bush and the men around him were concerned, was like a baby in an oxygen tent, entering its new life tentatively and awkwardly. As that process took place, Yugoslavia was very much a peripheral issue in Washington. Already there were signs of the immense benefits to be derived from the change in Russian-American relations. Russia had been an invaluable ally in the Gulf War, with Gorbachev greatly angering his own military people, who were closely wedded to Saddam Hussein (Milosevic and much of the JNA were also pro-Saddam, and indeed the JNA flagrantly violated the United Nations arms embargo on Iraq). Moreover, with Gorbachev and Eduard Shevardnadze’s uneasy acceptance, Germany was on its way not merely to unification, but unification within NATO, a geopolitical coup unimaginable a few years earlier.
Thus, in the eyes of the top Bush people, Gorbachev’s political problems greatly outranked whatever signals were coming from Yugoslavia. Gorbachev feared the accelerating potential for breakaway provinces in his empire and the rage it would stir up among his more jingoistic enemies on the domestic right and in the military. That, too, had repercussions in our dealings with Yugoslavia. For America could not appear to back a breakaway province in Yugoslavia without setting a dangerous precedent for a Soviet Union and Russia that might also splinter apart. If the United States tolerated the birth of Croatia and Slovenia and recognized them, then we might have to recognize Ukraine as a newly incarnated nation and God only knew how many other parts of what had been the Soviet Union now yearning for their independence. They would surely point to our acquiescence—or sponsorship—of new nations in the Balkans. That might trigger uprisings against our new and suddenly most important friend. Therefore, at a time when our leverage was at a maximum in the Balkans, we tended to disregard reports that not only suggested the inevitability of a Balkan breakup, but perhaps its desirability if it was done under mandated international supervision. Our policy was not just, as some critics later decided, Serbo-centric, driven by a traditional diplomatic preference for Serbs rather than Croatians, Slovenians, or Muslims, and a belief that the real Yugoslavia was Serbian. It was, at that moment, Gorba-centric.
Then there were the military complexities that worked against any kind of involvement. By the fall of 1991, Croatia and Serbia were at war, with the Serbs the primary aggressors. That had been obvious during the prolonged shelling of Dubrovnik and Vukovar. The Serbs had attacked Dubrovnik with land-based artillery and with the guns aboard some of their naval vessels. They were, given the nature of the conflict, far better armed than the Croats but extremely naked to any enemy with first-rate technology, such as American or NATO forces. American retaliation, either by jet fighters and bombers or by ships from the Sixth Fleet, would have been a piece of cake. They could have taken out the Serb batteries in a few minutes and sunk any number of Yugoslav ships. The air and sea belonged, if we so wanted it, to NATO and the Americans.
To some civilians in State, ahead of the existing curve in sensing how murderous the intentions in Belgrade were and how much more murderous they might become unless we checked them soon, the equation was immensely tempting. They thought that Serb forces were historically overrated. After all, relatively weak Slovenian forces, made up primarily of a few well-armed policemen, had bashed the Serbs when Milosevic had made his early move on Slovenia. In Croatia the Serb victories had come only when they used vastly superior firepower against underarmed local militia; when contested by real opposition, they had performed with only the most marginal success.
Yet there was little in the way of a constituency, either in or outside the government, for taking military action against the Serbs. The State Department tended to be split, along hierarchical lines. At the lower and middle levels, younger people, less steeped in Cold War orthodoxies and reacting to the events on the ground, were pushing for some kind of action. At the upper levels, people were reacting to policy, to the political signals coming down from the administration and men like Eagleburger. Those signals were simple enough to read: minimize what was happening in Yugoslavia. More important things were on the menu, a presidential election was coming up, and the administration was in no way anxious to be drawn into military action in the Balkans. The Balkans, the administration line went, constituted a problem that the European nations were going to handle.
The American military was also wary of any commitment to Yugoslavia. General Colin Powell, the head of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and other senior people in the military saw Yugoslavia as a potential nightmare. They were confident of the initial success of any early American military moves. But since war tends to be a disorderly business that rarely follows a predictable schedule, they worried what would happen next. A quick American sea and air strike might prove effective against the guns shelling Dubrovnik, Powell and others in the Pentagon believed, but it would not leave the Serbs without the capacity to strike elsewhere, particularly at remote targets deep in the interior that would be a logistical horror for the West. A direct confrontation with the Serb-dominated Yugoslav National Army would be no problem. The American army, fresh from its stunning triumph in the Gulf War against the Iraqi army, was at a high point in its morale and confidence. The new high-technology weaponry had been an exceptional success in that war, and the military leadership—from the top right down to the NCO level—had demonstrated that the army had recovered from the troubled days of the Vietnam era. The people who were most enthusiastic about military intervention in Yugoslavia wanted to use American airpower against the Serbs to dissuade them from their aggressive path. But what bothered the American military planners was the what-if factor, a factor much neglected by the Vietnam planners.
What-if in this case meant what would happen if the Serbs suffered heavy initial casualties from our high-tech weaponry, but instead of folding their hand and bowing to pressure, acted like the proud warrior nation they were long reputed to be, broke their forces down into smaller guerrilla-like units, and used the harsh terrain to their advantage and continued to attack their neighbors? What if we then sent in ground troops and the Serbs assaulted the long, extremely vulnerable American lines of supply and communication? What if there were American casualties, perhaps not many, but enough to get the war on television: first the images of American soldiers where they had just been killed (or captured), and then images from some American small town of their funerals, accompanied by an interview with a grieving and angry parent who said he did not know why his son had been sent to die in so foreign a place?
What sometimes seemed easy on paper, the use of awesome American technology against smaller, poorly armed forces, was not so easy in reality when the smaller, poorer forces had the option of appearing and disappearing as they saw fit. Colin Powell had learned that in two painful tours of Vietnam, which was the defining experience of his life and where he had dealt on the ground with the ferocious military forces the civilians and his military superiors had so casually underestimated. That was a war that had taken place before the coming of CNN, the all-day news network that would immediately highlight—to be followed by the other networks—any American deaths and create ever greater doubt about American purpose. What some people in State saw as pieces of cake were never pieces of cake to Powell and the men around him, all of whom had gone through the same haunting experience in Vietnam. They had a visceral sense that the technology of modern communications had more than kept up with the technology of modern armaments and had made the sustaining of war and the taking of casualties in distant places far harder for civilian politicians in ways that they discovered only too late. A number of ratios had changed in modern warfare, especially in wars in distant lands. Not the least of these changes was the coming of instantaneous communications, which gave politicians something they did not always comprehend at first, a ticking clock, transforming a military equation into a more political one in which a critical factor would be our innate national impatience that might, eventually, undercut the military. Powell and others in the Pentagon believed that if we got entangled with the Serbs in some way, it might become like Vietnam, a distant, peripheral war for our people and politicians, but an all-encompassing blood war of survival for the Serb people and politicians. Powell did not see us being either more passionate or more patient about any conflict in Serbia than the Serbs were.
Years later some of the young men who had served at the median level in State during the Bush years, as well as some of the civilians who were part of the top level in the Clinton administration, would judge Powell and the military quite critically in this period, claiming that he had been wrong and had overestimated the potential for Serb resistance. But in truth, in 1991 and 1992 and even 1993, when these decisions were being made, no one knew if he was wrong or not. An equally large truth was that the civilian teams under Bush and Clinton never gave Powell the most important requisite of all for a green light: the belief that acting militarily in Yugoslavia was a high priority for American national security and that it was worth the price of implementation if the consequences, as often happened in cases of military intervention, turned out to be more severe than imagined. Under Bush, and again under Clinton, when the top civilians asked what it might cost to intervene militarily, Powell would show his lack of enthusiasm by giving them a high estimate, and they would quickly back off. The figure never went under two hundred thousand troops.
Nothing reflected the difficulty of a potential American military move more than did dealing with two of the cities that had first begun to penetrate Western consciousness, Dubrovnik and Vukovar. Dubrovnik, where the Serb assault had started in October 1991, was a tempting target and would have been easy for the West to defend. A beautiful city, the jewel of the Adriatic, it was under siege from Serb gun positions that would not have been hard to nail. But well beyond Dubrovnik, far removed from Western journalistic eyes, a much uglier assault was taking place upon Vukovar, a mining city in eastern Croatia some 180 tortuous miles inland, a place that was about as logistically difficult to reach as any officer back in the Pentagon could imagine. The siege of Vukovar, which was significantly harsher and crueler than that of Dubrovnik, had begun in mid-September. In terms of Serb atrocities, Vukovar was to be far worse than Dubrovnik and would stand as one of the early examples of what became known as ethnic cleansing.
Outwardly it was a small, quiet city on the Danube whose classic baroque architecture might, in a more peaceful time, have fascinated the few Western tourists who were hardy enough to make their way that deep into Yugoslavia. It appeared to be of little strategic importance to anyone in the world, and yet it was a good deal closer to Belgrade than Zagreb, the capital of Croatia, a geographical fact that placed it in jeopardy. Milosevic had a large army at his disposal, and Franjo Tudjman of Croatia did not, and so the Serbs pounded the city with artillery. Why they brutalized it so badly no one was ever quite sure, though some, knowledgeable about Milosevic, thought it was because the different ethnic groups had lived there together in rather easy accord, not unlike Sarajevo in Bosnia, a place where the old Yugoslavia had worked surprisingly well, and where the local Serbs had not rallied with adequate enthusiasm to his nationalistic ambitions. Punish Vukovar, Milosevic did. The siege of the city was one of the ugliest battles of the early days of the Balkan war, a battle that was not really a battle, since only one side had weapons. The Serbs surrounded it with heavy artillery pieces and simply hammered away for several months. By the time the siege was over in mid-November, Vukovar looked like one of those cities in eastern Germany that had had the misfortune to be in the way of the advancing Red Army during the final days of World War II. Its fine old buildings had been reduced to rubble. Like a growing number of towns in Croatia and many, many more to come in Bosnia, Vukovar had been the site of a massacre. When the Serb soldiers entered the city, they swept into the local hospital and executed all the people they found there, civilian as well as military patients. When Vukovar surrendered, the Serbs invited all the foreign journalists, long barred from the area, to lunch, roasted some pigs for them, then handed out—the ultimate insult—postcards of the old Vukovar.2
If one thing had changed at the highest levels of the Washington power structure, Larry Eagleburger noted years later, it was how both the State Department and the Pentagon differed some two decades after Vietnam. In the old days, Eagleburger believed, the Pentagon had tended to be gung ho about military involvement and brought a can-do attitude to all its endeavors, while State tended to be cautious. Vietnam had changed that—the army had gone in there and paid a high price both in blood and in its psyche. Now the roles were reversed. State had a number of activists among its younger officials, many of whom had come along after the Vietnam experience, and at the Pentagon most of the senior people were extremely cautious. There the memory of Vietnam was a little longer, because almost all of the top army people, unlike those at State, had served directly in that war and the experience had been a bitter one in almost all instances. The Pentagon had an all too personal understanding of what happens, first, when the architects of an interventionist policy underestimate the other side, and second, when so many of those in the political process who were its architects soon orphan their own handiwork and go on to other jobs, leaving the military to deal with a war that no one could get right.
The American military, therefore, remained dubious about military intervention in the Balkans, and that, in turn, meant that the Serbs became increasingly audacious. It was the start of what would become a well-known Milosevic (and Milosevic-proxy) dynamic: a quick military probe to see if there was any Western resistance, and if none, then an even more brazen assault.
Colin Powell and most of the top people in the Pentagon were not only unalterably opposed to any seemingly quick and easy flexing of American military might, a flash of airpower or sea power in places where it was convenient, they were also nervous about assuming any simple humanitarian role that might be poorly thought out, too open-ended, and might somehow draw the country into an unwanted combat commitment: Serbs attacking a small group of American troops ferrying refugees or supplies to and from a city under siege, the Americans suffering casualties, some Americans firing back, the Serbs reinforcing, the conflict escalating on its own, with what the Pentagon assumed would be unsympathetic coverage generated by television journalists both on location and back home. An interventionist policy might look easy, but the best-case scenario, as often happened in military matters, might turn into a worst-case scenario. If that happened, Powell and others like him believed, the army would be left holding the bag, while many of the other people in the bureaucracy would deftly distance themselves from the policy, something that had happened when Vietnam turned into a disaster.
To the military, therefore, the two cities that had come to the fore early on were always entwined: Dubrovnik would be easy to handle, the logistics made to order for the West, but Vukovar would be a military nightmare. As the Serb assault on the two Croatian positions began, the American commander in Europe, General Jack Galvin, an army four-star, was on the phone with Powell every day. Could you protect Dubrovnik? was Powell’s first question. Easily, Galvin would say. Silencing the Serb batteries would be a relatively simple task. Could you protect Vukovar easily? Not very easily—the price would go up. Then there was the question: Could you protect Dubrovnik, the easy one, and walk the hard one, Vukovar? That was a very different question. Galvin, stationed in Brussels and distant from the Washington-insider rumor machinery, sensed that some civilians were pushing hard for an attack on the Serbs at Dubrovnik—just set up seaborne counterbatteries to hit the Serbs, or use air force muscle or run ships in from the Sixth Fleet to clear out the Yugoslav navy.
But the proponents of action, Galvin felt, never took into account the steps left open to the Serbs in the more distant reaches of the country. Like Powell, he believed, as he would later say, that you could not just put your toe in. Galvin was a highly decorated veteran of Vietnam, thoughtful, judicious, much admired by almost everyone who dealt with him, a man both tempered and strengthened by Vietnam, and he agreed that if you put in your toe at Dubrovnik, the foot would inevitably follow, and if the foot was in, the rest of the body might also be pulled in. If we went in, who was with us? How far would our allies go? Where was the Congress and where would the media be?
In Galvin’s mind, doing Dubrovnik demanded doing Vukovar as well. But if that happened, the Serbs might readily take the initiative in other distant places. They would have at least as many options as we did. Galvin had a clear understanding of the ambivalence in Washington about intervention in Yugoslavia because Powell, who read Washington better than any other senior military figure in years, would pass the word on to Brussels. It was, thought Galvin, absolutely fascinating to get a sense of the byplay. What made Powell so good, in Galvin’s opinion, was that he had a feel for what was real in Washington and what existed only on the surface. There was a pseudopolicy driven by today’s headlines and film clips, and the spin that an extremely agile spokesman could put on the administration’s view of these events, as opposed to long-term policy goals that emanated from deep within the administration and the bureaucracy—Washington’s own unspoken but important truths. Powell knew when the rhetoric was all posture and when it represented something real. He knew when a proposed policy was a kind of trial balloon, even an unconscious use of a trial balloon, something inflated in the uncomfortable vacuum of an absent policy, and when, in contrast, it reflected well-considered policy agreed upon by most of the decision-making apparatus. Powell seemed to symbolize a Pentagon that was adamant against any interventions. Only one member of the Joint Chiefs dissented from him, General Merrill (Tony) McPeak, the air force chief of staff, but his dissent was marginalized because Powell was so dominating a figure at the JCS resulting from his unique post-Vietnam personal stature, enhanced as it was by the Gulf War victory, his remarkable skill in dealing with all facets of the Washington political world as well as the media, and because his bitter feelings about the careless civilian decision-making in Vietnam were shared by almost all the other members of the JCS. McPeak alone thought we could use air power effectively, if not decisively, to limit what the Serbs were doing in Bosnia.
McPeak had been a last-minute addition to the JCS on the eve of the Gulf War, when the then incumbent, General Mike Dugan, had held what was considered to be an intemperate press conference in Riyadh that offended both the civilians and the brass back in the Pentagon in multiple ways, most notably his statement that the American people would support this war until the body bags began to come home. Dick Cheney had fired Dugan, and Powell had chosen McPeak as his successor. In comparison with his peers on the JCS, McPeak was very much a Bosnian activist. America was a great power, standing well above all the other military powers in the world, he believed, and if you were a great power, then on occasion you had to use your power. Certain crises—and to his mind the brutality in Bosnia had turned that crisis into a small-scale Holocaust—demanded action. If America did not act with its unique military dominance in a place like that, then what other country would, and on what occasion? he wondered. McPeak did not necessarily believe that airpower alone could do it, but he thought the skilled use of contemporary airpower might play an important role and put the price of Balkan imperialism up much higher for the Serbs. We could easily take out their artillery positions and headquarters in Bosnia, disrupt their lines of communication, take out a number of bridges and thereby limit their ease of entry into the country, and hit their weapons and ammunition storage sites. At the very least, we could even out the battlefield for the opposing indigenous forces and quite likely compel peace negotiations.
McPeak also believed that the air force had come into its own during the Gulf War, and that for the first time in its history, it was a force unto itself with its own munitions capability, no longer dependent upon munitions designed by other services. In World War I, he liked to muse, it had been so bad that the early bombing runs were made by pilots dropping previously unexploded, dud artillery shells over the side of their planes in order not to waste any good ammunition. That pretty well summed up the service’s past, he thought. McPeak realized that all his peers on the JCS—as well as members of the Joint Staff who were going over to the Hill to testify—were saying that airpower used alone was a bad idea, that traditional pre–Desert Storm doctrine still held. But he disagreed. He thought that confining the use of military force only to those situations where America’s strategic interests were directly threatened was far too limiting for a great power, almost handcuffing the top civilians and the military if carried to its logical extreme. It also excused us from taking any responsibility in what seemed to him to be the most likely kind of crisis now facing America—the implosion of countries in the post–Cold War era. A great power, he believed, had to be prepared to act in more ambiguous circumstances.
McPeak was very admiring of Powell, who was a neighbor and personal friend and had appointed him to his chair. He thought Powell was, in his own words, the most effective public servant he had ever dealt with in or out of uniform. But there was one difference between McPeak and many of the senior army officers he knew. McPeak believed that he and others in the air force had been less damaged by Vietnam than the army. Certainly, he and his peers who had flown there (he had flown more than one hundred sorties over Laos and North Vietnam) had been frustrated by what they felt were appalling rules of engagement, and they had often taken fire from places along the Ho Chi Minh Trail that were outside the zone of returnable fire. But the burden of combat for the air force had been carried by an elite officer corps. There had been no widespread smoking of dope or fragging of officers as he believed there had been in the army. Morale had never deteriorated within his service. They had lost men and overcome bitter frustrations, but somehow it had not gone as deep or as corrosively into the bloodstream of the air force as it had into the army, he thought. Many of the army people, he felt, had returned from the war deeply hurt, almost emotionally wounded, as if there were an element of personal humiliation in what had happened that greatly affected the army’s view of succeeding crises. If the president wanted to do something in a place like Bosnia where war crimes were taking place, McPeak had come to believe, then he had a right to try. But among the army people, particularly those involved in Vietnam, he sensed a need to talk him out of it.
McPeak made his dissent within the Pentagon starting in 1992. Both his bosses in the Bush years, Cheney and Powell, were against using airpower, and in the early Clinton years, Powell remained McPeak’s boss. He did not go public with his doubts. It was not in his mind an issue where you threw yourself down on your sword. No one criticized him for his opinions. The general view of his dissent was that of senior army people, who thought he was speaking for the air force, and the air force had always overestimated its military muscle, in World War II, Korea, and Vietnam; and because McPeak was an air force man, he had an institutional justification for pushing airpower. He, in turn, thought privately that the other Joint Chiefs had an institutional bias against using airpower as the sole or at least the primary weapon. When McPeak made the arguments on behalf of what airpower had done in the Gulf War, discussing the amazing accuracy of the bombing runs—an accuracy that two years later was even more precise—they had all argued back that because Iraq was a desert, the targets had been easy; they virtually stuck out, asking to be hit. He could not persuade them that the weaponry would in most circumstances be just as accurate in the Balkans.
When the issue came up of whether we could do anything in Bosnia, McPeak said simply, yes, we could do something. We could use airpower and make things difficult for the Serbs, make them pay a high price for their incursions into Croatia and Bosnia. But his colleagues argued that airpower would not be decisive because the terrain was so difficult and the weather would be so much worse. They also argued that some risk would be attached. Planes might be lost, and CNN or some other network would seize on any fatalities. To that there was no counterargument. McPeak’s dissent was never angry or especially heated, but he made no progress and picked up no other votes. Though he never went public, it became known that he was making the air-power-alone argument, and he was on occasion described in the media as the mad bomber. He understood the equation was stacked against him. “I was on the short end of a lot of five-to-one votes,” he said later. Powell, he decided, simply had no intention of intervening in Bosnia. Powell did not like the lay of the land in either Yugoslavia or Washington. McPeak thought Powell’s own description of himself as a reluctant warrior was a healthy one; warriors at that level should be reluctant. But McPeak also felt that the world had changed and that sooner or later the military would have to figure out how to use the forces they were being paid so much for—a ticket of $275 billion a year in the budget—in smaller wars, and that the current doctrine was simply too rigid.
Powell apparently believed that an air campaign in the Balkans might turn out to be unending and we would get bogged down. Again McPeak did not agree. He thought we could be effective with airpower at a relatively low cost and in a relatively short time. In this continuing debate, the weapons were new but the arguments were old. The other services distrusted the confidence of the air force men about what they could do. Powell, like many army men who had fought in Vietnam, was particularly distrustful. Or as he said after one meeting in which a civilian had extolled airpower as a dominating instrument for stopping Slobodan Milosevic, “When I hear someone tell me what airpower can do, I head for the bunker.” At this time no one was giving Powell a sense of anything approaching a consensus in Washington for serious military action against Yugoslavia. One reason he had always put the number of troops needed to do the job so high—over two hundred thousand—was not necessarily that he felt it would take many. It was a test for the civilians: How much do you really want this, how high a price are you willing to pay? Are you willing to cover worst-case-scenario possibilities? It was as if he were asking how much do you love me, and the troop figure were a symbol of how much love the civilians really had to provide.
No one in the Bush administration at a high level was eager for any kind of commitment like that. Yet one of the many ironies of what was taking place in the Balkans was that the Bush administration, unlike the Clinton administration, which succeeded it, was in no way short of people seemingly knowledgeable about Yugoslavia. Both Brent Scowcroft, the national security adviser, and Larry Eagleburger had served there, Eagleburger for eight years, Scowcroft as a military attaché for one tour. They were to some degree well-informed and knew a good deal about the nation that had once existed, if not of the polyglot society that was now erupting into armed conflict. In fact, Eagleburger noted years later, one of the principal criticisms leveled at both of them by those younger and more proactive was that they knew too much about Yugoslavia and were therefore too fearful of what the Serbs might do if we responded militarily. Perhaps, Eagleburger added, there was some truth in that criticism.3
Both Eagleburger and Scowcroft had some limited sense of the violence that might take place, one ethnic faction against another. They were aware of the dangers inherent in any military commitment there, and of the harsh quality of the terrain. They knew the hatreds that would drive the violence, Serb against Muslim, Croat against Serb, Muslim against both, were historic and had existed for hundreds and hundreds of years. “A very tough, nasty neighborhood,” Scowcroft would say in private. Eagleburger, in particular, found himself deeply ambivalent about events in Yugoslavia. He hated not just the dissolution of a country he had loved, but also the ferocity on the part of those who had once been his friends. He had assumed that there would be some level of violence, as Serb struck against Croat and vice versa, and as one or the other moved against the Bosnians. But he had expected a more traditional kind of violence, the kind that took place on the battlefield, and where eventually some sort of settlement could be reached because the respective parties had exhausted themselves militarily. He was aware that the two people above him, George Bush and James Baker, for a variety of reasons, wanted to make no additional military commitment, not immediately after the Gulf War, and that the Pentagon might be the most skittish and conservative of all. It was his job, however, to defend the administration’s inaction, and he was fond of quoting Bismarck on the Balkans, that they were not worth the life of a single Pomeranian grenadier; and Eagleburger would sometimes add that nothing could be done until the various parties to this historical hatred had killed each other off in sufficient numbers.
Scowcroft, who met with Bush every day and often several times a day—there had probably never been a national security adviser so close to a president and so tuned in to him—thought the breakup of Yugoslavia posed a dreadful dilemma for the president. Scowcroft was at once wary of the terrain and wary of being pulled into the middle of so ancient a struggle, but he also had a sense that something terrible was happening. Torn in two directions, he found himself pondering the use of force more seriously in the summer of 1992 as the worst atrocities in Bosnia became known. Though he was originally an air force man, he was quite dubious that airpower alone could end the violence. If we intervened with airpower and it didn’t work, what then? What would the next step be? Without answers to those questions Scowcroft found his own voice muted.
In the last year of the Bush presidency, a time of ever crueler events in Yugoslavia, of ever more barbarous Serbian acts inflicted upon its former partners in Croatia and particularly upon Bosnian Muslims, Scowcroft had to bring the latest news from the Balkans to the president and discuss it with him. It was important, Scowcroft believed, to remember the context of that moment. The Americans had just finished up the largely successful Gulf War, but it had been an exhausting, complicated political process, putting together and then holding together the alliance and the immense force necessary, steering the package through the Senate, getting and keeping the Pentagon on board, and making sure that the Israelis, in their anger over Scud missiles, did not go off on their own and break up the fragility of the new alliance. Scowcroft knew it had been an immensely draining experience for Bush. He also knew that no president wanted to go to war—on any sizable scale—twice in one term.
When Scowcroft briefed the president, he always felt Bush’s sense of distance on this issue. The president would seem puzzled about the complexity of the Balkans, asking again and again which side was which, who were the Bosnians, who were the Bosnian Serbs, who were the Bosnian Muslims, who were the Kosovars, and who were the Croats and the Slovenians. To Bush it was obviously an odd country, one where the forces that divided people were so much more powerful than the ones that united them. It clearly confused him, all these disparate places, strange names, and different ethnic groups who were supposed to be one country but clearly were not—Bosnian Serbs, Bosnian Muslims, Albanians, Macedonians, Montenegrans.
There was a ritual to their briefings. Bush would be reading the foreign intelligence reports on Yugoslavia, look up, and ask Scowcroft, “Now, tell me again what this is all about.” Then Scowcroft would go through the details of the conflict, describing the different parties involved, why they hated each other, how deep these hatreds were, who was a threat to whom, and who had inflicted the latest outrage on which group. The more Scowcroft talked, the more the shadow of perplexity seemed to come over Bush’s face. It was clear, Scowcroft thought, watching the president struggle with the complicated ethnic rivalries that were driving the conflict, that if Bush himself could barely understand the differences and the issues, how could ordinary Americans understand them? How then could Bush justify sending their sons and daughters to a place so far away, with towns whose names were so difficult to pronounce, for a cause that was so perplexing even to him? By contrast, the challenge in the Gulf War had seemed infinitely simpler. One country had invaded another. A border had been crossed. The balance of power in the Middle East might change if the Iraqis had access to Kuwaiti oil and could thereby continue to arm themselves at ever more excessive levels, thereby intimidating their neighbors. America’s technological weaponry was likely to be effective in the desert. All of that had been easy for Bush to understand, and thus, he believed, for the American people to understand as well. Not so Yugoslavia.
So at the very top, the most important person of all did not want to buy in. In the case of Kuwait, the intervention had been driven from the start by the president. The Pentagon had not been eager for a military operation there, nor had Jim Baker. Both in Panama and in the Gulf, tough and flinty as he might seem to outsiders dealing with him in different high-level meetings, Baker did not like to choose force. It was Bush who was outraged by what the Iraqis had done and brought the bureaucracy along with him. But Yugoslavia did not fit into his existing geopolitical mind-set of where America could and should use its power. It sounded like the most complicated kind of civil war imaginable, much of it within the recognized boundaries of an existing nation-state, with no easy mission or exit strategy, and with unusually high possibilities of things going wrong according to the people he respected the most, his military men. Bush’s resistance to intervention was immediate and constant.
That attitude—how difficult a call it might be—permeated even those who tilted slightly toward intervention. To respond and limit Serb aggression, Scowcroft once told Zimmermann (who would eventually make an appeal for the use of force), you had to be ready to send in ground troops. No one was anxious to do that, certainly not in an election year, and certainly not in the numbers the Pentagon was talking about.4 That figure varied—sometimes it was two hundred thousand and sometimes it was even more—but the numbers were always big. There was, in addition, much talk about the difficulty of the terrain, and how the Yugoslav partisans had tied down so many German troops during World War II. At one point David Owen, the former British foreign secretary, appointed to be one of the peace seekers in the region in 1992, and hearing how many German divisions had been tied down by the partisans—was it only twenty-five divisions or as many as thirty-six?—did a check and found out that it was only six, still not insignificant, a figure of around one hundred thousand men.5
Every time they looked at Yugoslavia, experience had taught the military planners that they could not think in terms of airpower alone. Only illusionists (and top air force generals), they believed, thought that could solve the dilemma. Most of these men, going back to Korea where airpower was more valuable tactically than strategically, and particularly in Vietnam, where its shortcomings had been all too apparent, had come of age aware of its limitations. That was especially true of the Pentagon’s leading generals, like Powell, all of whom had served one or two terms in Vietnam and were skeptics about airpower as a cure-all. If it proved ineffective, then we might need to deploy ground forces, and then we would begin to be gradually sucked into a full-scale war. Just like Vietnam.
The most telling line on what American policy would be in Yugoslavia had been delivered by Jim Baker after an unsuccessful trip to Yugoslavia in late June 1991, in a desperate attempt to keep the country from breaking up. It was hardly his kind of mission, for those who had studied Baker carefully over the years had learned that he did not lightly seize on issues that had the almost sure look of losers. He was not fond of difficult, dangerous places, filled with bitterly aggrieved people who presented political and human questions that, if not exactly insoluble, were as close to that as you could get. Questions like that tended to be handed off to deputies, in this case Eagleburger, whose terrain it ought to have been anyway by dint of his two tours of duty there and the alleged affection the people had for him.
Baker’s trip to the Balkans was one of the most unrewarding of his professional career, worse, he later said, than dealing with the leaders of the competing forces in the Middle East, who, he had decided long ago, left a great deal to be desired as listeners. He had patiently pointed out all the many reasons why the varying Yugoslav leaders should follow the advice of the United States and the Europeans and not inflict a suicidal war on each other, and he noted the obvious economic consequences if they went ahead. It would be a disaster for a region already desperately poor. Baker also noted that he held the proxies of all the European nations. That mattered not at all. It was as if he were speaking to the deaf. No one, least of all Milosevic, paid any attention to him. Baker left Yugoslavia angry and frustrated, feeling, his close aides believed, that these Balkan leaders had no earthly sense of what was good for them. Why waste rational words on irrational people? Why waste your breath? What happened there, he seemed to think, was what they deserved, and we should wash our hands of the whole thing.
After that, the administration’s policy in the Balkans, as articulated by Baker in terms that ordinary Americans would readily understand, was “We don’t have a dog in that fight.” It was a good phrase, but there was a danger, critics of the administration believed, that it summed up the Bush-Baker view of the entire new turbulent post–Cold War world, a place that was so messy, with so few choices that were positive rather than negative, that it was better, all in all, simply to ignore them.