Nothing characterized the universal—and highly fluid—nature of the modern American social-political experience better than the changeover from Colin Powell to John Shalikashvili in one of the most important and sensitive jobs in public life. It was hard to think of any other great power at any other moment in history that would turn so powerful a position over to men whose backgrounds were, for the highly critical position they held, so countertraditional. Neither man, unlike top-level army officers of the past, was a West Point graduate. But that was just the beginning. If Powell, the son of black Jamaican immigrants and a product of the Bronx and CCNY’s ROTC program, was an unusual choice for chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, then John Shali, as he liked to be called, was quite possibly an even more improbable high-ranking American military official with a personal history no less remarkable.
He was a product of the chaos and wreckage of modern Europe, an immigrant who had found sanctuary in America when he arrived in 1952 at the age of sixteen and who learned much of his English from watching John Wayne movies. His father, Dmitri Shalikashvili, was from the Soviet republic of Georgia. His mother, Maria Ruediger, was a Polish national of half-German extraction. His father had fought from 1919 to 1921 with the White Russian army during the Russian civil war. When that was over, he had settled in Poland, married, and trained officers for the Polish cavalry. That was where John Shalikashvili was born in 1936. Dmitri Shalikashvili fought against the Germans early in World War II with the ill-fated Polish cavalry during those heartbreaking days when the most permanent image of the time was of horse cavalry riding valiantly off to counter the mighty German panzer divisions that spearheaded the first great blitzkrieg. He was captured and taken prisoner by the Germans, but his wife, who had influential relatives in Germany, soon helped secure his release. For much of the war, the family had lived in Warsaw. Almost sixty years later, as chairman of the Joint Chiefs, John Shalikashvili had visited Yad Vashem in Jerusalem, and at this memorial to the Holocaust, to the surprise of his hosts, he had broken into tears because of the memories it evoked of the dehumanization of the Jews in the Warsaw ghetto, which he had witnessed as a boy.
After his release from prison, Dmitri Shalikashvili then served with Georgian forces fighting under the German flag, hoping one day for Georgian independence from the Soviets. Known as the Georgian Legion, it was based first along the Normandy coast to repel the Allied invasion. When the Allied forces eventually poured through, he was transferred to another unit, a Georgian battalion under the command of the Waffen SS, fighting in Italy. When John Shalikashvili, during his confirmation hearings in Washington, some fifty years later, learned for the first time of his father’s part in this unit, he was stunned and devastated by the news. The rest of the family had been living in Warsaw when the Red Army, having turned the tide of the war at Stalingrad, began to advance to the west. Somehow the Shalikashvilis survived the bombardment of the city and stayed ahead of the Russians. The family found its way to Bavaria, where they had wealthy relatives, and where they were miraculously reunited with Dmitri Shalikashvili, who had survived the Italian campaign, had been captured by the British, and was finally released in 1946. Good novels have been written about odysseys less tortuous than this.
Six years later, through the help of relatives (who kept the days when Dmitri Shalikashvili had served under the SS command a secret) and the Episcopalian Church, the family migrated to the United States, taking root in Peoria, Illinois, where Dmitri Shalikashvili went to work as an accountant in a utility company and Maria as a clerk in a bank. Their son John did well in high school and won a scholarship at Bradley, the local university. There he joined the air force ROTC, hoping to become a pilot, but was hampered because of poor eyesight. Soon after graduation in 1958, he received his draft notice and went into the service. He did well in the army from the start and was soon sent to officer candidate school at Fort Sill. Like Colin Powell before him, he found that he liked the army, and though, unlike Powell, he probably had a broader range of possibilities in civilian life, he was a soldier’s son and decided to make the army his career. He went to Vietnam late in 1968 as an adviser to ARVN forces in the area just south of the DMZ.
Shalikashvili was ambitious, hardworking, and, because of his unusual background, in many ways more worldly than his contemporaries. His vision always went beyond America’s borders. The army schooled him well; he picked up a master’s degree in international affairs from George Washington and attended the requisite number of advanced training courses. What he found, again like Powell, was that he was good at being a soldier. It was a comfortable way of life, unusually welcoming to uncredentialed but talented newcomers who might, in this more iconoclastic era, bring greater respect for authority than the comparably talented children of more traditional and successful American families. He did very well in the post-Vietnam years. He was smart, paid great attention to detail, and estimated the strengths and weaknesses of the people around him with considerable skill. He always turned out to be more intelligent and efficient than those above him thought he was going to be, and with his knowledge of languages—German, Polish, and Russian—he was particularly valuable during his tours in Europe. There he had performed brilliantly as deputy commander of American forces, a three-star slot, during the Gulf War.
Just as that war was about to start, Colin Powell and Norman Schwarzkopf decided to increase the U.S. forces in the Gulf with the addition of some seventy thousand men from the Seventh Corps, which was based in Europe. They also decided on a complete exchange of armored vehicles, from the outdated tanks already in the Gulf to the more modern ones in Germany. It was a monstrous, last-minute logistical assignment, for Christmas was coming up, but Shalikashvili, working closely with German railway officials, managed to move almost all those men and that equipment on the German rail system without impeding normal transportation for local citizens. Using the highways and the barge system in addition to the trains, he got the job done on time. The deadline pressures were enormous because the entire invasion was dependent on everything coming together at just the right moment. What he achieved was nothing less than a military tour de force. His superior in Brussels, General Jack Galvin, who was a four-star, thought that probably no officer in the United States army could have done it as well.
Up until then no one had thought of Shalikashvili as an army superstar. Part of the reason was his last name, which was long and difficult to pronounce. Another part was the way he spoke, with a slight foreign accent; he had learned his English not only from the movies but from antiquated textbooks, which gave his speech an old-fashioned formality. Moreover, when he spoke, his features did not have the easy flex and nuanced movements that signaled various changes of mood that a native son might have had. It made him seem not merely more formal than he was, but also perhaps a bit heavier in style and thought. Though a surprisingly supple man, he made a stolid first impression. So he was reputed to be a good officer, a solid citizen who could get the job done, but not a probable candidate for a top job. In the pressure cooker of the pre–Gulf War logistical preparations, however, his star had finally shone, and no one was more aware of it than Colin Powell. In those days Powell regularly called Jack Galvin in Brussels and would pick up on what Shalikashvili was doing. The admiration in Powell’s voice grew all the time, and he would say, “Shali is looking good, isn’t he? I mean really looking good,” and Galvin would agree.
At the end of the Gulf War, Shalikashvili performed another difficult task. The Kurds, encouraged by the American army’s victory, had taken over a number of villages in northern Iraq, but the Iraqi army, no longer opposed by the Americans, had soon gone after them, blasting away at their villages with artillery at point-blank range. Suddenly a major tragedy loomed. The Kurds had fled into the mountains, perhaps as many as six or seven hundred thousand of them, it was believed, and their condition was desperate. They were without food and water and, in many cases, any shelter. Various relief agencies estimated that they might be dying at the rate of a thousand a day. The Turks barred their entry at the Turkish border—having already absorbed as many Kurdish refugees as they could—so the potential for a humanitarian tragedy grew even larger. The most pressing problem was getting food and water to the refugees, and because he thought it was primarily an airdrop, Galvin assigned an air force two-star named Jim Jameson to run the operation. But soon the mission deepened to become an immensely complicated matter of moving the Kurds out of the mountains into refugee camps where we could protect them and, if need be, hold off the Iraqi army. At that point Galvin switched assignments and put Shalikashvili over Jameson.
Shalikashvili was able to move the Kurds through the mountains to new camps—tent cities—and he created safe zones that he demanded the Iraqi forces respect. Then through deft negotiations with local authorities (and eventually through Saddam Hussein), he enabled the Kurds to return to their villages. The mission, thought Galvin, had been both dangerous and explosive. Finally, fearing that if the new refugee camps were too sturdy, they would become permanent, “like creating another Gaza Strip,” in Shalikashvili’s own words, he set strict time limits on residency and deliberately made the camps impermanent in order to funnel the Kurds back to their original villages. Some refugee authorities believed that this so-called Operation Provide Comfort saved as many as six hundred thousand lives.
It was a textbook example of the kind of crisis a high-level American officer now had to be prepared to deal with. It also was probably the making of Shalikashvili, the assignment that lifted him above the level of many talented contemporaries and put him on the fastest military track of all. “It was an extraordinary achievement to save that many refugees, and it required exceptional skills and talents,” said Mort Abramowitz, then the American ambassador to Turkey, who had served before in Thailand and therefore had an uncommon knowledge of refugee problems and was also an exceptionally tough grader of high-level public servants. “Shali had to protect them from the Iraqis, he had to deal with the Turkish government, which he did with a combination of toughness and flexibility, and then he dealt with the Iraqi military and government with the same combination of qualities. And he did it all, and he moved them back to their villages in three weeks. There was about him something unusual, a sensitivity to refugee problems you did not normally expect to find in military men, a genuinely profound humanitarian streak. He was a superb diplomat as well as an excellent soldier in a very, very difficult moment.”
Powell was also impressed. “Shali’s looking very good these days,” he told Galvin during one of their phone calls as the Kurd refugee crisis came to an end. “I know what you’re going to do now,” Galvin said. “You’re going to tell me that you want him back.” That was, in fact, true and Powell brought Shalikashvili to Washington to be his assistant, a powerful and highly visible slot for a three-star. The job as secretary to Powell’s staff was a major promotion, not so much in terms of the military ladder, but in terms of exposure to the high-level world of Washington—on the Hill and in the administration, where Powell had excelled in his own career and was so forceful a figure.
Shalikashvili’s sensitivity to the plight of refugees was genuine, and it was to be a consistent part of his career. Some of his friends thought it reflected two characteristics that set him apart from most military men at his level. The first was his awareness of what it was like when the world that you had believed was yours had essentially disappeared off the face of the earth and you were nationless, homeless, jobless, dependent completely on the kindness of strangers—and foreigners. The other was an immigrant’s special appreciation for America and a belief that this country, not just in the eyes of its own citizens, but in the eyes of much of the world, was the place the least fortunate turned to as the court of last resort. These views were never articulated, but he was to show great sympathy when dealing with refugee problems and an acute awareness of the broad new role that the American military might play in refugee situations. What some officials in refugee work had hoped to find in Henry Kissinger they found instead in John Shalikashvili.
Shalikashvili went back to Europe in 1992, this time as CINC-Europe, and SACEUR, the job from which Galvin had just retired, and a four-star slot. For many Americans a top assignment in Europe was prized because that was where the big boys always went. But for Shalikashvili it had extra importance because it had once been his home. He was far more comfortable there than other Americans and had more genuine curiosity and interest in the region.
When it was time to replace Powell, Shalikashvili was on the chairman’s short list. The other leading candidate was Joe Hoar, who was coming off being the CENTO commander. Hoar was the Pentagon’s favorite, thought to be stronger, if need be, in standing up for the Pentagon’s traditional sense of its territory in any conflict with civilians. When Shalikashvili was interviewed by Clinton, the president posed a number of questions and at the end of their meeting asked him if he wanted to say anything. Yes, Shalikashvili replied. He did not want the job as chairman because he felt he could serve the country better as commander in Europe. He knew the terrain of Europe well, he knew all the top military and political leaders, and he had a feel for both the languages and the cultures.
Shalikashvili would be Clinton’s choice. Probably what catapulted him to the head of the class was his handling of the Kurd refugees. His appointment was to mark a critical change in the cast of characters on the American side in terms of Balkan policy. Shalikashvili was not yet more hawkish on Bosnia than Powell, but at least unlike Powell he did not have a doctrine of his own. The differences between the two men were a matter of tone. Shalikashvili was more likely to be amenable under certain conditions to the civilians, whereas Powell was more likely to be arbitrary. Powell stood so high on the landscape that his shadow had inevitably fallen over and diminished the Clinton people, who had arrived with marginal reputations and confidence and were always aware of his reputation, his achievements, and his confidence.
There was that something else about Shalikashvili, the top people in the Pentagon believed, that the president, always so nuanced personally and politically, would have been quick to pick up on. He would have recognized that Shali’s immigrant patriotism, a patriotism perhaps a bit more innocent than that of generals born here, might represent in the ongoing intricate byplay between the White House and the Pentagon, in which so far the military seemed to hold all the cards, a small advantage for the White House. Years later, a number of civilians who had worked in the Bush and Clinton administrations and wanted to escalate the American role in Bosnia would look at the appointment of Shalikashvili as an important step in the slow turning around of the existing policy, a step that had at first not appeared to be a step.
It was daunting for Shalikashvili to replace probably the most respected public figure in America. Shalikashvili was hardly well-known. Henry Kissinger, quick to put down almost any high foreign policy choice by a Democratic administration, told friends “that there were ten others who would have been better choices.” Shalikashvili was himself aware of his limitations, that by contrast with Powell he was, to say the least, charismatically challenged. Powell was a tall, striking figure with a great command presence and a formidable capacity to use language. Shalikashvili in the beginning was the exact opposite, the soldier unknown except to his colleagues. He was not a striking figure, although he was greatly admired by the troops who had served under him for his straightness and earthiness. There was always the problem of that name. In all the years he went before the Senate Armed Services Committee, Strom Thurmond, the senior Republican, apparently never once pronounced it correctly.
Shalikashvili knew that in terms of public appeal he was operating out of a deficit position. He was quite awkward at first, and his handlers had to encourage him to make appearances. But people gradually began to recognize the other qualities that Galvin and Powell had seen long ago. He was never going to be the Washington player Powell had been. But he was smart, indeed quietly erudite, he was modest—his ego was never in the way—he was an attentive listener, he used the people around him well, and he was an uncommonly good, thoughtful human being. Tony Lake remembered the time they had visited American troops in Haiti at Christmas in 1994. Shalikashvili was with a group of elite soldiers on December 24 and his words to them were quite simple: “I know you’re all tough warriors, and I know that sometimes some of you feel that being here is something of a disappointment and that this is not exactly your kind of mission. But when you wake up tomorrow, I want you to look in the mirror and say to yourselves, ‘I think I saved a lot of lives today—I think I’ve done something of value.’ You have a right to feel good about yourselves and I hope you do.” Lake thought it a quiet but eloquent performance, reminding these young men and women that elite soldiers can save lives in different ways.
Shalikashvili was not at first proactive on Bosnia, so no tangible change in the policy occurred when he replaced Powell. Yet to the Clinton people, he was a breath of fresh air. In their view, he was more approachable and helpful than his predecessor. He listened and was far more flexible. In contrast to many of the people serving in the White House and the NSC, too young for World War II and even for Vietnam, whose own combat experience was largely limited to an ugly political campaign or two, and whose knowledge of the rest of the world came from vacations, he had lived an uncommon life. The more time the civilians spent with him, the more they found to like. There had been a marvelously revealing moment in September 1994, when the end of the Cold War was celebrated by the retirement of the famed Berlin Brigade, the storied American combat unit that had stood duty in Berlin, a symbol of America’s commitment to the defense of Europe and a reminder that if its soldiers had to fight one day, then thousands of other Americans would soon follow. A number of high-ranking American officials had gathered for what was an important ceremony, among them Perry, Christopher, Shalikashvili, and Holbrooke. Waiting for the ceremony to begin, they were comparing notes about when each of them had first visited Berlin. Apparently the earliest visit had been in 1961 just before the hated wall went up. Then Shalikashvili spoke and trumped them all: “It was 1943. During the war. My father brought me here.” He was, Holbrooke thought, a fascinating hybrid, a “mixture of the culture and knowledge and sense of the past of Mittel Europe with the strength and the openness and optimism of America.”
By the time Shalikashvili became head of the Joint Chiefs in the fall of 1993, Bosnia, the issue that had seemed so manageable in the summer of 1992 when he had returned to Europe as the American commander, had grown completely out of control and NATO was being pulled into a deepening crisis, in danger of failing the first real test it had ever been given. At first Shalikashvili had not been eager to move on Bosnia. Quite the reverse. He was as apprehensive as Powell about deepening America’s involvement, and the Pentagon was hardly an eager participant in the search for a new policy. Again like his predecessor, he was disdainful of those who thought all you had to do was unleash American airpower in a lift and strike operation. He knew that a number of people in the administration, the Congress, and Democratic Party circles were enamored of that strategy. But lift and strike, he believed, was foreign policy on the cheap—that is, without the risk of American lives. We would supply the airpower and perhaps some arms for the Bosnian Muslims. But the use of nothing but our high technology, Shalikashvili thought, was a nutty idea, one put forward only by civilians who had no knowledge of how complicated it was to coordinate airpower with ground troops.
In truth, he believed it to be one of the most complicated of all military operations, almost impossible to accomplish without people who were well-trained in tactical air support. That had been true in World War II with prop planes, but now with jet fighters and bombers that flew at record speeds, it was even more difficult. The Bosnian Muslims would be ill-trained to play their part, he was sure, and the language problem would be appalling. There would be an inevitable incremental escalation, a small step at first, a demand that we send in American air support liaison men. Just a handful, of course. But if American troops were used as ground observers for the airpower, they would be at risk and make marvelous targets for the Serbs. If they were killed or captured—and the Serbs would not be shy about parading them around Belgrade in front of television cameras—the whole operation might collapse in a day or two, given the lack of popular and congressional support, and the thinness of support in the administration itself. It could easily become a repeat of Somalia. Lift and strike sounded great, he thought, foreign policy at a bargain price—and always painless. So he had dragged his feet.
But the horror of Srebrenica could not be ignored. The Americans were moving toward a new policy, which was being driven in the American bureaucracy for the first time by the president. Under these circumstances Shalikashvili and Perry now climbed on board, both of them accepting the need for a changed policy, moved by the belief that Serb aggression could no longer be tolerated, and that beyond the immediacy of the genocide, the consequences for NATO, for Europe, and for American policy throughout the world had grown in quantum fashion. Srebrenica was about genocide, but it was also about the very fabric of the West. Shalikashvili began to speak of this period, on the occasions when he returned to the Pentagon from meetings at the White House, as a defining moment in the Clinton presidency, and he did it as a means of pushing his colleagues to drive the new policy further. Not everyone at the Pentagon was pleased or completely on board, and there was in certain circles a belief that the civilians had gotten to Shali. These people did not like hearing that they ought to act because it was a defining moment for a president many of them distrusted.
If it had not been for Srebrenica, with the Serbs so brutally and callously overplaying their hand, Shalikashvili thought, they might never have been called on their aggression. But the fall of Srebrenica changed everything. It offended the Western nations and in some odd way made the tragedy personal. That was especially true of the French. The advent of Chirac gave Shalikashvili the beginning of leverage with the allies. Chirac had suggested that they use elite French and British troops in a heliborne assault to retake the town. The Americans were dubious. The risks were great, the upside in case they were successful relatively small. Shalikashvili had run into a badly shaken French colleague immediately after a sharp dressing-down administered by Chirac, and there was no doubt that the French were now more willing to accept the use of force.
It was at this juncture that Shalikashvili made an important point. To ensure that a helicopter assault like this was viable, the Americans would have to conduct a massive bombing raid to take out the Serb air defense system. If that was true, why bother sending in the choppers on a mission that had marginal military value? Why not go directly to the massive air campaign instead, make it the centerpiece of the operation, and take out the Serbs’ air defense system, thereby sending them the first of what might be a series of messages? It was a very good question and helped create a bridge over the issues that had divided the allies for so long.
As Shalikashvili pressed this argument, on a trip to London with a small group of colleagues, he found the Europeans still somewhat reluctant, but he also sensed, post-Srebrenica, some cracks in the wall. Then they all went to The Hague to continue the discussion, where he again used the arguments about the future of NATO and the alliance. They could not continue what they were doing, which loomed as a total failure of the alliance on its first real test. If NATO could not deal with this crisis, the Americans asked, if it failed here on European soil, and it was on the brink of failure as they met, what was the purpose of the alliance? Why meet at all? Therefore they had to use airpower, and it could no longer be the little stuff known as pinpricks. It had to be a systematic campaign so that the Serbs would feel some real pain. By the time of the Hague sessions, the Russians were represented, not by a Russian defense minister, but by an ambassador, and they hated Shalikashvili’s proposal. But he thought that the French, the British, and the Dutch were coming along; and when he returned from Europe, he began to believe that there was at last a chance to change the policy.
A few days later, Shalikashvili returned to London with Bill Perry and Warren Christopher to a hastily summoned NATO meeting. The turning point, Perry would later call it. There the three men pressured the allies to accept the concept of the use of massive airpower not merely if the Serbs attacked Gorazde or a place like it, but to strike when they seemed ready to mount an assault. They also urged a simplification of the control mechanism used when airpower was to be called in, to take command away if at all possible from Boutros-Ghali and his people, who were regarded as compromised, and get it into the hands of NATO people, primarily its battlefield commanders. Their mission was successful, though it would take some time to work out the exact control system and a number of phone calls from Christopher to Boutros-Ghali to make him give up his key. But for the first time there was an essential agreement on a new and more vigorous air campaign and a simplified, less politicized command structure. A great deal more muscle—so far potential muscle, but muscle nonetheless—had been added to the alliance’s threats, and it had been more NATO-ized than UN-ized.
Defense Secretary Bill Perry made a favorable impression on his European colleagues from the start. He was the most admirable of public servants, regarded by his peers much as Brent Scowcroft had been by his. Once back in late 1992 when Tony Lake was working on the foreign policy transition team with Sandy Berger, just before the Clinton people took office, they had discussed qualities that made the ideal public official. They divided potential candidates into four essential categories: talented but high maintenance, talented and low maintenance, not very talented but low maintenance, and not very talented but high maintenance. The rarest person of all, the perfect specimen, was high value, low maintenance. These were talented people with great ego control and a shared sense of common purpose. What they did was not about getting publicity, but about the value of the act itself.
On that scale, Lake, like almost everyone else in the administration, regarded Perry as one of the ablest people to join the Clinton team. Perry had helped stabilize the administration on defense issues and stop the hemorrhaging at the Pentagon. Clinton got him on the third try, after the tragedy of Les Aspin and the debacle of Bobby Inman. Perry was the rarest of public figures who had operated at that level of the Pentagon—a man much respected and fair-minded, with almost no enemies. His confirmation by the Senate was unanimous. He had a low profile outside of the building, but was greatly admired within it. He never had to show that the decisions that were made were his or that he was responsible for any victories, or that he could, if necessary, eat colonels and generals for breakfast. The chiefs not only admired him, they knew how hard it was to fool him. If he was not always on their side, he always played straight with them, which was important.
Perry understood how the Pentagon worked, and he was, unlike most of the other senior Clinton people, up to speed from the start. He had served an earlier tour in the Pentagon under Harold Brown in the Carter administration as undersecretary for research and engineering—the Pentagon’s high-tech man. His background was in science—he had a Ph.D. in mathematics from Penn State—and he had spent a lifetime in the world of high technology working with defense-connected industries in California. Much of his time in the eighties before he returned to government had been with Hambrecht and Quist, an investment firm based in San Francisco, which specialized in midwifing the initial public offerings of high-technology firms to potential customers. Unlike most civilians, he knew more about the new high-technology weapons than almost anyone else in the shop. It was a source of great strength in running the Pentagon, but he never exploited it, never flaunted it in front of the uniformed military as others might have. It was simply there and meant that he could not be fooled about weapons systems, an area that tended to befuddle most high-level civilians.
He was older than the president and the bright young people around him, and he did not seem to be in as much of a hurry as everyone else. He was also more given than most of the people in the administration to old-fashioned courtesies—as if to get respect from others you first had to grant them respect. In truth he was perilously close to being of the World War II generation, having enlisted in the army after graduating from high school in 1945. He had served as an enlisted man and went on to Stanford for his undergraduate degree before getting his doctorate in math from Penn State. The favorable impression Perry made on his European colleagues would be instrumental in changing Balkan policy in July 1995. He had time for everyone. He kept in touch with anyone who mattered or who might matter, even if it was just to check in once a week on the phone. If there was a meeting in Europe for the defense ministers, he would have dinner with them one night, the Baltic representatives the next, and the representatives of countries hoping to join NATO the third. He had dealt with many of them in the past, first in the Carter years and then in his first year of the Clinton administration, and he had never tried to muscle them or pull rank. To European officials often weary of being pushed around by brash young Americans who did not even know they were brash, he was a welcome change, a high-level American sensitive to the feelings of people from smaller, less powerful countries.
At one European summit, Clinton, as was his wont, had been twenty minutes late, which to the other heads of state, already familiar with American arrogance, meant he was very late. It was insulting to his colleagues because they were supposed to be there on time, but the president of the United States could, if he so chose, arrive late. Helmut Kohl and Jacques Chirac were fuming. It was Bill Perry who sensed the escalating danger of continental distemper and smoothed things over until the president, in his own good time, arrived.
If Perry had hardly been a hawk on Bosnia, at times when the Serbs had acted in an unusually brutal way, he had been quite ready to use American airpower. But in general, his views had coincided with those of the uniformed chiefs. He thought lift and strike an incomplete policy, immensely tempting because it was warfare on the cheap, but full of vulnerabilities. Like Colin Powell, he probably did not worry much about the JNA if it fought in main-force units, but he was worried about what would happen if the Serbs broke it down into smaller units and used them to harass a large American force with a stream of guerrilla assaults. When the uniformed chiefs made arguments like this to him, he was smart enough to take them seriously and not override, manipulate, or try to split them apart, as McNamara had famously done in 1964 and 1965. If the Serbs did that, either in urban or mountainous areas, it could be extremely painful. Hitler, Perry liked to point out, had managed to neutralize Yugoslav guerrilla attacks, but only by unspeakable brutality—savage reprisals against civilians—that would be unacceptable to Americans.
But like the others, Srebrenica had changed Perry, and he referred to it as the galvanizing moment that had crystallized the thinking of the American government and made the Europeans more willing to search for a common policy. It was in London, he believed, that he and Shalikashvili had managed to convince their European allies that the key to success was not the kind of light, pinprick bombing they had done in the past, which the Serbs had clearly scoffed at; it would be massive high-technology bombing. Carpet bombing was the phrase, a huge, relentless air campaign. The traditional European objection to the use of that kind of airpower, and the danger to UN troops on the ground, would immediately be addressed. The some twenty thousand UN troops there, scattered in small units, would quickly be consolidated into large units of a thousand men or more and would have sufficient firepower to hold off the Serbs until aircover arrived. Meanwhile, a team of American, British, and French generals would meet with the Bosnian Serb leaders to warn them that if they tried anything from now on, we would pound them as they had never been pounded before; this would be no light dust-off. If they moved against a safe area, they would also be pounded, and if they moved against UN troops, they would be pounded even more.
Finally, Bosnia was on the front burner. Two days after Srebrenica fell, the principals met in the Oval Office. This time it was Gore, long a hawk, but always careful not to embarrass the president and normally quite restrained at meetings like this, who spoke very passionately about Bosnia. If he disagreed with a policy or was bothered by something, Gore dissented with the president in private. Or if they were in the middle of a meeting, Gore would wait for a brief break and speak to the president apart from everyone else.
This time it was different. A long story had appeared in the Washington Post over the weekend about a young woman in Srebrenica who had committed suicide by using her belt and a floral shawl to make a noose. The vice president’s twenty-one-year-old daughter, Karenna, had seen a photo of the young woman, who was virtually her own age, and asked her father how the administration he belonged to could fail to act in a situation like this. “What am I supposed to tell her?” Gore asked at the Oval Office meeting. “Why is this happening and we’re not doing anything? My daughter is surprised the world is allowing this to happen. I am, too.1 I want you to tell me how to answer her—my own daughter.”2 The others in the room were surprised by the emotional nature of his words, and by the idea that he might be dissenting from the president. Then it dawned on them that his words were not in dissent; he and the president were together on this issue, which gave it an immediacy it had not had before. Gore then told the meeting he thought that with Srebrenica gone, Zepa would go, too. But they could draw the line at Gorazde, where as many refugees as had jammed into Srebrenica were now cornered. The United States had to end its policy of acquiescence. At the end of the meeting Clinton was talking openly about using American airpower. “The United States,” he said, “can not be a punching bag in the world anymore.”