The United States was going to sit this one out and let the Europeans handle it. Nothing highlighted that policy quite so clearly as an incident that took place in the late spring of 1992 at the time when Sarajevo was being systematically shelled. Richard Johnson, the State Department desk officer for Yugoslavia, was probably at the exact fulcrum in the department between the dissenters at the lower level and the upper-level figures who wanted to sustain the status quo. Johnson heard that the people in the national security world—years later he was not sure whether it was the NSA or the CIA—who did the satellite imagery not only had uncommonly good photos of what the Serbs were doing at Sarajevo, they also had excellent—and precise—photos of the Serb gun positions there. This kind of satellite technology was a uniquely American marvel; we did it better than anyone else in the world, and it had proven exceptionally valuable during the Gulf War.
The connection had been made through INR, the bureau of Intelligence and Research, which was State’s own mini-CIA. A briefing by the imagery experts was set up in the State Department building. Invitations were sent out up to the deputy assistant secretary level. On the scheduled day, Johnson gathered himself together and went to the briefing. He was the only person from State who attended; that of itself was revealing, as if there were a need not to know. The briefing lasted roughly an hour and a half. The satellite photos were devastating; they showed about ninety-five Serb artillery and antiaircraft emplacements. One of the things that struck both the briefer and Johnson was how brazen the Serbs were. The guns were neither camouflaged nor given even the slightest physical protection—no bunkers protecting them, no sandbag walls built up. The briefer, having been through the Gulf War, was quite surprised by how exposed the Serb gun positions were.
Johnson asked the briefer if the guns would be difficult to take out and he answered not at all. Based on what had happened in the Gulf War, he said, it would be simple; it would take at best a day or a day and a half for American airplanes to destroy them. The briefing over, Johnson wrote a one-page memo to Tom Niles, the assistant secretary for European and Canadian affairs, describing what he had learned and how easy it would be to obliterate the guns of Sarajevo. He did not hear back on it. Instead his immediate boss, Mike Habib, who had been out of town when the briefing took place, rapped Johnson’s knuckles for having sent the memo, scolding him for trespassing outside the proper boundaries of State and venturing into territory that belonged to the military.
Milosevic, not surprisingly, quickly became aware of what the West was not going to do. It had not come to the rescue of Vukovar and Dubrovnik, so it was unlikely to come to the aid of Bosnia either. In 1993, David Owen, his peacekeeping mission in tatters, was accused at a meeting in New York of acting as an appeaser, as Neville Chamberlain, representing the Western powers, had appeased Hitler at Munich before World War II. Angered by the accusation, Owen had answered coldly, referring to what had happened in late 1991 in Vukovar, which had been subjected to a brutal siege and had fallen to the Serbs a month before Christmas, “Munich was last year.”1
If for a variety of political reasons the official American government sources were unwilling to report the truth of the genocide in Bosnia, the role of the press inevitably became far more important, and as in Vietnam, when the government was in denial about military failures, reporters in the field in Bosnia linked up with more junior members of the bureaucracy. What senior Western diplomats were learning from their intelligence sources and from representatives of nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), they were quite content to keep secret because of the enormous disparity between the horrors that were being committed and the impotence of their response. But at the same time, a handful of Western journalists began to pursue the story actively. Roy Gutman, the Newsday reporter who was by then relatively well advanced in his personal reeducation about the Serbs, virtually stumbled onto what were the worst atrocities in Europe since those of the Third Reich. The timing was intriguing; Gutman’s first major piece on the cruelties inflicted on the Bosnian Muslims by the Serbs ran on July 3, 1992, just as the United States was gearing up full-time for an election campaign. Gutman was beginning to uncover evidence of genocidal crimes at precisely the moment when the incumbent Bush administration, already criticized for being more concerned with foreign policy than domestic issues, was preoccupied by an increasingly difficult reelection drive.
Almost from the start, Gutman’s reporting had been well ahead of the curve. In early July, one of his stories on the deportation of Muslims from Bosnia to Hungary bore a particularly prophetic headline: “Ethnic Cleansing: Yugoslavs Try to Deport 1,800 Muslims to Hungary.” That was just the beginning. Within a few days he got an emotional phone call from one of the Muslim leaders he had met earlier in Banja Luka: “Please try to come here. There is a lot of killing. They are shipping Muslim people through Banja Luka in cattle cars. Last night there were twenty-five train wagons for cattle crowded with women, old people, and children. They were so frightened. In the name of humanity please come.” With that Gutman managed to get to Banja Luka, where he heard reports of concentration camps set up by the Serbs for Muslims in northern Bosnia, the worst of them at a place called Omarska, which was an open iron-mine pit north of Banja Luka. The stories he heard were terrible, and there was good reason to take them seriously; he could vouch for a number of the people he was talking to. “All the grass has been eaten by the people,” one source told him. “Every day in Omarska between twelve and sixteen people die. . . . Two-thirds of them are living under open skies. It is like an open pit. When it rains, many of them are up to their knees in mud.”
Gutman could not get to Omarska—the Serbs said they could not guarantee his safety—but a Serb official offered him another trip to a prisoner-of-war camp in a place called Manjaca. Gutman and his photographer and interpreter went there, and again the images—this time of emaciated men with shaved heads—were hauntingly similar to those from Nazi Germany. On August 2, Newsday published Gutman’s story on Omarska under the headline “There Is No Food, There Is No Air.” It was the most damning account yet of the new culture of genocide. “The corpses pile up. There is no food. There is no air to breathe. No medical care. Even the grass around the pit has been completely clawed away,” he quoted one relief agency official as saying. Two days later, Gutman filed another story about the mass deportations of Muslims in railroad cars. “There was no food, no water, and no fresh air. There was no toilet, just holes in the floor, piled high with excrement.” A number of people, children and old people, had died on the trains, he quoted an eyewitness as saying. The eyewitness spoke of seeing the people packed in the train like cattle, their hands visible through the tiny ventilation holes. “It was like the Jews being deported to Auschwitz,” said a Muslim official who had witnessed it. The headline over his story said it all: “Like Auschwitz.” Under it was the subhead “Serbs Pack Muslims into Freight Cars.” The Muslim men who were at Omarska and other camps weren’t idly chosen, since little about this campaign was idly done. They were the elite of these Muslim towns, the political leaders, the police officials, the doctors, the businessmen, and the teachers. Many of them would never be seen again.
Now there were witnesses in the West to the catastrophe, and the lingering sense of indecision in Washington and in European capitals eventually created a complicated new political constituency in America. This constituency was different from those that had preceded it in recent foreign policy debates, no longer divided by traditional ideological bias, but instead driven by a memory that connected these events to the atrocities of the Nazis and therefore demanded that other nations ask themselves what their larger purpose was. What was happening in Bosnia began to crystallize, however slowly, into a new foreign policy issue, one that, if it failed to meet the standard national-security definition for American involvement, obviously met a more complicated new moral test involving a great nation’s self-definition, and one that recalled memories of a previous failure on the part of Western leaders to act in time to stop genocide.
It was interesting, Gutman thought years later, that with all the diplomatic services of the developed nations involved, with all their intelligence services on the case, and with all the NGOs with roots in the West able to report on the tragedy in Bosnia, it took reporters working in the field to break the story. This was the age of satellite spy cameras, he liked to point out, and there were at least one hundred Serb concentration camps in Bosnia. So the claim that there were no photos of what was happening readily available to Western intelligence agencies was laughable. A rich, powerful nation could easily have this kind of information at its fingertips. If Washington officials did not want to know about it, it was for a good reason: to know about it and not to act was a profound embarrassment. Therefore, for as long as possible, that is, for much of 1992, it was better not to know.
Gutman understood from the beginning that this was going to be a tough sell for most American newspapers. In the past, the easy button to push for a foreign correspondent had always been the Cold War: good anticommunists struggling with bad communists. Or if on occasion fewer moral distinctions existed between the two forces as they contested each other in the third world, then at least editors and readers could be reassured that the contest was a part of the larger East-West confrontation and give it decent play. For there was no doubt that any kind of confrontation with the communists (or at least the leftists) was the mother’s milk of foreign reporting over more than forty years, with an unspoken assumption that the communists were the forces of darkness. It was not that the Balkans story lacked evil. Quite the reverse. Evil obviously abounded. But it was evil without a larger context and without the dramatic framework that most top bureaucrats in Washington, people on the Hill, and senior news executives at home had been trained to recognize. The form of evil Gutman was writing about did not fit the preconception of evil that existed in the minds of many of the people he was writing for—a definition created by over forty years of the Cold War.
The lack of television coverage also made it more difficult for print reporters to get the story of Bosnia to American homes. In an earlier time, print had defined news stories, thereby setting the agenda, and network television had broadcast them to the mass audience. But that had ended in the late seventies, probably with the Iran hostage story. Now not only was foreign news in decline—the Vietnam War had disillusioned many people about the nature of foreign involvements—but the country simply felt less threatened; and the networks were emphasizing domestic stories, which were presumed to be more important to viewers than foreign news. Equally important, the networks, feeling their ascending power and influence compared with print, were beginning to operate on norms of their own. The gravitas of a story that normally defined elite print coverage meant less and less to the new generation of executive producers. Pictures—images—meant more and more. Replicating the New York Times or the Washington Post with a televised version of their front-page stories was now considered boring. Going for high-voltage action shots was more exciting, even if the action shots often meant little.
Other than a flash of interest in the siege of Sarajevo, television did not cover events in Bosnia with any great intensity. This absence of network coverage meant that the government did not have to respond to the isolated or episodic stories carried primarily by elite, middle-class newspapers. Though gaining some momentum, until the story became a television story, it was not in the American mainstream and the administration would not have to respond.
An American press corps was, however, beginning to come together in Yugoslavia: Blaine Harden of the Washington Post and John Burns of the New York Times, whose coverage, Gutman believed, was critically important because he represented the paper with the most powerful constituency in the country and the world. Burns, a distinguished reporter who had already covered a number of tough assignments, brought with him a considerable reputation as well as a Pulitzer prize, and his stories could not lightly be written off as the emotional outbursts of a young cub reporter who did not know how the real world worked.
Because of Gutman’s coverage, the story of Bosnia was beginning to wend its way upward into the middle levels of the Washington bureaucracy. John Fox, a young man who was working at State for Policy Planning, thought that Gutman’s early stories on genocide were a turning point. To his mind, Gutman was a highly respected reporter in Washington and Newsday was a highly respected paper. In addition, Gutman’s bureau chief, Saul Friedman, was one of a group of diplomatic correspondents who often traveled with James Baker, and he was an old friend of both Baker and his press aide, Margaret Tutwiler. That added a sense of legitimacy because Friedman was vouching for Gutman and making sure that his stories got to the top State Department people immediately. But Gutman’s stories—confirmation of what so many people were sure was happening—had the greatest impact at a lower level in the department. There the stories were photocopied and circulated throughout the department. It was, thought Fox, what the old samizdat days must have been like in the Soviet Union. Gutman’s reports were exactly what Fox wanted, for he was trying to make as strong a case as possible for some form of American military intervention, often working with other people who were equally frustrated at comparable levels elsewhere in the bureaucracy. Moreover, Fox thought the NGOs were not to be underestimated. They were out there on the spot, most of them were humanitarian rather than ideological by nature—and this was a humanitarian not an ideological conflict—and some of them had excellent intelligence about what was going on. Fox was sure that their reports, particularly reports of Serb atrocities inflicted on Bosnian Muslims brought back by the International Red Cross, had reached the highest level of the U.S. government. Why, then, didn’t the government act on them?
It was a struggle in the summer of 1992 to get the top people in the government even to admit that genocide was taking place in Bosnia. Fox was constantly working the bureaucracy, talking to like-minded people in other agencies and with friends in the NGOs, in an attempt to document the atrocities. “I was,” he said years later, “like a fact-checker at The New Yorker trying to confirm certain things, working with people who felt the same way I did throughout the government. There was a network of us, working for different agencies both in and out of government, sharing information and keeping each other tuned. And we had a lot of information very much like that which Gutman came up with about the camps and the atrocities. The camps, we had discovered, were not even the worst of it. The worst of it was, village by village, the systematic execution of all village leaders by the Serbs.” That was why Gutman’s story of August 2, 1992, about the horrors of Omarska was so important. “We knew it was going to be a big day and a lot was going to be in play,” Fox remembered, “because here was a major reporter for a major newspaper reporting concentration camps in very considerable detail.”
For weeks the State Department press guidelines had stated that rumors of Serb atrocities in Bosnia could not be confirmed. But that day the answer in the press guideline to any questions about Gutman’s report in Newsday was a startling reversal. Yes, it stated, we can confirm this, there are concentration camps in this part of the world. The admission was important because if these camps existed, then the United States had to have a policy in response to them. When Fox saw the press guideline that day, he was stunned. He called around asking what had happened and found that the editor of the guidelines, a man who was famously anti-interventionist and whose role was critical in controlling what went into the guidelines, was on vacation. “It was a great opportunity, with the cat away, for the mice to play,” Fox said.
Larry Eagleburger, the person at State in charge of the policy to minimize the atrocity story, was very unhappy with the changed position. The next day, a preliminary version of the press guideline had a complete turnaround. The department’s press officers, when asked about the story, were to say, no, they could not confirm it after all. Fox got wind of it and decided to challenge this latest attempt to sustain what he believed was a cover-up. His superiors had told him that the reversal had come from people at the top, which meant Eagle-burger, and that the denial was being driven from the top down. If Fox wanted to change it, he would have to engage them.
So in a series of E-mails, Fox challenged what the department was trying to do. The U.S. government had plenty of information to confirm these atrocities. A denial, he said, could not stand up. We know it’s true and yet we’re saying that we don’t know what we, in fact, do know. Then he added one single killer of a sentence: we did this once before, and we must never do it again. By that he meant the United States—due in no small part to the negligence and indifference of the State Department—had turned away from Germany’s annihilation of the Jews during World War II and it must never happen again. Never again, he believed, meant exactly that: never again. Talking with the people in Eagleburger’s office, he also played his best card. He let them know that he had access to a great deal of material that confirmed Gutman’s story.
In the end, Fox got his superiors in Policy Planning to change the latest directive and confirm Gutman’s story. It might, he thought, seem like a small victory to people on the outside, but in a place like the State Department, a victory of any kind, even if it was on paper, was an immense one in the slow and difficult process of changing a policy that had been frozen for so long. Fox was amused to learn that Tom Niles, the assistant secretary for Europe, had gone to the Hill that day, where he tried to defend the hear-no-evil, see-no-evil policy. He was challenged by Tom Lantos, a Democratic congressman who had been born in Hungary and was already one of the most outspoken members of Congress in decrying the Serb atrocities. Lantos had reliable sources of his own and scoffed at Niles’s story.
By chance, there was soon more graphic evidence of the death camps. A British television team had managed to work its way to Omarska and got some film clips. As one of the journalists on the team, Ed Vulliamy, later wrote of what he saw, “Nothing could have prepared us for what we see when we come through the back gates of what was the Omarska iron mine and ore processing works. . . . [The prisoners] run in single file across the courtyard and into the canteen. Above them in an observation post is the watchful eye, hidden behind reflective sunglasses, of a beefy guard who follows their weary canter with the barrel of his heavy machine gun. There are thirty of them running; their heads newly shaven, their clothes baggy over their skeletal bodies. Some are barely able to move. . . . They line up in obedient and submissive silence and collect their ration: a meager, watery portion of beans augmented with bread crumbs and a stale roll. The men are at various stages of human decay and affliction; the bones of their elbows and wrists protrude like pieces of jagged stone from the pencil-thin stalks to which their arms have been reduced. Their skin is putrefied, the complexions of their faces debased, degraded, and utterly subservient, and yet they fix their huge hollow eyes on us with looks like the blades of knives. There is nothing quite like the sight of the prisoner desperate to talk and to convey some terrible truth that is so near yet so far, but who dares not.”2
One of the most intriguing things about that period, thought Richard Johnson, the Yugoslav desk officer, was the dance of nomenclature. Starting in the Bush years, but extending well into the Clinton years, an attempt was made to avoid or at least modify the G-word; that is, genocide. To admit outright that what the Serbs were doing was, in fact, genocidal was a critical decision because the need to act would be that much greater. The most inventive kind of descriptions were demanded, the use of words and phrases the like of which had not been seen around the department in years, perhaps since the early days of Vietnam when, in the face of continued terrible news about the war, the government had steadfastly announced that it was cautiously optimistic.
Johnson noted that even when State Department spokesmen gradually began to edge toward saying how terrible it was in Bosnia, there were still gradations that allowed the press officers to stop short of calling it genocide. Certain acts, they said, could be described as “tantamount to genocide.” Or they had “bordered on genocide.” Or a particular act was genocidal, as if the sum of everything the Serbs were doing was not and there was a difference between an act of genocide and genocide itself.3
The pivotal figure at State at this point was Eagleburger, and he was not in an enviable position. He had been the deputy secretary of state, and the deputy traditionally gets the assignments the secretary does not want. Dealing with the Balkans most clearly was a job that James Baker did not fancy; it was messy, with no plausible rational outcome. That meant Eagleburger had faced a resistant secretary, a resistant president who obviously did not want to engage there, and a very resistant Pentagon. By August of 1992, however, he had been promoted—a rare honor accorded a professional foreign service officer—and had been named acting secretary of state. A most unhappy Baker, in the growing recognition of the crisis in Bush’s drive for reelection, had been dragooned out of State and brought back to the White House to run the political campaign. Shortly thereafter Eagleburger was named secretary of state, a special moment somewhat diminished because the foreign country he knew best and perhaps loved best was breaking down into genocidal conflict.
Eagleburger was aware of the doubts and reservations of the rest of the administration, particularly of the two men directly above him, Baker and Bush. He shared many of those doubts himself. He was not sure that there was a right course of action, certainly there was no easy one, and he feared like others in the administration that America could be dragged into something difficult and costly. But he was gradually beginning to feel that the status quo could no longer stand. What was happening in Bosnia was far worse than anything he had ever imagined.
Eagleburger’s change of opinion was driven by events and by the bright, passionate people under him. He was, in effect, a somewhat compromised man, unhappy with what would occur if they followed the current policy, but no more happy with any alternative to it. Like his close friend Brent Scowcroft, Eagleburger believed that we could not depend solely on airpower. He could envision the Serbs breaking down their regular military forces into small guerrilla units. That alone could bedevil America’s high-technology military, which depended upon quick results in distant places while, of course, taking few casualties. “What I always worried about in those days,” he later said, “was the shadow of Vietnam. I had a very strong sense of how tough the Serbs could be from my time there, how stubborn and how resilient they were.”
But the cruelty being inflicted by the Serbs on the Bosnians was another thing. When Yugoslavia began to break apart in 1991, he had assumed there would be violence—“a terrible, bloody mess,” in his words. He had always been aware of the potential for ethnic conflict in Kosovo because of the historical blood hatreds, and he regarded that as a special place where the United States had to make clear to Milosevic that it would not tolerate any brutality inflicted by the minority Serbs on the Albanian majority. In the rest of Yugoslavia, however, Eagleburger had envisioned a very different level of violence than that which was now taking place. There would be some bitter struggles between the Serbs and the Croats, but they would be waged within a traditional military context. Eventually the map would probably be redrawn, the Serbs would come away with a slice of Croatia or the Croats would have a slice of Serbia, and either might grab a slice of Bosnia. Then having expended so much energy in a number of battles, they would find themselves, however involuntarily, exhausted, and an uneasy, probably unwanted, and certainly uncomfortable equilibrium would take hold. The map of the Balkans would once again be redrawn, and those who had gained more than they had started out with would be happy, and those who had lost a little would be unhappy. The fighting would end of itself when the different sides simply ran out of energy.
What Eagleburger had not expected was the genocide, the relentless cruelty inflicted by the Serbs on civilians. He had seen photos of the emaciated Muslim men looking like the Jews either on their way to the Nazi camps or already there. He had read the stories in the newspapers, and one particular cover of Time magazine in August 1992 (with the cover line, appropriately enough, “Must It Go On?”) showing Bosnian men looking through the fence of a concentration camp had told him he had been wrong and had underestimated the catastrophic nature of what was taking place.
That summer the pressure mounted within the lower and middle levels of the State Department to do something about the Balkans, and most of it centered around reaching Larry Eagleburger. Below him in the department almost everyone wanted a more aggressive policy toward Yugoslavia. Above him almost no one did. Though he was from the foreign service and not a political appointee, he was a moderate to liberal Republican and a committed, old-fashioned internationalist. By the time he had risen to become the number two man in the department, he had survived in the bureaucracy under different presidents, from Johnson through Bush, and had managed to operate at a very high level.
His father, a doctor first in Milwaukee and then Stevens Point, Wisconsin, had been “somewhat to the right of Genghis Khan,” Eagleburger remembered. But growing up in Republican student politics in the years after World War II, the son had emerged as a committed member of the internationalist Vandenberg wing of the party. At the age of eighteen, Eagleburger had been a supporter of Earl Warren in the 1948 presidential primaries, and as a college student he was the relatively rare Wisconsin Republican who had fought the state’s own senator, its best known, if not most admired, politician, Joe McCarthy.
Eagleburger was immensely popular with high-level people across a wide political spectrum. He had served as a special assistant to Dean Acheson when Acheson was running errands for Lyndon Johnson, worked on European affairs on the NSC staff under Walt Rostow, and then slipped away from Rostow and the NSC to become Nick Katzenbach’s special assistant when Katzenbach was undersecretary and was beginning to question the Johnson policies in Vietnam. Eagleburger had served with distinction through to the Reagan years, working under George Shultz at State, and was believed by others in that administration to have played a critical role in some of Shultz’s successes, particularly during his long, hard struggles with Cap Weinberger at Defense. Eagleburger was bright, with a practical rather than an abstract intelligence, and his greatest strength was his shrewd reading of the people around him. He had natural political skills and was virtually without peer in knowing how to work within the bureaucracy and actually make things happen. He had made his most important political connection in late 1968, linking up with Henry Kissinger while Kissinger was working for Nixon during the transition period just before becoming Nixon’s NSC assistant. Kissinger, about to trade academe for government, understood immediately how good Eagleburger was, how well he operated in a complicated bureaucracy. In that area, Kissinger was then something of a virgin.
During the following year Eagleburger devoted himself, among other things, to protecting Kissinger’s flank, which was virtually a full-time job because of the animus felt toward Kissinger by the right. Typically, he tried to buffer a badly wounded Kissinger through the famed 1976 Republican convention in Kansas City, where not only his policies of détente but the entire concept of bipartisan internationalism came under assault. The noisy, heated convention in the end gave, however reluctantly, its nomination to Jerry Ford, but the most memorable speech was by Ronald Reagan, who did not mention Ford’s name. Kissinger, something of an embarrassment at the convocation of this party that was changing so radically, was smuggled into Kansas City and kept there, in the words of the columnist Jules Witcover, “under virtual house arrest.” Aware of his boss’s hurt feelings, Eagleburger had called the Republican organizers and asked if they could put on some kind of demonstration to make Kissinger feel welcome when he arrived. That was easy enough to do, and when Kissinger finally got to his Kansas City hotel, a nice crowd of clean-cut, freshly scrubbed young Republicans were cheering and waving placards in his honor—Kansas City Welcomes Secretary of State Henry Kissinger! The ever-mordant Kissinger took one look at the crowd, turned to Eagleburger, and said, “You organized this, didn’t you?”
Eagleburger was not by instinct an idea man; rather he was one of those rare people whose native human talents suited him exceptionally well for being in government. He was straightforward, surprisingly candid with everyone, and played by rules of old-fashioned loyalty. But he was not viewed as a foreign policy visionary or conceptualizer. The relationship with Kissinger was ideal, some people believed. Kissinger was the conceptualizer and Eagleburger knew how to work the bureaucracy, and, of course, to clean up after Henry.
Eagleburger had left government in the mideighties. Partly burned-out and somewhat out of step with the Reagan people, he had gone to work for Kissinger Associates, where his clients included Yugoslavia. He made considerable money in those years, certainly a good deal more than foreign service officers usually make, though not as much as some well-credentialed Americans were about to make as America’s role in what was now a global economy became preeminent, the line between government official and former government official blurred, and the financial rewards became infinitely greater. (A few years later when the world of the Internet was just being born and Eagleburger had retired again, he was besieged with offers to join boards. Some he accepted, some he turned down. One offer was from a new company in California, and as far as he could tell it was one board too many, demanding too many cross-country flights on which he would not be able to smoke his omnipresent cigarettes. So he suggested that the head of the company take his old sidekick Brent Scowcroft instead, and Scowcroft, a mild and unassuming man of no wealth and considerable personal modesty, went on the board of the company, which was called Qualcomm, and the value of his stock was at one point some $75 million.)
After working with Kissinger Associates, Eagleburger came back to the State Department to serve as Baker’s deputy secretary. Once again he proved of value because of the trust he had created. Typically, in the midst of the Gulf War after the Israelis had been hit by a series of Iraqi Scud missiles and were threatening to jump the tracks and respond on their own, thereby shattering the delicate bond that held the Arab nations in the otherwise predominantly Western alliance, it was Eagleburger who was sent to plead with them not to retaliate. The Israelis obviously trusted him as they trusted no one else at that level in the administration, especially not Baker.
Eagleburger was particularly good at a kind of pseudocandor, admitting a weakness in his own position before anyone could point it out, as if to show how straight he was. He was the rare high-ranking foreign service officer who was so politically savvy that he could as easily have been Speaker of the House had he followed a slightly different career track. In a world where successful men and women in the foreign service, as in most parallel professions, appeared to be ever sleeker physically and colder of demeanor, Eagleburger was somehow old-fashioned and endearing. There he was, short, appallingly overweight, far too many pounds distributed on a body whose contours seemed to defy the State Department prototype, his health always terrible, suffering from severe asthma, yet still chain-smoking, alternating cigarettes with his antiasthma inhaler.
He was, his staff thought, oddly fatalistic about the Balkans at that time. He knew the old Yugoslavia, knew the hatreds suppressed and thought them dangerous. He was always decrying the world of the Balkans in private. “They’re all liars out there,” he would say again and again. Aides feared he would one day say it in public, and in time at a press conference in Europe, he did, but it passed without a diplomatic ripple. With a few close confidants, he would talk cautiously about the political dilemma they faced. Nothing was going to happen at the level above him because it was an election year, and because the president he served was already under severe attack for being too interested in foreign policy. At the very least, his aides thought, he was telling Bush and the other top people how bad things were in Bosnia. Bill Montgomery, his deputy, thought Eagleburger was immensely frustrated. Montgomery had quietly been urging Eagleburger to take a more proactive position. The two had argued heatedly over what was happening in the Balkans and the American failure to act. Years later when Montgomery eventually became ambassador to Croatia, in his office in Zagreb was a signed photo from Eagleburger dedicated to “my nag, conscience, scold and friend.”
Montgomery was aware, as few of the people pushing for greater action on Yugoslavia were, that the Bush administration was focused on the fledgling and very uncertain Russia. As far as Bush, Baker, and Scowcroft were concerned, the threat of secession of former parts of greater Russia was uppermost in their minds, much more important than Yugoslavia. That was one of the obstacles Eagleburger ran into whenever he suggested a more aggressive policy at the White House. The other was the military. At the urging of the people underneath Eagleburger, he might make their arguments to his peers, but when he returned to the department and repeated what they had said, the opinions they had the most trouble countering were those of Colin Powell. What would happen if any early military move did not work? What happens, Eagleburger would ask, his questions echoing Powell’s, if a plane is shot down and they parade prisoners through the streets of Belgrade? What’s your advice now, guys?
For a brief period in the summer of 1992, Jim Hooper and Richard Johnson worked on a special committee headed by Warren Zimmermann, the former ambassador to Belgrade, who had become Eagleburger’s point man on the Balkans. Both Hooper and Johnson were activists and had been placed on the committee by Montgomery, a covert activist who wanted them to move Zimmermann forward a bit. But they soon felt stalemated on the Zimmermann committee and asked for a meeting with Eagleburger. It took place in mid-September, when the presidential campaign was in full swing and Bush was running badly. They had been granted fifteen minutes, and Eagleburger gave them thirty. Hooper and Johnson were very blunt. American policy in the Balkans was a complete failure. Milosevic had a strategy and we did not. We were reacting to military aggression with empty words. Eagleburger was lowkey at the meeting—in no way hostile. That, Hooper suspected, was because he and Johnson were playing by the rules, not resigning loudly and publicly, but working within the system. At one point Eagleburger turned to them and said, “I want to thank you for telling me that my policy is full of shit.” “I see you’ve been paying attention to us,” Johnson replied. At the end of the meeting they asked for the right to do a critique of the policy and Eagleburger agreed. Some ten days later, they handed in a tough twenty-five-page dissent. After that they heard nothing. Finally they put their paper in the dissent channel, which guaranteed that it would at least be part of the historical record.
Some two months later, Hooper and Johnson went back to see Eagle-burger. It was, they remembered, Veterans Day, November 11. The election was over. Bush had lost and Clinton would be the next president. This time Eagle-burger was surprisingly candid with them. He had read their paper, he said, read it carefully. But he had not wanted to talk too much about it before because of the election. Nothing, he said, was going to happen until it was over. But if they wanted him to make any changes, now was the time, because he was going to bring the matter up with Cheney and Powell. He and the two dissidents went back and forth, with Eagleburger essentially making the military’s case. They tell me, he said, they do deserts, not mountains. “Before Kuwait they didn’t do deserts,” Hooper replied. What about the allies, how do we handle them? Eagle-burger wanted to know. You don’t ask them, you tell them what American policy is going to be, Johnson and Hooper answered.
Then a strange thing happened. Eagleburger critiqued the policy himself and his critique was even harsher than theirs. “I knew something like this was going to happen,” he said. “I knew it was going to be violent. I just didn’t know it would be this bad.” With that the meeting was over. But at one point, because he thought this was not leading anywhere and because he felt there was a moral imperative to act, Johnson said something to the effect that history was going to judge them all. “Don’t use that stuff on me—I’m not going to be judged,” Eagleburger said. Later when told by a reporter that Eagleburger had remarked long after leaving government that each day he looked in the mirror and wondered whether he should have done more, Johnson said, “Good—I’m glad to hear that.” The problem, Bill Montgomery thought years later, was that even when you pumped Eagleburger up, he would go to the White House virtually without allies. In the past when they had got him to make the case for intervention, he had been forced to go against Bush, Powell and the uniformed military, Cheney, and Baker. In addition, Montgomery believed, Eagleburger was a divided soul, fighting an undertow within himself, his own heart at least partially on the side of the people he was ostensibly arguing with.
What dissent there was in the Pentagon came from the civilian side, and its leader was the undersecretary of defense under Cheney, Paul Wolfowitz, who represented the new complexity of political currents at work in Washington. He was a Scoop Jackson Democrat who, disenchanted with his party’s foreign policy, had gradually turned into a Reagan Republican, which meant that he was something of a social liberal and a combination of hard-liner and ideological purist in foreign policy. Like many of the proactive people at State, Wolfowitz thought that American participation in an arms embargo toward Bosnia was absolutely appalling. It was morally unacceptable to permit the aggressor the luxury of arms but to deny those under attack the ability to defend themselves. He agreed with both Powell and Cheney on the need to keep American ground troops out of a potential Balkans quagmire, but disagreed on the practical effect of the arms embargo. He was certain that it would almost surely guarantee that the United States would be drawn into the conflict rather than preventing it. It made the Bosnians more vulnerable than they already were and encouraged the Serbs to think no one would stand in their way.
If the indigenous forces in Bosnia were not able to defend themselves, then the international community would eventually have to do it, Wolfowitz believed. In his mind the Europeans lacked the muscle, the force, and the will to handle so difficult a situation. There was already considerable evidence of their limitations, evidence that they were unconsciously playing into Serbian hands. He was sure that matters would continue to disintegrate, and as they did, the burden would eventually fall on the United States. Therefore, American self-interest demanded that we allow the Bosnians access to weapons.
Wolfowitz met with Colin Powell, who heard him out and made sure that one of his top people was in the room. Powell was immune to most of the pleas coming from the interventionists. He thought that no one in Washington was willing to pay the price that a commitment like this might demand. To him the interventionists were talking a policy based on hope rather than reality, a hope that things could be affected with a minimum, casualty-free application of airpower. But what Wolfowitz told him was intriguing. It was based on a hard look at the forces at play, not a humanitarian call to arms on the part of those who might not be there if and when things went sour. The hearing he received from Powell was, Wolfowitz thought, as serious as you could get in the top level of the bureaucracy. Powell obviously listened attentively and quite possibly agreed with him. “And what about your friends in the State Department,” Powell asked at the end of their meeting, “what do they think about this?” They were, Wolfowitz admitted, against arming the Bosnians. “Come back to me,” Powell told Wolfowitz, “when they’re on board.”
Powell, Wolfowitz knew, was already unhappy with the policy he had been handed, which had come through State, for American forces to be part of a humanitarian aid mission, carrying food and medical supplies into troubled areas. That put his troops, as far as he was concerned, right in the middle of an ugly war, one without rules. He had his own suspicions about humanitarian missions anyway because of the ease with which they could be expanded or escalated if something went wrong, if a plane was shot down or troops were taken prisoner. If he was going to switch policies for one that, in fact, might make more sense, he wanted everyone on the same page. But no one was close to that. Any chance at lifting the arms embargo and letting the Bosnians handle the Serbs on their own ended there.