Much as Mexico is a part of Latin America located in North America, so too the Balkans constitute a fragment of the Islamic world within the confines of Europe. According to one of the prevailing shibboleths of the present age, this commingling of cultures is inherently good. It fosters pluralism, thereby enriching everyday life. Yet cultural interaction also induces friction, whether spontaneously generated or instigated by demagogues and provocateurs.

Until the middle of the last century, the U.S.-Mexican border neatly (if imperfectly) divided Ibero-America, then almost entirely Catholic, from the Anglo-Protestant sphere with which most citizens of the United States, including virtually the entire American elite, identified. In the Balkans, centuries of conflict between Islam and Christendom had long since erased any such line of separation, leaving in its wake a residue of unhappy minorities, unsettled scores, and frustrated ambitions.

For some Americans, even today, the breaching of the barrier that once separated the United States from Latin America remains a source of resentment, and for cynical politicians an opportunity ripe for exploitation. They want the barrier restored. In the Balkans at the end of the Cold War, comparable resentments and even more pronounced cynicism also produced demands for separation. A series of shooting wars resulted, four in all. On two occasions, those conflicts prompted the United States to intervene, first in Bosnia in 1995 and then in Kosovo four years later.

In both cases, the plight of beleaguered Muslims offered the pretext for U.S. military action. In America’s ongoing War for the Greater Middle East, the Bosnia and Kosovo campaigns qualified as sideshows. Yet even if soon superseded by larger events, they were hardly trivial. Indeed, of all the various military actions undertaken by the United States in the Islamic world since 1980, these two appear to have come closest to achieving real success. Yet appearances deceive, or at least do not tell the whole story.

That story begins in 1914, when Serbian terrorists assassinated the Austrian Archduke in Sarajevo, triggering a conflagration that, among other things, spelled the end of European global preeminence. In the wake of World War I, the victorious Allies, acting with the same insouciance that they demonstrated in redrawing the map of the Middle East, signed off on a new Balkan political order right out of Rube Goldberg. The result was Yugoslavia, an amalgam of Bosnians, Croats, Montenegrins, Serbs, Slovenes, and others destined to induce political migraines on a scale similar to those produced by other Allied creations such as Iraq and Palestine.1

This patchwork arrangement survived for seven decades. With the passing of the Cold War it came apart, as the people-formerly-known-as-Yugoslavs, abandoning multicultural socialism, embraced various forms of religiously and ethnically infused nationalism.

In June 1991, Slovenes and Croats became the first to break away. For Slovenia, which won its independence after a brief “Ten-Day War,” the break was relatively painless. For Croatia, things proved more difficult, as a large minority of ethnic Serbs, supported by the Serb-dominated Yugoslav army, resisted. Vicious fighting killed thousands and displaced far larger numbers of Croats and Serbs alike. The suspension of hostilities in January 1992 found Croatia independent but with wide swathes of its territory controlled by a self-declared Republic of Serbian Krajina. Under the auspices of the United Nations, which had already imposed an arms embargo on Yugoslavia, European peacekeepers arrived to maintain a precarious ceasefire.

Then, at the end of February, Bosnians voted to secede from what remained of the Yugoslav federation. Ethnic Serbs within Bosnia-Herzegovina boycotted the referendum and established their own Republika Srpska, aligned with Serbia proper. Soon thereafter, in April 1992, a third Balkan war erupted, as Serbs and Croats set out to dismember now predominantly Muslim Bosnia-Herzegovina. Serb forces laid siege to the Bosnian capital of Sarajevo, in Western eyes a symbol of secular pluralism, now transformed into a scene out of Dante’s Inferno. “For 400,000 Sarajevans,” war correspondent John Burns reported, the siege

meant living with sudden death every hour of every day. Children climbing a cherry tree in an orchard are blasted to oblivion by a tank shell. A young mother falls to the sidewalk, mortally wounded by a Serbian sniper, her baby cast from her arms with a leg so severely injured that doctors have to amputate. Mourners grieving over fresh graves in public parks scatter in panic, some falling dead themselves, as Serbian forces fire on them with antiaircraft shells and mortars. Sniper fire is so accurate that surgeons have detected the “personal signature” of individual gunmen in the wounds they inflict—some favoring shots to the head, others to the heart.2

The cordoning off of the Bosnian capital formed just one part of a larger campaign to evict Muslims from territory earmarked for incorporation into a Greater Serbia.3 UN peacekeepers dispatched to the scene were utterly inadequate to the task.

The United States had made every effort to steer clear of these developments. Other priorities absorbed the attention of the George H. W. Bush administration. With the Cold War winding down, Yugoslavia no longer commanded Washington’s attention. The Balkans were Europe’s problem. Bush’s secretary of state, James Baker, put the matter succinctly: “We don’t have a dog in this fight.”4

Three factors undermined this hands-off approach. The first was the ineptitude of those to whom Washington looked to handle the situation. Demanding an end to violence, European leaders proved incapable of enforcing that demand. To defer to dithering Europeans was, in effect, to become an accessory to murder.

A second factor was the moral framing imposed on the Yugoslav crackup. Among Western elites especially, the fate of Sarajevo and of the Bosnian people more generally assumed a significance reminiscent of the siege of Madrid in 1936–1939. In Bosnia, one of the great moral dramas of the age was being restaged. This contest between “the primitive and the cosmopolitan,” as one writer put it, offered Western governments that had failed to rescue the Spanish Republic from the clutches of fascism the chance to get it right this time.5 Seen in this light, the Bush administration’s apparent indifference to the ongoing agony of Sarajevo seemed unconscionable.

Finally, and above all, there was American domestic politics, playing out in a presidential election year. Seeking to unseat an incumbent whose greatest strength lay in foreign policy, Bill Clinton needed some way to portray himself as tough-minded and forward-leaning. President Bush’s passivity on Bosnia in 1992 gave his brash young challenger just the opening he was looking for. The Clinton campaign chided Bush for failing to demonstrate “real leadership” in the Balkans. The odious Serb president Slobodan Milošević and his henchmen were made-to-order villains. The solution was obvious: an “economic blockade” to strangle “the renegade regime of Slobodan Milosevic” along with “air strikes against those who are attacking the [Bosnian] relief effort.”6 The candidate himself forthrightly declared, “I would begin with airpower, against the Serbs, to restore the basic conditions of humanity.”7

When Clinton won the election, however, bellicosity gave way to reticence. The new president’s aides postured. Imitating John Kennedy at Berlin, for example, Madeleine Albright flew into the Bosnian capital to announce “Ja sam Sarajevka” and assure her listeners that “America’s future and your future are inseparable.”8 Yet such rhetoric notwithstanding, Clinton was no more eager than his predecessor to plunge into any Balkan quagmire. The collapse of the Somalia mission barely eight months into his presidency only reinforced that reluctance.

What ensued was intervention by inadvertence. Clintonites styled their approach “assertive multilateralism.” Practically speaking, however, the noun took precedence over the adjective. Assertive multilateralism emphasized consensus over action, process over outcomes. Assertiveness (of a sort) made its appearance only after the exhaustion of all the other alternatives.

Unwilling to proceed unilaterally and unable to persuade U.S. allies to undertake forceful collective action, Clinton found himself in a bind. In early May, European leaders had rejected his “lift and strike” proposal—lifting the arms embargo and using NATO air power to protect the Bosnians. This humiliating diplomatic setback effectively left the administration without a Balkan policy. “In view of your public posture,” Secretary of State Warren Christopher gently chided his boss, “what you may not be free to do is to follow the Bush strategy of doing nothing.”9 To paper over their disunity and confusion, the United States and its European allies had at hand a placeholder of sorts. This was Operation Deny Flight, which just the month before had cracked open the door leading to a decades-long U.S. military involvement in the Balkans.

Deny Flight was another exercise in no-fly-zone enforcement, a low-risk way of offering a semblance of protection to Bosnian Muslims threatened by Serb depredations. It was a gesture pretending to be a serious military undertaking.

Acting pursuant to a UN Security Council resolution, twelve NATO nations provided aircraft to Deny Flight. Operating from bases in Italy or aircraft carriers in the Adriatic, U.S. forces contributed far and away the largest share.

As was the case with the Iraqi no-fly zones, Deny Flight offered ample opportunity for boring holes in the sky. In all, between April 1993 and December 1995, NATO aviators flew more than 109,000 sorties. In prohibiting Serbian fixed-wing aircraft from entering Bosnian airspace, the operation did achieve notable success. The weak Serbian air force rarely challenged NATO. When it did, it paid a price. On February 28, 1994, for example, two pairs of U.S. Air Force F-16s encountered six small, subsonic Serbian bombers within the no-fly zone and proceeded to shoot down four without suffering a scratch.10 In June 1995, the Bosnian Serbs partly evened the score, employing a surface-to-air missile to shoot down an F-16 piloted by air force Captain Scott O’Grady. After successfully ejecting from his aircraft, O’Grady evaded capture for six days until rescued by U.S. Marines in a daring and well-executed recovery operation.

In squadron ready rooms, air victories offered cause for celebration. Back home, O’Grady’s exploits made him an instant celebrity, book contracts and cinematic re-creations following in due course.11 Yet such episodes amounted to the military equivalent of tabloid journalism, diverting perhaps but thin on substance. The action that mattered was occurring not in the air but on the ground. There, unrelenting, primordial violence continued. Although Bosnians (and Croats) were not innocent of crimes, the better-armed Serbs were clearly the worst offenders. As NATO aircraft patrolled overhead, the signatures of the Serbian way of war—random shelling of populated areas, the confinement of military males to squalid concentration camps, and the use of rape as a weapon—all continued undisturbed.12

Although authorized to use air strikes to protect peacekeepers—a grant of protection subsequently extended to Bosnians within certain designated “safe areas”—NATO rarely acted on this authority. Between June 1993 and August 1995, Deny Flight aircraft actually released ordnance on a grand total of only ten occasions. The United States and its European allies vaguely hoped that the prospect of more serious military action might induce the Serbs to relent and agree to a negotiated settlement. Yet in terms of impact, Deny Flight amounted to little more than an irritant. Certainly, it did not dissuade the Serbs from intimidating UN peacekeepers or making life hell for Bosnians. The NATO air campaign had become an exercise in military masturbation—a display of ostensibly superior power that served chiefly to reveal Western impotence.13

The problem was twofold. On the one hand, procedures for approving air strikes were cumbersome. Under a “dual key” system, both UN and NATO authorities had to assent before a single aircraft could actually attack a single target. Wishing to preserve its nominally non-belligerent status, the UN rarely gave its okay. On the other hand, Serb threats (sometimes implemented) to take peacekeepers hostage dampened the enthusiasm for air strikes on the part of those NATO members—not including the United States—that had peacekeeping contingents at risk. So although American officers occupied most of the key posts in the NATO chain of command, they exercised limited actual authority.14

As the war dragged on and the body count continued to rise, criticism of U.S. policy also intensified. To be sure, not everyone was eager for the United States to become more deeply embedded in the Balkans. Senator John McCain, for one, insisted that this was a problem without a military solution. “Tragic as Bosnia may be,” he said in a speech on the Senate floor, “it is a self-inflicted wound which we cannot heal with either airpower or ground troops.”15

With the passing of time, McCain’s became very much the minority view, however. An increasingly energized, if informal, Bosnian Muslim lobby rejected the excuses offered up to explain Clinton’s fumbling effort. Already in July 1993, The Washington Post was deriding the administration’s defense of its Bosnia policy as “petty and embarrassing.”16 That same month, in an amply publicized act of solidarity, Susan Sontag, doyenne of the American intelligentsia, had gone to Sarajevo. Recounting her experience in a widely read essay appearing in The New York Review of Books, Sontag denounced the United States and the West for “giving the victory to Serb fascism.” In the Bosnian capital, she had staged Beckett’s Waiting for Godot, even though Sarajevans, she acknowledged, were actually “waiting for Clinton.”17 By early the following year, The New Republic was castigating the White House for “indifference” and “timidity” in the face of out-and-out genocide. “Poor Bosnia,” the editors wrote, “it should have found itself in a trade war. Trade wars we fight. Wars of genocide we watch.”18

To the influential academic Fouad Ajami, the Bosnians represented the potential for reconciling Islam itself with modernity. Bosnian Serb leaders such as Radovan Karadžić claimed that they were “defending Christianity against militant Islamic fundamentalism.”19 Just the reverse was true, Professor Ajami insisted. Bosnian Muslims were the “true bearers of a universal culture, children of the secular environment of the West.”20

Here, according to observers such as Ajami, was the reason it was imperative for the United States to come to Bosnia’s defense. The typical Bosnian Muslim identified with Islam no more than the average Frenchman identified with Catholicism or the average Brit with the Church of England. In these quarters, religion had become a cultural artifact not worth fighting about. From a strategic perspective, it was incumbent upon the United States to encourage this tendency wherever it existed in the Islamic world. The ultimate objective was not to promote religious tolerance but to make religion itself redundant. Secularization ostensibly facilitated peace.

Concerns related to cultural pluralism, human rights, and protecting Muslims said to share a Western secular outlook kept Bosnia on the front pages. However, they did not suffice to prod the Clinton administration to take the more muscular approach that Bosnia’s sympathizers were demanding. What ultimately prompted Clinton to act was a core geopolitical interest: preserving the viability of NATO. For decades, the alliance had formed the cornerstone of Washington’s claim to European leadership. Deny Flight represented a first post–Cold War attempt to demonstrate the alliance’s continuing relevance. Viewed from this perspective, that operation’s evident failure was intolerable. If Bosnian Serbs could defy NATO and get away with it, the alliance was finished, perhaps fatally undermining America’s claim to European preeminence.

Throughout this period, well-meaning efforts to negotiate a settlement to the war while preserving Bosnian territorial integrity had proven futile. By the summer of 1995, the Clinton administration accepted that diplomacy had failed. U.S. policy priorities now shifted: Ending the war became imperative, even if that meant accepting de facto ethnic partition. Defeating the Bosnian Serbs militarily (thereby refuting the charge that NATO had become toothless) provided the means to achieve that end.

Although President Clinton’s post-Mogadishu aversion to committing U.S. ground troops to combat remained intact, his administration was more than open to collaborating with surrogates. Since 1993, in acts of solidarity more substantial than Sontag’s, the governments of Iran and Saudi Arabia (not sharing Sontag’s or Ajami’s outlook on religion) had competed with one another in funneling weapons worth hundreds of millions of dollars to Bosnian Muslim forces. Although these efforts violated the UN embargo, they reportedly occurred with Washington’s knowledge and tacit assent.21 Several thousand “holy warriors” from Iran, Pakistan, and elsewhere in the Islamic world converged on Bosnia to wage jihad on behalf of their fellow Muslims.22 Just as they were not innocent, Bosnians were not powerless.

Simultaneously, the United States had been quietly building up Croatian military power. To judge by his retrograde views, the epithet fascist fit Croat leader Franjo Tuđman no less than it did Serbs like Milošević and Karadžić.23 So rather than sullying itself through direct involvement in training and advising Croat forces, the Pentagon sublet the project to a contracting firm run by recently retired U.S. Army generals. Here was another distinguishing feature of America’s War for the Greater Middle East, one destined to become more prominent with time: a tendency to farm out traditional military functions to de facto mercenaries.24 The pursuit of policy objectives was merging with the pursuit of profit.

Still, the upshot was that by the time the Clinton administration finally decided on a policy of coercion, it found local partners ready and willing to forge an anti-Serb axis. With the massacre of some eight thousand Bosnian Muslim men and boys at Srebrenica in mid-July rendering any further “peacemaking” efforts untenable, the United States and its NATO allies now became parties to a war against the Serbs. The shelling of a Sarajevo marketplace on August 28, which killed thirty-seven Bosnian civilians and wounded dozens more, provided the immediate impetus for implementing the new policy.

On August 30, Operation Determined Force supplanted Deny Flight. Policing no-fly zones gave way to bombing. Nominally, the purpose of Determined Force was to prevent further attacks on Bosnian civilians.25 The real aim was to “inflict enough pain to compel Serb compliance” with various NATO demands.26 Chief among those demands were the following: lift the siege of Sarajevo, agree to a cessation of hostilities, and give up aspirations for creating an ethnically pure Greater Serbia.

Operationally, inflicting pain meant degrading Bosnian Serb capabilities rather than pursuing a “cut it off and kill it” approach. So despite its large ambitions, the U.S.-led air campaign, directed by U.S. Air Force Lieutenant General Michael Short, a fighter pilot and Vietnam veteran, was limited in scope. Some 220 combat aircraft participated, operating primarily from the U.S. base in Aviano, Italy, and from the USS Theodore Roosevelt, afloat in the Adriatic. By the time it ended on September 14, pilots had flown slightly more than thirty-five hundred sorties—two-thirds of them completed by U.S. forces.27 NATO had expended 1,026 weapons against forty-eight targets, all chosen with an eye toward minimizing the risk of collateral damage. Only a single allied aircraft—a French Mirage fighter jet—was lost to enemy action.28 All told, the bombing amounted to about one day’s effort during Operation Desert Storm.29

In terms of careful planning and controlled execution, Determined Force offered much to admire. As a practical matter, however, it was largely superfluous. Even before NATO aircraft struck their first target, developments on the ground had effectively decided the war’s outcome. At most, the U.S.-led air campaign drove home the point with Bosnian Serbs that they were facing imminent defeat.

During the first week of August, a Croat offensive called Operation Oluja (“Storm”) had recaptured the Krajina, the strip of territory running along the Croat-Bosnian border that Serbs had seized back in 1991 and occupied ever since. In liberating this region, an area almost as large as Connecticut, the Croats had done more than win a decisive victory. They had demonstrated clear-cut superiority over their enemy. A second Croat push called Maestral (“Breeze”) exploited the success of the first. The Bosnians also got in the act, launching their own anti-Serb offensive.30 A dramatic shift in the overall military balance had occurred. According to the CIA’s history of the conflict, Bosnian Serb leaders and Milošević himself were quick to recognize the implications. The loss of the Krajina “crystalized their belief that a political-military settlement had to be negotiated as soon as possible.”31

In the face of this Croat-Bosnian onslaught, Serb civilians fled for their lives. Croat forces occupying the Krajina ousted as many as two hundred thousand Serbs, their plight attracting about as much international sympathy as the Germans expelled from Central and Eastern Europe at the end of World War II. The results met with Washington’s quiet approval. “We ‘hired’ these guys to be our junkyard dogs,” one U.S. diplomat wrote of the Croats. Sure, the results were ugly, but now was no time to get “squeamish.”32 Somewhat more delicately, Secretary of State Christopher detected the glimmerings of “a new strategic situation that may turn out to be to our advantage.”33

For that situation to mature, the war that Washington was seeking to end needed to last a bit longer, as indeed it did. So although NATO had suspended Determined Force two weeks after it began in return for a Bosnian Serb commitment to lift the siege of Sarajevo, fierce fighting persisted for another month. Croat and Bosnian troops “continued to battle for chunks and scraps of disputed territory,” further weakening the Bosnian Serb forces.34 During what proved to be the war’s climactic phase, NATO was a bystander. Only after weeks of wrangling did the hostilities finally end on October 12, each of the belligerents now concluding that the costs of continuing outweighed any potential benefits. This ceasefire stuck.

On its heels came a three-week-long peace conference at Dayton, Ohio, convened under U.S. auspices. The resulting agreement did not restore secular multiculturalism to Bosnia-Herzegovina. Indeed, by and large it accepted the reality of ethnic separation there and throughout the former Yugoslavia. Yet the Dayton Accords did cement an end to violence among Serbs, Croats, and Bosnian Muslims, an outcome widely hailed as a triumph of American statecraft. Here, it appeared, was a textbook demonstration of how the deft employment of military might combined with vigorous diplomacy could solve even the most intractable problem.

Seen in this light, the implications extended well beyond the matter immediately at hand. The role that the United States had played in bringing peace to Bosnia affirmed its unique standing in a post–Cold War world. No less importantly, the outcome showed that the American public remained ready to shoulder the responsibilities of global leadership. As Richard Holbrooke, the principal architect of that settlement, wrote, “After Dayton, American foreign policy seemed more assertive, more muscular.” Put simply, “America was back.”35

This at least was the interpretation that the Clinton administration promoted and to which activist American elites readily subscribed. “Our leadership made this peace agreement possible,” the president told reporters in announcing the Dayton Accords.36 Admirers credited Holbrooke with “taming the Balkan bullies.” Profiling Holbrooke in The New York Times, the journalist Roger Cohen wrote, “Without his outrageousness, without his swagger, America could not have imposed its peace.”37

Behind Holbrooke’s swagger, of course, was American military might. “Deliberate Force infused NATO with a new sense of strength and vibrancy,” The Washington Post’s Pentagon correspondent observed. It had “also validated force as an effective handmaiden to diplomacy.”38 Here was a template for future action—force employed with great precision in measured doses, allies allotted supporting roles to impart a multilateral gloss, no-nonsense American diplomats thereby empowered to crack heads and get things done.

The view found favor in at least some American military circles. Although the CIA might conclude that it was the junkyard dogs who had finally driven the Serbs “to sit down and negotiate a peace settlement,” members of the officer corps thought otherwise.39 In their view, Operation Determined Force had turned the tide. “Almost at the instant of its application,” U.S. Air Force analysts concluded, NATO’s abbreviated bombing campaign had accomplished “what three years of factional ground fighting, peacekeeping, and international diplomacy had yet to achieve.” In that regard, airpower had “delivered what it promised,” bringing peace to Bosnia “quickly, clearly and at minimal cost of blood and treasure.”40

There was more here than the usual display of American narcissism, and more too than the latest updating of a decades-old claim that airpower offers the most expeditious and humane way to end wars. Rather, with overall U.S. military supremacy a given, traditional notions of what it meant to “win” required some tweaking. The proper role of armed force was not to supplant diplomacy but to make it work. Bosnia supposedly demonstrated that the United States possessed the capacity to do just that. Here was the means to police the “new world order” that George H. W. Bush had glimpsed and Bill Clinton had inherited. Crucially, the Bosnia intervention suggested that Islam as such did not pose an insuperable obstacle to the further application of this template. So, at least, the subsequent implementation of the Dayton Accords seemed to show.

Beginning on December 31, 1995, a robust contingent of some twenty thousand U.S. troops began entering Bosnia to form the core of an even larger NATO peace enforcement mission.41 The army’s 1st Armored Division, commanded by Major General William Nash, provided most of the troops. Fearing a repeat of Mogadishu, the Pentagon had acceded to this assignment with trepidation. The cigar-smoking Nash, an officer who shared more than a little of Richard Holbrooke’s swagger, understood that he was to ensure that Bosnia not become a replay of Somalia. His purpose was not to perform good works but simply to maintain a separation between antagonists—to project strength without being excessively intrusive. “We will not be provocative,” Nash instructed his troops.42

The operation, known as Joint Endeavor, began on an unpropitious note, a direct result of an overly bureaucratic planning process, with too many generals getting in each other’s way. Just deploying the troops to the starting line—the Sava River, which forms Bosnia’s northern border—involved a frustrating number of snafus. A botched crossing of the Sava, attributable partly to bad weather, partly to gross incompetence, delayed the actual entry of U.S. troops into Bosnia by ten days.43 Thankfully, the initiative and determination of ordinary soldiers saved the day. One American officer who was present attributed the eventual crossing of the Sava to “a triumph of the human spirit over an insane system, narrowly averting catastrophe.”44 Those wearing stars on their shoulders had not covered themselves with glory.

From that point, although the operation did not lack for anxious moments, problems proved manageable. U.S. commanders were adamant in defining the mission narrowly. Their remit did not include nation-building or even the pursuit of war criminals. Intimidation, not conciliation, defined the spirit of the enterprise. Encased in body armor and wearing Kevlar helmets while armed to the teeth, U.S. troops projected an image of warriors not to be trifled with.45

By and large, as a way to enforce order, this approach worked. For anyone nursing expectations of Bosnia becoming a model of multiethnic harmony with Christians and Muslims living together in peace, it proved a disappointment. In fact, the overall effect of armed intervention was “to cement wartime ethnic cleansing and maintain ethnic cleansers in power.” Four years after the peacekeepers arrived, Bosnia consisted of “three de facto mono-ethnic entities, three separate armies, three separate police forces, and a national government that exists mostly on paper and operates at the mercy of the entities.” Even so, the cessation of hostilities negotiated at Dayton had held. That was something.46

The U.S. military presence in Bosnia continued for nearly a decade. During that entire period, the total number of troops involved progressively dwindled, with no American lives lost due to hostile action.47 For a military consumed by the imperatives of “force protection,” such an outcome met and even exceeded expectations. For commanders at all levels, mission accomplishment meant “returning home with no casualties.” In sharp contrast to the more relaxed attitude of other allied contingents in Bosnia, risk aversion had emerged as a hallmark of the U.S. military’s posture. At the unit level, exit strategy meant, in effect, “don’t get anyone killed.”48

More broadly, Joint Endeavor eased concerns that any sustained encounter between American soldiers and non-American Muslims was likely to fuel antagonism. Instead, it appeared that quartering U.S. troops alongside a Muslim population could reassure or pacify. So although painful memories of Somalia lingered—derided by Holbrooke as a “Vietmalia Syndrome”—Bosnia now appeared to define the way forward.49

This alluring prospect soon proved chimerical, however. Rather than bringing peace to the Balkans, armed intervention in Bosnia merely set the stage for another intervention on behalf of beleaguered Muslims, this time within Serbia proper.