In the late spring of 1995, the forces dealing with the crisis in Bosnia were changing. It began in France, where François Mitterrand, who had been a de facto Serb ally, was replaced by Jacques Chirac as president on May 17. Appalled by the humiliation of French forces under the UNPROFOR banner, Chirac was willing to take a harder line against Belgrade. Equally important, though no one would realize it for several months, Croatian forces on what was the Serb western front, somewhat belatedly armed by the outside world, had been in training under former American army officers for more than half a year and could for the first time match the Serbs in firepower.
To Belgrade it indicated that events were coming to a head, and as a result the Bosnian Serbs started to consolidate their gains and cap off their victories with assaults on the three important Bosnian towns that remained outside their control: the so-called safe zones created by the UN at Srebrenica, Zepa, and Gorazde. That move triggered decisions the West had always been reluctant to make. All three towns were small Muslim islands in what had become an ever-expanding Serb ocean. Of the three, the dubious honor of becoming the most famous would fall to Srebrenica. It would become the symbol of all the evil that had transpired for the last three years in Yugoslavia and enter the history books on the list of tragic towns and cities, like Lidice, Katyn, and Nanking in World War II, that were sites of state-ordered genocide.
Srebrenica had undergone a prolonged, bitter siege for almost three years and yet it had not fallen. It stood virtually alone as a place that the Serbs wanted but had not been able to take. It was hardly an important town; most larger maps of Europe did not even show it. It had been predominantly Muslim before the country began to tear apart. The larger community of Srebrenica consisted, according to the 1990 Yugoslav census, of nearly thirty-seven thousand people, three-quarters of them Muslim, one-quarter Serb. The town itself, with a population of about six thousand, was nestled in a steep valley. Any force with decent weaponry could easily defend it against an invader; any force outside with heavy weapons could pummel it unmercifully. It had been by Yugoslav standards a moderately prosperous community with some mining, tourism, and small industry. The name Srebrenica came from the word srebren, or silver, in honor of the nearby silver mines.
When the Serbs made their final assault in July 1995, the size of the town itself had nearly quadrupled, to around twenty-three thousand Muslims, many of whom had arrived as desperate survivors from other smaller villages that the Serbs had already cleansed. The unenviable job of protecting the people in this alleged safe zone fell to a Dutch battalion of 429 soldiers, many of them medical and support personnel. With only some light armored vehicles, light antitank weapons, and a few mortars, they were heavily outnumbered and outgunned by the Serb forces surrounding them on all sides. They had little ammunition and not much fuel. If that was not bad enough, like all UN forces they remained unsure of their mandate. Could they fire back in defense of the refugees they were supposed to protect? Or would that mean they had taken sides?
The Bosnian Serbs had already in recent incidents captured UNPROFOR troops and used them as hostages. The UN headquarters, shaken by this and aware that pressures were growing in Washington and some European capitals for countermeasures, did not want the Western allies to take any action, especially the use of NATO airpower, which might trigger the capture of even more hostages. So the stage was set: an aggressive Serb force, which had already captured most of Bosnia and which sensed that the clock might be ticking against it, a nervous and uncertain UN command on location, and a small town swollen with refugees, protected by a tiny combat unit that could not defend the refugees because it could not defend itself. It was the perfect recipe for disaster.
The battle that led to what many would consider the worst war crimes in Europe since World War II began on July 6, 1995, with a Serb mortar attack on an outpost south of Srebrenica manned by the Dutch. From the moment it began, the Dutch defenders were in a virtually hopeless situation. They lacked not only the weaponry with which to defend themselves, but the mandate as well. Their orders were always unclear. By July 9 the Serbs had the first and perhaps the most important of their treasured prizes: thirty Dutch soldiers whom they had encircled and who had surrendered while facing a tank gun pointed right at their small outpost. Without anyone yet realizing it, that sealed the fate of everyone else in Srebrenica.
During the next few days, the Serbs continued to probe and attack, to wait and look for a NATO air response, and then to probe and attack again. Despite the extreme vulnerability of the Dutch troops, requested NATO air strikes failed to take place, certainly not in force and not in any way that would dissuade the Serbs from their assaults. One quick pass at using airpower ended up backfiring. NATO came close to authorizing an air strike, but confusion in the dual chain of command—with both NATO and the UN required to approve air strikes—neutralized Western decision-making. The caution of UN officialdom about a wider war and the weakness of its headquarters command structure were to leave much of the world with an indelible example of incompetence and cowardice.
What followed was a calculated and carefully organized Serb attack and a Dutch-UN response of almost complete uncertainty and confusion. Colonel Ton Karremans, whose great misfortune it was to command the Dutch forces, did not understand until far too late that what had at first appeared to be just another series of probes was, in fact, the ultimate Serb assault. He was never able to get clear instructions from his superiors about what to do: whether to accommodate to the much larger Serb force or try to make a courageous last stand and hope for NATO airpower to save his own force and the Muslims in his care. During the next three days of battle, the Serbs systematically assaulted the tiny little Muslim enclave, while General Ratko Mladic, the commander of the Serbs, promised the UN commander, Lieutenant General Bernard Janvier, that he was not trying to capture Srebrenica.
To the terrified Bosnians caught in this trap, the Serbs were not, as they were politely referred to in the Western press, Bosnian Serbs. They were Chetniks, the feared Serbian monarchist force that had once slaughtered everyone ethnically different in its path—cruel hatreds from the past coupled with the terrifying weapons of the present. Mladic, soon to be named an official war criminal, was the prototypical Serb leader. Those who had known him when he was just an enterprising young army officer and a loyal, ambitious communist never sensed any unusual nationalism in his makeup. As with many people and many things in Yugoslavia, a dark part of his personal history was just under the surface. During the Serb campaigns against the Croats and the Bosnians, however, that darker side emerged, because he had been scarred by his country’s cruel fratricidal history. In 1945, Croat fascists, or the Ustashe, as they were known, fighting alongside the Germans had murdered Mladic’s father, who was fighting with Tito’s partisans. Now it was payback time. A few years earlier during the siege of Sarajevo, when Serb forces were enjoying themselves by lobbing mortar rounds into the city that had been the symbol of Yugoslav pluralism and tolerance, Lieutenant General Lars Eric Wahlgren, the commander of UN forces, had asked Mladic, the man in charge of the shelling, why he continued to assault the city in such a harsh and cruel way. “General, do you remember your father?” Mladic asked. Wahlgren answered that he did. How nice, Mladic remarked bitterly, then said that his father had been murdered when he was only two years old. His own son, he added, would be the first in many generations to know his father: “Because there have been so many attacks on the Serb people, children do not know their fathers.”1
Mladic’s forces had gained several early victories in the war, first in the Krajina against the Croats and then against the Bosnians, usually with minimal opposition from local police and often against people with no arms at all. They had done it with a singular brutality, which Mladic sanctioned and encouraged. As he won those easy battles, he became increasingly full of himself. He enjoyed giving visiting journalists lectures on the weakness and cowardice of the West. He spoke vaingloriously of attacking—if the West was not careful—cities in Europe. Perhaps Trieste. Perhaps Vienna. A Greater Serb patriot who thinks of himself as Napoleon, decided the French general Philippe Morillon, who clashed with him several times. When Morillon told him that, Mladic was amused by the idea. Morillon reminded him that Napoleon had ended his days alone in exile. Mladic, still pleased by the comparison, remained amused.2
Mladic began, in the most dangerous way imaginable, to believe his own myth and the myth of his troops’ invincibility. His command of the Serb forces in Bosnia had been personally conferred on him by Milosevic; but as his troops gained their early victories, he became increasingly egocentric and difficult to control. Eventually Milosevic, exhausted by Mladic’s self-importance, told Dick Holbrooke that his general was “clinically mad,”3 an assessment Holbrooke soon came to share. Mladic not only believed that the Western world was foolish and eager enough for noninvolvement to accept what he said at face value, worse, he soon came to believe the truth of his most outrageous statements. He had an answer for everything. Of the terrible photos of Omarska, the town that Roy Gutman had written so passionately about, he said, “Detention camps? Those pictures were faked by the Bush administration to justify the use of American weapons throughout the world.”4 To him the Bosnian Muslims were not fellow members of a once-shared nation, they were the worst kind of foreigners. They were Turks, blood enemies of his nation. His, then, was the holiest of missions: to capture sacred soil for his own people. “The Muslims?” he once said scornfully. “If you make way for one of them, he will come along with five wives, and before you know what is happening, you have a village.”5
The battle of Srebrenica was fought in a familiar but particularly tragic way. The Serbs continued to take Dutch outposts, one after another, encircling the town and gaining ever better positions from which to rain down their artillery fire. The defenders remained uncertain and confused. The Dutch were still unclear whether they were allowed to defend the Muslims. They believed they could not fight alongside the ragged remains of the Bosnian Muslim forces for fear of losing their status as independent peacekeepers. One last-minute attempt was made to use NATO airpower, but it failed. By the time air strikes were finally about to be carried out, the Serbs had enough Dutch hostages to bluff NATO out of it.
The Dutch began to move as many Muslims as they could to Potocari, a tiny nearby village, where they had set up their own headquarters. That little area, designed to accommodate a few hundred men, was soon overwhelmed by some twenty-three thousand terrified refugees crowding in from Srebrenica. It presented an appalling scene even before the denouement. As one Dutch lieutenant remembered it, “It was absolute chaos. Women were walking around crying, searching for their children, family, or friends. Children were calling for their mothers. . . . [There were] women, men, and children with gunshot and other wounds . . . asking for a doctor. . . . People were fainting. A couple of pregnant women spontaneously went into labor because of the tension. Medics worked overtime with what little material they could use.”6 By July 11 the town of Srebrenica was open to the Serbs.
The crimes of Srebrenica finally pushed the West over the brink. The media seized on them as exhibit A of the brazen willingness of the Serbs to violate every agreement and brutalize their fellow countrymen. Srebrenica became the highly visible symbol of Western indifference. In Washington, the implications of the crisis in Bosnia were escalating rapidly. The politics of the situation were at once amorphous but potentially very real. Bosnia was not an issue in and of itself. Not many Americans were likely to go to the polls in the 1996 presidential election and vote one way or another because of events in Sarajevo or Srebrenica. Rather, its importance was more complicated than that, for it appeared to suggest something larger and far more devastating, an impotence on the part of the Clinton administration not just in this, but in all matters. Events in Bosnia added to the widening suspicion that this administration was facile and articulate and nimble—if anything too nimble—but guilty of believing that words were the equivalent of deeds. The Balkans might become the tip of an iceberg of growing disappointment with an administration that had not yet found its way—nearly two and a half years after coming into office—just as judgment day for the next term was approaching.
The president was frustrated by the situation in Bosnia and irritated with his aides for their failure to provide him a policy. The middle of 1995 was quite possibly the low point in Clinton’s presidency. Nothing seemed to be on track. His most important domestic political initiative, the broad, all-inclusive health care plan, had gone down in flames. The benefits that were to come from deficit reduction had not yet kicked in, and many liberal Democrats believed the administration was too conservative. Hillary Clinton, perceived as the chief architect of the health care plan and hailed only months earlier as the prototype of a modern first lady (two chief executives for the price of one, the president often said), was now deftly moved off center stage, her duties—or at least the public perception of them—to be much more traditional for the time being.
Nothing more clearly indicated the deep disappointment in the Clinton presidency than the devastating off-year election, which had given control of the House and the Senate to the Republican Party and heralded the rise of a very conservative right wing in the Congress: the so-called Gingrich revolution, named after Newt Gingrich, the young Georgia Republican and Speaker of the House. Gingrich had become the poster boy for all the new forces coming together in the Republican Party, originating primarily from the South and generated by the political and social changes that had taken place in the twenty-nine years since the Voting Rights Act of 1965 was passed.
That legislation had caused a massive white migration from the Democratic to the Republican Party, and it had produced in Gingrich and the coterie around him a new kind of political radicalism in the rural and suburban South. They represented a complete break with the national Republican Party of the past, particularly those Republicans who had been part of a bipartisan coalition in foreign policy. Their interest in the rest of the world was at best marginal; at least one hundred of Gingrich’s new congressmen, Clinton liked to say, did not have passports when they arrived in Washington because they never traveled.7 Not only were the Republicans in control of the Congress, but their new leadership was less centrist, considerably more partisan and hostile to the administration. Gingrich immediately became the spokesman for this new breed of American conservatives largely backed by religious fundamentalists with a singular cultural agenda of their own; they were out to undo much of the classic, long-standing New Deal doctrines of the past half century. They were the children of the Reagan revolution now coming of age, driven by their own passions and, like many true believers before them, accustomed to talking only with people who agreed with them. They were confident that what they wanted was exactly what the entire country wanted. They were deeply distrustful of the very government that they, like it or not, were now an important part of, but they were apparently unaware that millions of Americans, whatever their ideological tilt, also wanted the country to function well, a mistake that Clinton would eventually use against them with considerable skill.
But the immediate impact of the 1994 election and Gingrich’s rise to power was devastating to Clinton. It added to all the failures of the past two years and raised doubts in the entire Clinton team about whether it was up to the job. Warren Christopher, who had become the target for many of Clinton’s critics, was in Korea on a state visit when he heard the news that the administration had not only lost both houses of the Congress, but that the new congressional leadership was likely to be ideologically very different from most of its predecessors. He went from Seoul to Indonesia, where he met with Clinton, who was there to talk to APEC (Asian Pacific Economic Cooperation) nations. He found the president, normally the most resilient of public men, to be emotionally down and clearly quite shaken.
Christopher wondered if part of the reason that the Democrats had lost both houses in the election was the lack of clarity and progress in foreign policy. The timing could not have been worse for Christopher. His friends thought he was exhausted physically and, if not actually depressed, certainly badly worn-out by his nearly two years in office and the failure to deal with the number one problem, Bosnia, which blocked progress on so many other issues. He appeared, in the eyes of close aides, to be exhibiting signs of bureaucratic combat fatigue, a man beaten down by his job and a lack of victories. Christopher did not like to show weakness to anyone. When things went badly, he normally just worked harder and became even more stoic, as if willing himself to have an additional layer of emotional protection against those who attacked him. But now for the first time he was not sure whether he was doing the president any good.
One day in late 1994, right after he had returned from Jakarta, Christopher, without discussing it seriously with his aides, went to see the president and, in effect, resigned. (Many within the department believed it the only time he had made a major decision without checking with Tom Donilon, the shrewdest of his political advisers, and Donilon went ballistic when he heard the news.) Perhaps, the secretary thought, it was simply time to go. He liked Washington, but he loved California, and before taking office he had just finished building a handsome new home near the ocean. He had never really lived in it, but he kept a photo of it, panoramic view and all, on his desk as if it was a reminder that easier, less-pressurized days would be ahead.
His resignation stunned Clinton, already under siege himself. His foreign policy team was unraveling. Clinton had already severed himself from Defense Secretary Les Aspin after Somalia, and his national security adviser, Tony Lake, who was wound much too tightly, had become the target of an undercurrent of complaints from his peers and had been thinking of resigning himself. Clinton’s CIA director, Jim Woolsey, had not worked out, would leave in early 1995, to the relief of both parties, and would eventually endorse Clinton’s opponent in 1996. Now at just the wrong moment, Clinton’s secretary of state was getting ready to go home. This potentially quite messy situation was sure to be interpreted by the media as a sign of a larger failure in foreign affairs. Clinton would also have the problem of finding a new secretary of state and getting him (or her) through the Senate, a confirmation process that had not so far been an administration strength, and would surely be more difficult after the off-year election.
Clinton immediately called Vernon Jordan and asked him to come to the White House. “Christopher’s resigned,” Clinton told his friend. “So what do you want me to do?” Jordan asked. “Call Colin,” the president answered. Colin Powell had always fascinated Clinton. He admired him and saw his many strengths but at the same time remained envious of him because he had emerged, so late in life, politically bulletproof. When things had gone wrong in the past, particularly at the time of Somalia, Clinton was wont to pour out his frustration to close aides in tirades about how unfair the media was to him, while it always gave Powell a free ride because he was such a national hero. Powell, he would add, had as many fingerprints on Somalia as anyone in the White House, but no one called him on it. Well, Clinton would say, by God, just let Colin Powell try running for the presidency and he would find out how many real friends he had in the media and how long they would remain adoring. Hero or not, Powell would quickly discover the other side of the media beast, Clinton liked to say. It would turn on him, too, as it turned on everyone else.
His administration at an absolute low point, his foreign policy team openly scorned, and his secretary of state about to desert what appeared to be a sinking ship, Clinton was returning to an idea he had flirted with in the past: Colin Powell as secretary of state. Having a man in the cabinet with Powell’s reputation would give instant credibility to an otherwise not very distinguished and somewhat damaged national security team. It would be immensely popular with the general public, and of course, it would fly through the Senate. No one was likely to speak against Powell. Clinton was always thinking ahead, and Clinton saw Powell as the man who would be hardest to beat in 1996, the one Republican who might have a stronger claim to the political center than he did and would cut across party lines. Therefore, Clinton might gain a talented secretary of state while at the same time neutralizing a dangerous and popular potential presidential challenger in the next election. It would also limit other Republican candidates in that race because the policies they would ostensibly be criticizing were, in part, Powell’s. But Powell as secretary of state had a downside as well. It would deed over an incredibly important cabinet portfolio to a man with far better credentials in foreign policy than Clinton himself, and though this was never discussed, a man with much stronger convictions on a number of issues. It would pit a president already vulnerable in foreign and defense policy against a national icon who was not lightly to be disputed in his areas of expertise. That was not an inviting equation; the president might end up as a prisoner of a cabinet officer who towered above him in prestige and authority.
Some of the people around Clinton thought it was about as misguided an idea as possible. They thought he saw Powell as a black icon with whom he would have a connection. For Clinton knew he was skillful with blacks; they had always formed the core of his political base, the group he turned to in moments of need for absolute, rock-solid support. Clinton did not understand, these advisers felt, that Powell was a great deal more than a black man. He was a conservative military-political figure with a national constituency all his own that had no racial borders. “It was all misbegotten,” said one of Clinton’s top people, “based on a terrible misreading of Powell—that he might, because of Clinton’s attitudes on race, come over to our team. But Colin Powell was never on our team. He was always on the other team. He was a very conservative man on any number of critical issues. His closest friends, the people who he pals around with at the end of the day, were men like Ken Duberstein and Richard Armitage, and they are very conservative men, and believe me, neither of them is on our team either. First Reagan and then Bush had made Colin Powell what he was—along with the United States army. To come over to us would have been in his own eyes a profound violation of his loyalty to them, and loyalty was very important to a man like Colin Powell.” It was, said the official, a rare example of the president’s political instincts, usually so sure, deserting him. An arrogance, born of his skill with dealing with black politicians in the past, misled him into thinking he could handle Powell.
Even so, Vernon Jordan called Powell and asked to come by and meet with him. When the phone had rung, near midnight, Powell was sure he knew who was calling and what the subject was—an offer of secretary of state. “Can you derail it?” he asked Jordan when the latter stopped by his house. “No way,” Jordan answered.8 Jordan himself was sure Powell would not take the job. He was sure Powell would view it as an act of disloyalty to Bush, who had treated him so well and made him chairman of the JCS. Powell was also quite leery of the Clinton team; he did not have very much confidence in its top players, and he feared they might tarnish his own reputation. Besides, he had spent more than three decades in the service; he had just bought an expensive new home in suburban McLean and was enjoying his new options, writing his memoirs, and giving lectures at top-dollar fees. He met with the president and politely turned him down.
Jordan then went on a mission of his own. He drove over to see Warren Christopher and asked just what in the hell he was doing, resigning, and above all doing it without checking with him. Christopher seemed to him to be exhausted, convinced that he had somehow damaged the man he was supposed to serve. So Jordan and a few allies, including Christopher deputies Tom Donilon and Strobe Talbott, orchestrated a campaign to urge Christopher to reconsider, which he did, reenergized by the notion that the president had been willing to accept his resignation and had already turned to Powell. He decided to stay on.
But the episode taking place in late 1994 was a good example of how worn down they all were. Six months later, in the middle of 1995, still pitted against hostile forces from every direction, Clinton appeared to be very much on the defensive. He remained something of an ill-defined figure politically, perhaps more accurately defined by his enemies than by his friends; that is, his enemies seemed surer of what was in his heart, and what was his intent, than his friends. Some more traditional political analysts had begun to study Clinton’s moves and failings not in ideological terms as to whether he was of the left or the right of center, but in generational terms. As the first baby boomer president, he was bright and talented but, they believed, spoiled. Like many boomers his expectations outweighed his sense of obligation. His talents—and his charm—were so considerable that they always outweighed his faults. When he disappointed people, they always forgave him, and in time he came to expect that forgiveness. When things went wrong, he was unusually slow, even in private, to accept responsibility himself. The belief that what he represented generationally was critical to his political behavior was shared by some people who worked with him daily. Tony Lake and George Stephanopoulos would often talk about the difficulty they had in dealing with the president, deciding they bookended the boomer generation, Lake just a bit too old and Stephanopoulos a bit too young.
It was against this largely negative political background that the news from Srebrenica was so damaging, a sign of the administration’s impotence that could readily translate into a political handicap in 1996. Bosnia had not become an all-consuming issue; it was still peripheral on national television, not yet given a daily network dosage. But a number of the president’s top advisers had begun to argue that Bosnia was becoming not just a moral problem but potentially a domestic political one as well. In a way, that group now included, like it or not, Tony Lake, who had from the start pointed out that the failure to come up with a viable policy on Bosnia was a cancer that could destroy the administration’s entire foreign policy. Clearly the cancer had begun to spread.
Lake did not connect Bosnia to the coming 1996 election. He did not need to; the consequences were self-evident to the president and everyone around him. In Lake’s opinion there had been an equally depressing forerunner of what Bosnia might become. Lake had been Carter’s head of Policy Planning in 1979 when the Iranian hostage crisis had taken place, and Lake later came to understand that it had sounded, without anyone realizing it at first, the death knell of the Carter presidency because it had underlined other more vaguely defined weaknesses of his administration. Some close friends of Lake’s thought that, among all the others in the upper level of the NSC world, he had been bruised the most by the hostage crisis, perhaps believing that he and the people around him in Policy Planning should have come up with some solution, some formula that would have ended the crisis and saved the president. The rest of them had suffered the difficulty of trying to disengage from the crisis and had seen its catastrophic impact on the president’s reelection hopes, but they had eventually accepted the outcome. Every once in a while you are hit by a runaway freight train; that was life. Lake among his peers was considered to have taken the failure quite personally, as if by having been more prescient he might have stopped that train.
As for Clinton, he was beginning to feel pressure from yet another direction. Bob Dole, the Republican Senate majority leader, a likely 1996 presidential candidate and a Bosnian activist, was advocating a resolution that called for a unilateral lifting of the arms embargo. He appeared to have the votes in both the House and the Senate to pass the resolution, and in case the president vetoed it, the votes to override the veto. Some of those votes would stem from genuine repugnance about what was happening in Bosnia—for Dole had become passionate on the subject of the Serb crimes—but others were more likely to be partisan and motivated by the smell of presidential blood.
It was at this point that Jacques Chirac, the new president of France, arrived on the scene. He was a former French army officer who had volunteered for service in Algeria during the bitter colonial war, had been seriously wounded, and thought of that experience as the most important in his life. He was a force not to be underestimated—the nickname for him in France was the Bulldozer. Because of his own service and the bravery shown by his comrades in a difficult and unpopular war, he had a strong Gallic sense of how French soldiers should acquit themselves in uniform. He was furious about the humiliations being inflicted on French troops in Bosnia and their passivity in a moment of crisis. On the first day that Chirac took office, photos were published of French peacekeepers who had been captured and were being used by the Serbs as hostages; some of them had been tied to trees, some chained to Serb artillery pieces. He absolutely exploded at the idea that people in the Balkans, whom the French were trying to help, could do that to his men. “I will not accept this!” he told his aides. “You can kill French soldiers! You can wound them! But you cannot humiliate them! That will end today! France will not accept that! We will change the rules of the game!” Either he was going to beef up the French contingent on the ground and give it new, far more aggressive rules of engagement, or he was going to pull it out. But from now on they would behave with the grandeur and bravery that the French expected of their soldiers—the nobility and courage shown by the last defenders of Dien Bien Phu in French Indochina.
Almost immediately Chirac issued new orders to the French generals in charge in Bosnia—orders that went outside the UN command system. By chance the Serbs, dressed in captured UN uniforms, had just slipped into Sarajevo and captured one of the bridges there. Chirac tongue-lashed the commanding French officers over that incident. His final words before he hung up were “You have twenty-four hours to retake the bridge.” They did, though two French soldiers were killed in the recapture. Chirac was a genuine hawk who wanted to do more but was willing, if that was not possible, to do less. He would no longer accept the status quo. He talked with John Major about the creation of a Rapid Reaction Force, an elite French-British unit, far better armed with much heavier weapons, which, with American air support and helicopters, could move quickly and strike the Serbs with genuine force if they violated any more agreements.
Mitterrand, by contrast, had been a man of the old order, who had grown up with a knowledge of the French-Serb alliance in World War I, and of Serbia as a partner and ally during World War II, in an alliance created by mutual distrust of the Germans, and a need for Europe’s Slavs—Serbs and Russians—to help counterbalance German expansionism. Of the European leaders, no one had been more sympathetic to the Serb cause. He had always opposed expanding the war: “Don’t add war to war,” he counseled in a stance which had greatly helped the Serbs.9 On several occasions when it had appeared that the allies might be moving against the Serbs because of some new outrage, Mitterrand had protected their interests.
Chirac’s defining experience had been in Algeria, not World War II. He did not fear Germany in the new Europe, and he felt neither geopolitical dependence upon nor moral kinship with former Slavic allies who were inflicting such terrible crimes on their fellow countrymen. Chirac saw an additional reason to act. What the Serbs were doing was cruel and unspeakable, but it also threatened to destroy something new and noble just being born, the concept of a unified Europe that would reject fratricidal violence and fuse its great energies into positive pursuits. In the new Europe, the senseless shedding of blood in the past could no longer be a justification for the senseless shedding of blood in the present and the future. No one knew this better than the French, who had made their own painful reconciliation with the Germans. Soon after assuming the presidency, Chirac was at a dinner of European leaders when Andreas Papandreou, the Greek prime minister, began to defend the Serbs’ actions. The Greeks, for religious reasons, had been steadfast allies of the Serbs in NATO deliberations. Papandreou spoke of the dilemma of the Serbs scattered throughout so large and unwieldy a nation where in some areas they were a minority and were now merely defending their Orthodox faith. Chirac immediately cut him short: “Don’t speak to me of any religious war. These people are without any faith, without any sense of law. They are terrorists.”10
In mid-June 1995, not yet a month in office, Chirac flew to Washington on his way to the G-7 meeting to be held a few days later in Halifax. He met with Clinton and spoke of the need for a tougher line in the Balkans. They could not change the UN mandate, he said, but they could add their own troops to the mandate, use the Rapid Reaction Force (RRF), and in time NATO could end this humiliation. Clinton was largely in agreement and sent him to the Hill to meet with Dole and Gingrich. It had been a helpful visit, a sign to the critics in Congress that the gap between Washington and the Europeans was narrowing.
From there Chirac flew to Halifax for the G-7 meeting, where he surprised everyone by placing Bosnia, though it was not included in the agenda, on the table. His intensity caught everyone unprepared. How could they, he asked the other heads of state, even pretend to talk about conditions in Europe and the world without mentioning Bosnia? He was concerned not just about national security or Balkan atrocities or the future of Europe, but also about the glory that was France. Pure beau geste, said one slightly irritated American. If Chirac surprised the Americans with the immediacy of his call, he surprised his European peers even more. In the past they had been quite uneasy about the Balkans and glad to suppress the subject if at all possible. Chirac instantly became the center of media attention, and photos of him taken in Halifax appeared on many front pages. But perhaps the most interesting thing about his statements was their effect on the president of the United States. Clinton was more than a little jealous of the French president. When Chirac suggested in one of his speeches that “the position of leader of the free world is vacant,” it had touched home, and some of the top people in the bureaucracy picked up on it as a way of making the president more proactive on Bosnia. As Clinton had been jealous of Colin Powell’s exceptional standing with the American people—unelected and yet revered, with the media having little interest in finding warts—he was now showing signs of being envious of Chirac. In the past two and a half years, he had tried to push the Europeans forward and it had never occurred to him that he might be challenged as the leader of the Western coalition against the Serbs and that another Westerner might become, of all things, more of a leader on this issue. Yet it was happening now, led by a man who was not only newer to his job than Clinton but the head of a much smaller and less powerful country.
Chirac’s decision to oppose the Serbs changed the rules of the game in Bosnia. “It is easy for the Americans to underestimate how important that decision was in terms of Europe,” said one senior foreign policy analyst. “Chirac was choosing a new and as yet uncertain Europe over the traditional past, dark and bloody though that past was.” It also gave Clinton a stronger hand if he chose to authorize the use of American ground troops and airpower. Instead of the British and the French being vehemently opposed to an upgraded policy, the president now had an ally who already had troops on the ground and was willing, under the right circumstances, to use more force.
In the view of those European leaders who wanted to escalate the policy in Bosnia, it had always been like a poker game in which the Americans never quite got to the table. They had watched from the sidelines as if the stakes were not high enough for them, and they talked loudly about the need for a bigger game, one worthy of them to play. They had kibitzed and criticized the size of the existing pots, the slowness with which the hands were being played, but so far they had not deigned to sit down, put up any money, and play a hand themselves. The American position, much to the irritation of many Europeans, was mostly posturing; the Americans could safely call for some degree of escalation, sure that the Europeans would block them. Now that was over. “With Mitterrand in power the energy level coming out of France had been, on a scale of ten, about a three,” said Peter Tarnoff, the number three man in the State Department. “With the arrival of Chirac it went to about a nine.” With France a much more aggressive player, it put increased pressure on the British to take a more aggressive line.
It also added to Clinton’s frustration. To him Bosnia was hardly like Vietnam to Johnson, or even the Iran hostage crisis to Carter. It was more peripheral; it had the capacity to cause damage, but his entire presidency was not riding on it. No American troops were there yet, which meant that he was easier to reach and listened more readily than Johnson ever had. His ego, unlike Johnson’s in 1967 as Vietnam began to cast a shadow on his political future, was not yet a factor. But now as the horror of Srebrenica was being revealed, the stakes were going up and his attention was gradually becoming less episodic. It was the simplest of equations: the more open the sore, the less it was about foreign policy and the more it was about presidential effectiveness. Thus it was tied to his political future and he had to pay more attention. He was still quick to blame others, people on his staff who had never been able to give him the policy he wanted. As for the Europeans, he said, they were bumbling around out there, unable to end the thing themselves and yet preventing him from using American airpower. They were whiny, he liked to say, an obstacle to a real policy.
But he was beginning to feel cornered. The French were making their play under Chirac, and that was both an irritant and an asset. The people in the White House talked privately about Chirac and whether he was all bravado. In the Congress, meanwhile, Dole was continuing to put together a veto-proof majority for lifting the arms embargo, which might trigger a politically dangerous chain reaction. If we broke the embargo unilaterally, it would threaten the alliance, with the possibility that the Europeans would decide to pull out. We had already committed armed American helicopters to withdraw UN troops from the most hazardous venues in Bosnia. That would have to be done under the sights of formidable Serb weaponry that, the administration had to assume, was zeroed in on all possible landing zones. We would have to use as many as twenty-five thousand Americans in an exposed and difficult rescue mission. Even worse, as Tony Lake warned, it would take place in the context of a defeat—all that risk, all that danger, with no upside.
The story in Bosnia, then, was in transition from being a foreign one to a domestic one, like Vietnam—though Vietnam had always been a bigger story with so many Americans fighting there. But there were dangers here. The greater the tragedy and the more despicable the atrocities in Bosnia, the more likely the networks and the leading newspapers were to report it, and the more likely it was to come up in press conferences. Clinton was shrewd enough to know that a constituency for action in the Balkans was still relatively small. But it was articulate, morally driven, and an odd amalgam of different people and groups who would in the past have been strange political bedfellows. It existed on both the left and the right, liberal critics of the war in Vietnam like Tony Lewis of the Times, and neoconservatives, like Jeane Kirkpatrick, who could normally be depended upon to be critical of each other. It was cerebral and motivated by something relatively rare in politics, a historical if not an actual memory of the Holocaust. That someone like Lewis and others who had been Vietnam doves were now Bosnian hawks irritated Clinton greatly. “What would they have me do?” he asked. “What the fuck would they have me do?”11
If these people and groups were not yet large, they were articulate and influential far beyond their numbers, particularly in the print media. They also had a tendency to be slightly ahead of the curve; if they were critical of Clinton in mid-1995, might not their numbers increase by mid-1996? They could not swing an election, but they had the ability to define an issue in what might be a fateful way; moreover, they were the kind of people Clinton badly wanted as well-wishers. They had the capacity to define him and his presidency as he most certainly did not want to be defined—as a man of talent and promise but of little substance or fulfillment. They could wound him severely because many of the things they might say about him on Bosnia were not only true, but might also extend to other aspects of his presidency.
Clinton knew that few Americans had passionate feelings one way or another about the Serbs, Croats, or Muslims, and that the politics of the Balkans were either too remote or too complicated to understand. But a foreign policy crisis that revealed the president of the United States as either passive or politically impotent was quite another thing—potentially devastating. More quickly than anyone else, Clinton was beginning to see that his presidency might be at stake. That realization brought about dramatic change in the White House. The president, like it or not, was becoming immersed in Balkan policy, and he was turning desperately—and often angrily—to the very people he had kept at a distance for the last two and a half years. Tony Lake was now briefing the president every day on foreign policy, and most of the news about Bosnia was bad. It was, Lake later said, as if he walked into each meeting with a giant B for Bosnia painted on his forehead. Finally, Clinton’s national security adviser had the kind of access that his predecessors had enjoyed.
Still, they did not have a policy. In mid-June, pre-Srebrenica, when Chirac visited the White House, the Clinton team met to go over the outline of what the president should say to this formidable new player about Bosnia. But even with renewed energy, there was clearly no forward movement. The divisions within the American government were as great as ever, and the roadblocks that prevented it from doing anything more active were still sizable. Clinton was infuriated by the images of U.S. helplessness that had been shown on network television, and his aides witnessed some of the worst of his private rages.
They desperately needed to have a policy, the president told his people at one meeting, “or we’re just going to be kicking the can down the road again. Right now we’ve got a situation, we’ve got no clear mission, no one’s in control of events.”12 Then he went on a tirade complaining bitterly about the decision to put troops on the ground, where their hands were tied, and where they themselves presented such easy targets. “The rules of engagement are crazy!” he said. Then Gore spoke about the mounting pressure in Congress led by Dole to lift the arms embargo. Bosnia, the vice president said, echoing what Christopher had said two years earlier, was “the issue from hell.”