Dick Holbrooke wanted in the worst way to handle the negotiations from the moment it became obvious that some kind of peace process would take place and would be led by the Americans. He was sure he was the right man for the job; he had been preparing for it in one way or another ever since he had virtually forced his way onto the American team that had gone to Paris in 1968 in a failed attempt to end the Vietnam War. What many people did not like about Holbrooke—the excessive energy, the singular sense of purpose, the sheer fearlessness, the willingness to act on and accept responsibility for his views, even the willingness to run over other people if need be—was, his friend Tom Donilon thought, exactly what would be needed in these forthcoming negotiations. Holbrooke wanted the job for the most basic reason: it was the ultimate professional test. You were the man of the hour, all the attention was focused on you. Could you bring it off? All your professional training would be on the line and your country depended on you. Besides, no one was better suited to deal with the particular collection of people from the Balkans who would come to a peace conference. As Bill Clinton later said in a farewell toast to Holbrooke at a dinner in December 2000, “After all, everyone in the Balkans is crazy and everyone has a giant ego. Who else could you send?”
Even before the conference began, Holbrooke had won a major victory over the choice of venue. In Washington, almost no one at the upper level, from either the national security side or the White House political side, wanted the conference held in the United States. The reasoning was obvious. It would be higher profile with more media coverage, and if it failed, which seemed quite possible if not quite likely, it would cause severe damage to a president just about to enter an election year. But Holbrooke, almost alone against the prevailing opinion, had argued vigorously that if you were going to do this, you had to do it right. You had to control it—the logistics, the location, the access to media. The only way to control it, he said, was to conduct the talks on American soil. His friend Talbott strongly disagreed with him but generously helped frame his argument. Given how difficult it was going to be, and how bitter the divisions were between all of the parties, Holbrooke pointed out, if you did not have absolute physical control of the environment, it was likely to turn into a shambles. You might as well take the risk, go for broke, and hold the negotiations here. What he was saying was not what a lot of people in the White House wanted to hear, but in the end his argument, self-evidently true, carried the day. After some debate about the best possible site, the air force volunteered Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Dayton, Ohio, which was a brilliant suggestion because it would give American negotiators greater control over access—and media—than any other location.
For Holbrooke, it was the role of a lifetime. He loved high visibility, which had been a strength when he was running the Balkan shuttle in the weeks before Dayton, in no small part because he had been so good with the media. He knew just how much to give, and how much not to give, to a hungry press corps. His briefings were a careful blend of genuine information and deft spin, thereby managing to serve both his purpose and the purpose of most reporters. No one since Henry Kissinger and James Baker was as dedicated and skillful in the care and feeding of the media as Dick Holbrooke. Never mind that the central and often most heroic figure in Holbrooke’s conversations with journalists tended to be himself—something that angered many of his peers in Washington. Reporters liked him and he was unusually accessible; they might see his flaws, but they thought he was taking this entire process further than anyone else could, and he was good copy. They always got what they needed. His press coverage was good, however, not just because he was a deft briefer, but because he also made things happen. If Holbrooke was pushing on Bosnia, it meant that it would no longer be a grievous, frustrating back-burner issue. It would be a grievous, frustrating front-burner issue.
That was potential consolation for those high-level people who were unenthusiastic about his selection to run the Dayton talks and who were suspicious about the flowering of his ego. If they failed, then, because Holbrooke had been so visible, so close to the media, it was likely to be seen as his failure. The White House would then, it was hoped, be able to separate itself from him. So the plum—was it a plum or a live hand grenade?—fell to Holbrooke. He would be a constant presence in Dayton, someone equal in guile and physical stamina as well as intelligence to the other participants, products though they might be of the Byzantine ways of the Balkans. What the American team was getting, and Donilon and Talbott certainly knew it, was nothing less than a hammer, a person who would pound the Bosnians, the Croats, and the Serbs relentlessly and would be a worthy match for them in toughness and, if necessary, obtuseness and brutality. He would hammer his own countrymen just as hard. His career was in diplomacy, but he was not necessarily a diplomatic man. All the qualities that had once seemed to work against him—the raw edges, the instinct to go where angels fear to tread, the ability to let virtually nothing stand in his way when he wanted something—now worked for him. He had a special strength that most top-level foreign service people lacked—diplomatic niceties meant absolutely nothing to him. Power was what mattered, and because of the changed map in the Balkans he had been handed and the threat of continued NATO bombings, he as a representative of the United States of America held the power.
He would be a match for Milosevic as a user. He could get along with Milosevic if need be, but did not buy into Milosevic’s artificial veneer, the earthy bonhomie, a guy you could have a drink and deal with. He saw him as Milosevic had seen countless Western negotiators in the past, someone to be used and manipulated. Holbrooke knew just how much power Milosevic had, and that for all his braggadocio, he was playing with a weaker hand at Dayton than he had held for the last six years. His bluff and that of his proxies had finally been called on the ground by the Croats and NATO. During his Balkan shuttle talks in September, Holbrooke happened to be with Milosevic in Belgrade the day after the Americans had fired their first Tomahawk cruise missile in western Bosnia, with devastating accuracy. Milosevic was clearly shaken by the news of what had happened. So much of his game had been premised on bluster, and now just one Tomahawk missile had wiped out the Serb communications center for the entire region. What kind of weapon allowed a gunner who might be several hundred miles away to fire with pinpoint accuracy as if he could actually see his target when he hit the button? That weapon had not only produced a lethal effect on the ground but a devastating psychological effect as well.
Holbrooke believed that was the moment when Milosevic began to lose some of his bravado. One day in Dayton just after the peace talks began, the Americans took Milosevic and some of the Bosnian Serbs through part of the air base’s museum and showed them a Tomahawk missile. It did not seem that big or dangerous, but the Serbs were mightily impressed. “So much damage from something so small,” Milosevic said. “It’s just so small . . .” Clearly, Milosevic had to worry about that if the conference failed: a continued Croatian-Bosnian assault loosely blended, perhaps, with the awesome airpower of NATO. All for a piece of terrain that did not mean that much to him personally or politically.
Holbrooke intended to waste little time on formalities with these Balkan leaders. He knew when to listen and when to tune out, the rare moments when they were really talking and when it was all propaganda, as if Radio Zagreb or Radio Belgrade or Radio Sarajevo were just spitting out all the hatred and paranoia of the past. He also understood something important about all three groups who would attend the conference: the Serbs, the Croats, and the Bosnian Muslims. They were not only vulnerable to each other because of the blood hatreds, they were vulnerable to themselves. Again and again because of those blood hatreds, they had committed unspeakable acts having grave consequences. It was in the nature of the beast and they did not know how not to commit them. Therefore in some bizarre way, they wanted others to stop them from doing the things that by a kind of primitive instinct they felt they had to do.
Holbrooke’s job would be not only to limit their claims against each other, but also to create a deterrent force to prevent further Pavlovian acts of violence. He had to be at once a brute, but supple. To understand Milosevic you had to know that though he had helped set the Bosnian Serbs on their murderous mission and they were his instrument, he felt a deep contempt for them, as if they were social inferiors. The fiction that they had nothing to do with him was important to him and his international self-image. From the start, Holbrooke had let Milosevic know that the Americans connected him to the worst deeds of the Bosnian Serbs and the Serb paramilitary.
Yet Milosevic loved his carefully created and nurtured fictions, and he constantly denied any link between the JNA and Arkan and his Tigers, probably the most brutal of the paramilitaries. So in early October 1995, Holbrooke had the CIA prepare a lengthy document on Arkan’s activities and exactly how he worked in conjunction with the JNA, or to be blunt, Milosevic. In late October, Holbrooke had broached the subject of Arkan with Milosevic again. “No, no, your information is wrong,” the Serb leader said. Holbrooke pointed to the folder the Agency had prepared, carried to the meeting by Jim Pardew, an aide. The evidence is right here, Holbrooke said. Milosevic refused to look at the folder or touch it, and when the meeting broke up, it remained on the conference table. As the Americans were leaving, one of Milosevic’s aides told Pardew that he had left his paper on the table. “I didn’t forget it,” Pardew said. “It belongs to President Milosevic.”1 The implication was obvious—not only was NATO muscle now aimed directly at the Serbs, but the days of easy con jobs were over.
As a very junior member of the Paris peace talks in 1968, Holbrooke had watched a variety of people in Washington undercut Averell Harriman and Cy Vance, the principal U.S. negotiators. Paris had been a bitter learning experience for Holbrooke, and he intended to let no one undercut him at these talks. He would control all information, force the Americans to work as a team, and prevent a split in the alliance by limiting the ability of the different Balkan groups to create mischief by going to their closest European sponsors. He would try to keep the Europeans on board because he needed the threat of more NATO sorties to keep the Serbs in line. It was, given all the divisions on each side, among the Americans, among the Europeans, and among and within the three Yugoslav groups, a large order.
There was no small irony in seeing himself as an airpower hawk, Holbrooke thought. He had always believed the American dependence on airpower in Vietnam as a critical instrument of policy was a serious mistake and it had been of limited value there because of the nontraditional way the enemy, both Vietcong and NVA, operated. But this was a different war with a different enemy, one using relatively traditional, far more stationary battle formations, and thus much more vulnerable to airpower. Equally important, there had been a quantum change in the effectiveness of the instrument itself, the ability to hit targets with great precision and little risk.
There was nothing pretty or just about Balkan history, there was nothing pretty or just about the Balkan wars of the nineties, and there was nothing pretty or just about the Dayton peace conference. The three groups arrived in varying degrees of readiness. The Croats were the most coherent, in effect the real winners in the struggle that had taken place over the previous three years. They were the principal beneficiaries of their recent military assaults, their troops had done most of the fighting, driving the Serbs out of the Krajina and western Bosnia, and they had been on something of a military roll when the cease-fire was declared. In addition, they were as close to being a defined, ethnically unitary nation as it was possible to be in that fractious region. Tudjman was their undisputed leader, with no factions within their delegation. They were on a high after their military victories and likely to become stronger if the fighting continued because they had access to weapons, excellent American training, and might have the advantage of a NATO airshield.
The Serbs arrived much more exposed and divided. Perhaps the most important victory over them had been achieved even before the conference began. For several years Western negotiators had been trying to get Milosevic to exert some control over the Bosnian Serbs, or at least to admit that he had the ability to control them, all to no avail. He had stuck to the fiction of their being an independent force fighting for an independent nation. But after the first major NATO bombing, Milosevic had miraculously shown up at a meeting with Holbrooke with a piece of paper signed by the Orthodox Church patriarch, which in effect gave him control of the Serb delegation that would go to a peace conference. There were to be three representatives from Belgrade and three from Pale, the capital of the Bosnian Serbs. In case of a tie, three to three, the leader of the delegation, Milosevic, would cast the deciding vote. That meant it was his delegation. At one point Holbrooke asked him whether he was sure his friends, the Bosnian Serbs, would go along with it. “They are not my friends. They are not my colleagues,” he said. “It is awful to be in the same room with them for so long. They are shit.”2 That meant he was at least partially cutting them loose. Bosnia, unlike Kosovo, upon which he had built his climb to power, was not in his mind sacred Serbian soil.
The Bosnian Muslims were, as they had been from the start, at the greatest disadvantage. Because they were the most pluralistic, they were the most democratic, which meant they were the least unified. The diversity of their delegation made them the most vulnerable to internal divisions among the different ethnic groups. In addition, they had paid the steepest price because of Serb aggression. They had been ill-prepared for the events of 1992–95 and remained ill-prepared now. They arrived in Dayton, their territory partially carved up—to be sure not as badly carved up as it had been two months earlier—with a sense of loss and grievance.
The Bosnian Muslims were indignant about the injuries that had been inflicted on them, but they had significantly less muscle than the Croats. As far back as mid-September, they had been furious when the Americans finally gave the signal to halt the bombing. Not surprisingly, they would prove to be the most difficult group to deal with in Dayton. Relatively weak on the ground militarily, virtually powerless to control the events now unfolding, which affected their country more than any other, they were frustrated, divided, and went home the angriest with the settlement. The other delegates, like the sponsoring Americans, felt that the Bosnian Muslims lacked a sense of reality and, indeed, a sense of gratitude. But the Bosnian Muslims had a deep distrust of those (like the Americans and Europeans) who had had the means to stop the carnage from the start, had done so little for so long, and after finally acting—at so little cost to themselves—had pulled back so quickly. Anything at all that even partially legitimized Serb gains in their eyes rewarded the aggressor. The source of their anger was their dependency; nothing will make the head of a small, defenseless state angrier than dependency upon a large, immensely powerful, but somewhat indifferent superpower. All in all it was not a happy equation.
The conference was chiefly about maps, about trading land for land, and about making as many people as possible equally unhappy. There was a terrible moment late in the talks as things were moving along relatively well, at least for Dayton, when Milosevic, who had not been paying attention to the maps, suddenly realized that instead of a 51–49 split against the Serbs, by mistake it had gone to 54–46. He was furious, sure that he was being tricked—he who had always snookered everyone else. A flurry of pressures got things back to the original goal, as the principals kept trading islands of land to achieve the magical 51–49. Nothing was going to make everyone happy at Dayton.
Late in the negotiations when it appeared the conference might collapse because of Bosnian Muslim resistance, Holbrooke wrote a telling memo for Warren Christopher: “The Bosnians still wish us to believe that they are getting a lousy deal. Yet they know it is not only a good deal, but the best they will ever get. Logically, therefore, they should accept. But the dynamics of their delegation make this a very close call. Izetbegovic spent nine years of his life in jail, and is not a governmental leader so much as a movement leader. He has little understanding of, or interest in, economic development or modernization—the things that peace can bring. He has suffered greatly for his ideals. To him Bosnia is more an abstraction, not several million people who overwhelmingly want peace. Haris [Silajdzic, the prime minister], on the other hand, is more modern and focused heavily on economic reconstruction, something Izetbegovic never mentions.”
So it was the victims who were as always the least realistic and had to be squeezed the hardest. The entire three-week conference demanded almost inhuman reserves of energy, toughness, and guile on the part of the lead negotiator. One additional strength Holbrooke brought to the talks, a curious one, was a product of his ego, his flair for the dramatic, and his sense that life was in part theater. It was his ability to impress on the others that this was a historic moment and the entire world was watching them. If they did not recognize that and move with it, then history might pass them by. They had to be ready to play their appropriate roles. In the end Holbrooke not only outlasted the various Balkan representatives, he outbullied them, driving them to do what he was sure was good for them even if they did not yet recognize it themselves. “Why did your man Holbrooke do so well in Dayton?” Jacques Chirac once asked Bill Clinton. “Because he has the same character as Milosevic,” Clinton answered. That was both true and untrue, but during that amazing three-week conference, he found the resources to bring home a peace settlement from as difficult a group of parties as any negotiator had ever faced.
Holbrooke brought an imperfect peace to a very imperfect part of the world after an unusually cruel war. “Did Dayton,” Holbrooke shrewdly asked at the end of his own book on those years, “bring peace to Bosnia or only the absence of war?”3 There would be two states, a -Croat-Bosnian Federation based in Sarajevo and, surrounding it like a badly designed hat, a Bosnian Serb republic; the contours of both resembled what the battlefield positions had been at the end of the fighting. It was, as Michael Ignatieff wrote, a “de facto ethnic partition.” Among the many ironies to that settlement, it was, as some critics believed, only slightly better than the Vance-Owen peace plan that the administration had so arrogantly disdained two and a half years earlier, which, had it gone through, might have saved hundreds of thousands of lives.
The settlement demanded that the Americans station twenty thousand men on the ground as peacekeepers, and that put the president at risk as he was about to enter an election campaign. On the final day of Dayton when it appeared the conference was going to break up without success, a number of Clinton’s domestic advisers were greatly relieved, because they feared a settlement and worried that if we sent in peacekeepers and events blew up in Bosnia as they had in Somalia, it would hinder the president’s reelection. Rarely had Clinton done something of such import with so little ostensible public support. When he committed American troops to peacekeeping in Bosnia, the polls were running roughly 70 percent against the idea. It was, whatever the upside, and the upside was considerable, still a roll of the dice, and it took extraordinary courage on his part to make that decision.
But the peace was incomplete in many ways. The shadows of Vietnam and Somalia still loomed: the possibility of being impaled and losing young Americans in defense of a strategy that had no end. The fear of body bags was always there. The White House, without consultation with the people who had worked out the details of the Dayton plan, decided to put a time limit on the troop commitment—twelve months. It was a sure sign of presidential caution and the apprehensions of his White House political advisers, some of whom had not wanted the Dayton settlement in the first place and had covertly been rooting against it. It was a completely unrealistic deadline that had nothing to do with the problems that any peacekeeping force was likely to encounter on the ground. But it would cover the period of the 1996 election.
It was a waffle of the first order, done strictly for domestic political considerations. If it was designed to send a signal to the Congress and to the American people, it sent an even more powerful one to our European allies, a sign that we were not necessarily committed. It also convinced Slobodan Milosevic that we might have little real staying power. It was exactly the wrong message to send, especially because the Republican Senate leader, Bob Dole, a major Bosnian hawk, was perfectly willing to help Clinton avoid any time limit. Dole was perhaps one of the last figures from the internationalist bipartisan generation of the past, and he had not only been helpful to Clinton on Bosnia, but would not use it as a campaign issue. More typical of the new face of the Republican Party and the Congress was Newt Gingrich, who authorized a resolution supporting the members of the armed forces who might go to the Balkans, but not the policy that sent them there. It was a perfect insight into the schizophrenia of post–Cold War American foreign policy. It passed, 287–141.