In this chapter, the case study we will investigate is the conflict in the former Yugoslavia, particularly that in Bosnia-Herzegovina1 between 1991 and 1995. This war will also form the case study for the chapter on the part of the Powell Doctrine stressing the need for an “exit strategy.”2 This first chapter will try to place US policy towards Bosnia in the context of perceived issues of national interest broader than the conflict in Bosnia alone. We will then move on to look at how the different concepts and issues surrounding the idea of national interest that we describe relate to other elements of the Powell Doctrine, specifically the preference for the use of overwhelming force, the need to gain and hold Congressional and public support, the need for clear objectives, and the need for an “exit strategy.”
In this chapter, when referring to the case study, it is appropriate to refer to the Powell Doctrine, as this case study largely takes place after the publication of Powell’s 1992 article in Foreign Affairs, and, through the brief period of the case study that takes place before the publication of the article, Powell, as Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, was in a position to influence national policy directly in line with the ideas put forward in the article. However, in talking about where the idea that the use of force ought to be in the “vital national interest” came from, we will look at the intellectual climate and those authors that influenced Powell’s thinking, particularly Douglas Kinnard and Harry Summers. But first we will look at why the perception grew within the US Military that the Vietnam War was not in the United States’ “vital national interest.” By doing this we will be able to see more clearly what lessons regarding the US’s “vital national interest” the US Army took from its experience in Vietnam.
The argument we will pursue is that during the Vietnam War, the Johnson Administration seemed to be unsure as to whether the preservation of an independent South Vietnam was, or was not, in the vital interest of the United States. In effect, the Johnson Administration committed the United States to war without having made a clear and unambiguous decision that the preservation of South Vietnam, in and of itself, was worth the sacrifice of American lives. This ambiguity is underlined by the fact that relatively senior Administration officials were often unsure how to explain the war to the American public. The following quotation is an extract from a memorandum to the Secretary of State written by the Assistant Secretary for Public Affairs:
A public statement, either Presidential or on a high State Department level, should spell out some of the guidelines which will motivate our future actions in Viet-Nam. But this look into the future need not form the bulk of such a statement. Instead, the statement should be dominated by a simple, direct restatement of US policy. This restatement should outline the reasons why we are in South Viet-Nam.3
This memorandum was written four years after President Kennedy decided to send large numbers of military advisors to South Vietnam, and after the Johnson Administration had already made the decision in principle to bomb North Vietnam. The fact that, four years after the US began to dramatically step up its involvement in Vietnam, an official as senior as an Assistant Secretary of State should feel the need to point out that the public did not understand the reasons for US involvement in the war. Johnson did try and address this concern through a series of speeches, the most famous of which was his address to a graduating class at Johns Hopkins University. In this speech Johnson’s motivation for being in Vietnam seems clear:
We are there [South Vietnam] because we have a promise to keep. Since 1954 every American President has offered support to the people of South Viet-Nam. We have helped to build, and we have helped to defend. Thus, over many years, we have made a national pledge to help South Viet-Nam defend its independence.4
However, in private Johnson was far less sure about the reasons for American involvement in Vietnam: “President Johnson: Well, I know we oughtn’t to be there [Vietnam], but I can’t get out. I just can’t be the architect of surrender.”5
What Johnson means by “architect of surrender” is that whatever the merits of US intervention in Vietnam, the US cannot be seen as losing the war in Vietnam without risking the credibility of its alliance commitments around the world. As we shall see, this was a line of argument pushed strongly by Johnson’s Assistant Secretary of Defense for International Affairs John McNaughton.
Whilst publicly the United States’ objective was the preservation of an independent South Vietnam, in private, within the upper reaches of the Johnson Administration the preservation of South Vietnam was not universally seen as a non-negotiable objective of the war. As we shall see, the Johnson Administration broke down into competing camps with different views as to the underlying reasons behind US involvement in Vietnam, and as to what the stakes of the war were for the United States. Crucially, these were not arguments that were resolved before the US committed itself to war, but arguments that ran right the way through the Johnson Administration’s term in office, at the end of which the US had over half a million troops in Vietnam.
Particularly within Robert McNamara’s Department of Defense, there was an influential group of officials, the most prominent of whom was Assistant Secretary of Defense for International Security Affairs John McNaughton who argued that it would be enough for the US to have fought a war in South East Asia to underline the credibility of its commitment to combating the spread of Communism in Asia. For McNaughton, the ultimate outcome of the war was almost immaterial, so long as the United States had demonstrated that it had done everything possible, within reason, to preserve South Vietnam that would be enough. The following quotation is taken from a paper McNaughton co-authored with Assistant Secretary of State William Bundy. This paper was written as part of a major policy review carried out between October 1964 and January 1965. The end product of this review was the decision to commence the systematic bombing of targets in North Vietnam:
1. To hold the situation together as long as possible, so that we have time to strengthen other areas of Asia.
2. To take forceful enough measures in the situation so that we can emerge from it, even in the worst case, with our standing as the principal helper against Communist expansion as little impaired as possible.
3. To make clear to the world, and to nations in Asia particularly, that failure in South Vietnam, if it comes, was due to special local factors—such as bad colonial heritage and a lack of will to defend itself—that do not apply to other nations.6
Opposing McNaughton, and increasingly, Secretary of Defense McNamara, were the Joint Chiefs of Staff who argued that once any war began, its objectives should be the defeat of the enemy. Air Force Chief of Staff Curtis LeMay summed up the Chiefs’ view with the following observation: “You can’t get a little bit pregnant … Once you get into this, you’re into it.”7
They saw McNaughton’s theory as adding up to nothing more than fighting a war for the sake of fighting a war, and that struck the Joint Chiefs of Staff as profoundly immoral. LeMay’s successor, General John McConnell, described his feelings on the decision to declare certain targets in North Vietnam off limits to American bombing in the following terms. “I can’t tell you how I feel. I’m so sick of it … I have never been so goddamn frustrated by it all … I’m so sick of it.”8
Also opposing McNaughton’s views was a group led by Secretary of State Dean Rusk who saw the war in Vietnam through the prism of 1930s Europe. Their view of the war was that it was imperative that the United States be seen as standing up to aggression. Men like Rusk saw the preservation of an independent South Vietnam as being not only of “vital US national interest,” but in the vital interests of maintaining world peace: “The central objective of the United States in South Viet-Nam must be to insure that North Viet-Nam not succeed in taking over or determining the future of South Viet-Nam by force.”9
Perhaps the man who was most torn over these competing views was the President himself, both in the public and private record. Johnson’s mood can be seen swinging wildly between doubting whether the US had any business being in Vietnam or whether the war in Vietnam was vital to the US:
I don’t think it’s worth fighting for and I don’t think that we can get out. It’s just the biggest dammed mess that I ever saw … I was looking at this sergeant of mine [his valet] this morning. Got six little old kids over there and he’s getting out my things and bringing in my night reading … and I just thought about ordering his kids in there and what in the hell am I ordering him out there for? What the hell is Vietnam worth to me?10
On other occasions Johnson seemed to see the war as crucial to American security:
We have chosen to fight a limited war in Vietnam in an attempt to prevent a larger war—a war almost certain to follow, I believe, if the Communists succeed in overrunning and taking over South Vietnam by aggression and by force. I believe, and I am supported by some authority, that if they are not checked now the world can expect to pay a greater price to check them later.11
What we can clearly see from Johnson’s tone is a fear that any appeasement of what Johnson in this speech considers to be North Vietnamese aggression could lead to a replay of the appeasement on Nazi Germany in the late 1930s leading to World War II. As we have seen above, this was a line of argument put forward strongly by Secretary of State Rusk. We will discuss the strategic logic of Rusk’s position below.
Underlying these discourses on the US national interests was always a dark fear within Johnson, that one way or another, Vietnam held the power to destroy his presidency and his hopes for the future:
If we get into this war, I know what’s going to happen … Those damn conservatives are going to sit in Congress and they’re going to use this war as a way of opposing my Great Society legislation. People like [John] Stennis [senator from Mississippi]. They hate this stuff, they don’t want to help the poor and the Negroes but they’re afraid to be against it at a time like this when there’s been all this prosperity. But the war, oh, they’ll like the war. They’ll take the war as their weapon. They’ll be against my programs because of the war … They’ll say they’re not against it, not against the poor, but we have this job to do, beating Communists. We beat the Communists first, then we can look around and maybe give something to the poor.12
Many of the arguments surrounding how the war was to be waged ultimately came back to the fact that the principal foreign policy decision makers of the Johnson Administration had competing views over what the basic stakes of the war were for the United States. If it is taken as a starting point that the survival of an independent South Vietnam was intrinsically important to the United States, then it would be logical to use every resource available to prevail, even potentially at the cost of provoking a war with China. The logic of Rusk’s analogy with Europe in the 1930s would lead the United States to a position where it would have to be prepared to confront China in order to force it to back down. To men like Rusk, the lesson of appeasement was that there was an urgent need to confront expansionary powers early and clearly demonstrate US resolve. However, if it was taken as a starting point that the objective of the war was to maintain US credibility, it made a great deal of sense to limit the amount of effort expended in South Vietnam. First, preserving forces would allow commitments to be met in other, possibly more vital parts of the world. Second, if South Vietnam had to be destroyed in order to save it, how would this have affected the credibility of the United States? Effectively the message that would be sent out was that the US would maintain its commitment to its allies at the cost of destroying them. Or, as John McNaughton put it, the US needed, “To emerge from (the) crisis [sic] without considerable taint from methods.”13
As the amount of blood and treasure the US expended in Vietnam increased, such abstract considerations of the national interest became less and less relevant to the problem at hand. Now that American blood had been spilt, the moral issue at hand resolved itself more and more as an issue of would the US allow itself to be beaten now that men had died for the cause. As Johnson put it, “we will not permit those who fire upon us in Vietnam to win a victory over the desires and the intentions of all the American people.”14 This logic had a cruel circularity to it. More people were effectively being asked to give up their lives in order to make the sacrifices of those who had already given theirs meaningful. Increasingly the rationale for US involvement in the war boiled down to the absurd notion that the US was in Vietnam because it was in Vietnam, and would remain in Vietnam because it was in Vietnam. As for McNaughton’s argument that remaining in Vietnam was vital to the US’s credibility, there is a world of difference in terms of credibility between being seen as helping an ally defend themselves, and intervening in somebody else’s civil war with allies of very uncertain determination.15 Looking back on his experience in Vietnam after having retired as Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Colin Powell observed: “I would spend nearly 20 years, one way or another, grappling with our experience in this country [Vietnam]. And over all that time Vietnam rarely made much more sense than … We’re here because we’re here, because we’re … ”16
So what was the intellectual climate that led to the particular element of the Powell Doctrine calling for force to only be used in the “vital national interest”? We can see that such an intellectual climate was a climate that was extremely hostile to the Johnson Administration’s inability to define clear, consistent, and militarily achievable objectives in Vietnam. Brigadier General Douglas Kinnard concluded that, “almost 70 percent of the Army generals who managed the war were uncertain of its objectives … [this] mirrors a deep-seated strategic failure: the inability of policy-makers to frame tangible, obtainable goals.”17 Colonel Harry Summers, in An American Strategy in Vietnam: A Critical Analysis, points out that University of Nebraska Professor, Hugh M. Arnold, found that, “Compared to the one North Vietnamese objective, he found some twenty-two separate American rationales.”18 What we can see from this is that officers of fairly senior rank, a Brigadier General and a Colonel, writing in the late 1970s and early 1980s, less than a decade after the end of direct US involvement in the Vietnam conflict, were already pointing towards the Powell Doctrine’s insistence on policymakers being clear on what the stakes are for the United States in any military intervention, and the need to have a clear, coherent and consistent reason why US military intervention is necessary. As General Bruce Palmer put it,
One larger lesson concerns the national interest. From the beginning our leaders realized that South Vietnam was not vital to US interests … As hostilities dragged on interminably, with no clearly discernible end in sight, more and more questions were raised.19
These observations were all made more than a decade before Powell put pen to paper on his Foreign Affairs article.
Having observed the lessons of Vietnam, it is time for us to move back to our case study of US policy towards the war in Bosnia between 1991 and 1995. We can identify two distinct types of interest the US had in the conflict in Bosnia. The first type we can call “security interests.” These would be issues that relate to the physical security of the United States and its allies. The second type of issue the US finds itself taking an active interest in is what we could call “humanitarian interests.” These were issues that could not be said to affect directly the physical security of either the US or its allies, but were ethical problems. These issues included refugees, the delivery of humanitarian aid and the protection of civilians in a warzone. US action on these issues was driven by a sense of moral revulsion and the urge to protect innocent people caught in the middle of a particularly bloody conflict. As we shall see throughout this chapter, the Administrations of George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton saw these issues in a slightly different light and gave significantly different weight to such issues at different times.
We will look first at the security interests. In order to fully understand these issues, it is important first to set the Bosnian conflict in its historical context.
The peoples of the former Yugoslavia had the bad luck that the conflict that tore their country apart took place during one of the most profound shifts in the geopolitical landscape of the twentieth century. At the same time as Yugoslavia entered its final collapse, the Soviet Union was also entering its terminal decline. “Within a year of Bush coming to office, communist governments across Eastern Europe tumbled, the Berlin Wall came down and the Cold War came to an end.”20
This impacted on the conflict in Yugoslavia in two ways: first, it meant that the Yugoslavian conflict was never more than halfway up US policymakers’ agenda.21 When compared to the collapse of a nuclear-armed superpower, the aftermath of the Gulf War,22 the reunification of a potential great power in Germany, and the potential breakthrough in the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians. The problems of Yugoslavia, whilst tragic and certainly potentially dangerous for the peoples of the region, in the eyes of most of the senior members of the Bush Administration were simply not on the same scale. One of the everyday facts of life which are frequently overlooked in academic analyses is that policymakers are human beings, just like the rest of us, and even though it sounds trite it is still true to say that there are only so many hours in the day. Former Secretary of State James Baker makes this point in diplomatic yet clear fashion:
The Yugoslav conflict had the potential to be intractable, but it was nonetheless a regional dispute … The greater threat to American interests at the time lay in the increasingly dicey situation in Moscow, and we preferred to maintain our focus on that challenge, which had global ramifications for us, particularly with regard to nuclear weapons. Moreover, in the summer of 1991, we were already consumed by the Middle East peace process and close to getting the parties to the table.23
These unfortunate facts led to the second consequence of the timing of the conflicts in the former Yugoslavia. US policymakers tended to see events in Yugoslavia through the prism of how they would affect events in the Soviet Union rather than on their own merits. This leads us to the first major security interest that the Bush Administration felt was at stake in the former Yugoslavia: “For America could not appear to back a breakaway province in Yugoslavia without setting a dangerous precedent for a Soviet Union and Russia that might also splinter apart.”24
The nightmare scenario for the Bush Administration was that the Soviet Union would turn into Yugoslavia writ large. Just how aware the Bush Administration was of this risk can be seen by the tone of the speech given by then Deputy Secretary of State Lawrence Eagleburger at Georgetown University in September of 1990:
“For all its risks and uncertainties, the Cold War was characterized by a remarkably stable and predictable set of relationships among the great powers.” A sudden end to the East-West standoff could bring disorder, leading to government crackdowns, the reestablishment of dictatorships, and war.25
The strong desire to keep the Soviet Union together inevitably had a major impact on US policy towards Yugoslavia. The US could not find itself in the position of supporting the dissolution of Yugoslavia whilst at the same time trying to keep the Soviet Union together. Just how strong this desire was can be seen from the fact that as late as March 1991, a month after a hard line Communist coup attempt had failed, and only eight months before the final collapse of the Soviet Union, President Bush publically refused to even contemplate the possibility that the Soviet Union might collapse. The following quotation is taken from a response to a question during a press conference:
Q. Could you tell me on the eve of the Secretary’s trip to Moscow whether you think it’s in your intention for your Administration now reach out in the Soviet Union individually to the Republics? And do you think that President Gorbachev’s days are now numbered in power?
The President. I will continue to deal with the President of the Soviet Union. That is the Government that’s accredited, and that is the Government with which the United States Government will deal.26
Consequently, throughout 1990 and 1991, the official US policy was to do everything possible to encourage the various parties within Yugoslavia that the best hope for the future was to reform the federation rather than to secede from it.
In June of 1991, Secretary of State Baker paid a one-day visit to Yugoslavia as part of a tour of Europe. Baker recounts the message he gave to all of Yugoslavia’s leaders:
“Our critical interest in the Yugoslav question is its peaceful settlement. We will continue to oppose the use of force or intimidation to resolve political differences.” Unilateral acts, I reiterated, would lead to disaster, a point I underscored with the Slovenians and Croatians. I also said that while we supported the territorial integrity of Yugoslavia and existing republic borders and would not accept unilateral changes, the international community, of course, recognized that if the republics wanted to change borders by peaceful, consensual means, that was an altogether different matter.27
The lower down the policymaking hierarchy, the more focused US attention would become. The staff of the State Department and the CIA that dealt most directly with Yugoslav matters felt that trying to hold the federation together at this point was a fool’s errand and that the better policy was to try and ensure the peaceful dissolution of Yugoslavia. The further up the policymaking ladder one moved, the less officials were concerned with the merits of a particular policy on Yugoslavia itself and the more concerned they became with the merits of Yugoslav policy vis-à-vis the Soviet Union.
Here, we can make our first comment on the general nature of how one defines “national interest.” What we can see in the Yugoslav case is that “national interest” is an almost entirely subjective evaluation, and that often different interpretations of “national interest” derive not from which bureaucracy one is a member of, as scholars like Graham Allison28 would have it, but rather from how far up the hierarchy of a particular organization people sit. A recurrent feature of US policy towards the former Yugoslavia was the extent to which the State Department, the Department of Defense and the CIA all found themselves engaged in huge internal disputes in Bosnia between those at the top of the organization, whose responsibility was to try and look at the global impact of particular policies, and those at a more junior level, whose job was to execute policy and who were much closer to the peculiarities of the situation on the ground of the former Yugoslavia and who tended to look at US national interest in terms of the situation on the ground. Stephen Walker who dealt with Yugoslav affairs through the Europe and Canada Bureaus of the State Department, could describe what was happening in Bosnia in the following terms:
Here we are, almost fifty years after the holocaust, approaching the 21st century, and we’ve apparently learned nothing. We call it “ethnic cleansing” because it sounds nicer, but it is genocide. Genocide is taking place again in Europe and we—yes, you and I—are letting it happen. Actually, we’re not just letting it happen, we’re encouraging it, we’re encouraging the war criminals, the butchers, the rapists, we are responsible.29
Here, I believe we can make a second generalization about how US policymakers tend to view what is and is not in the United States’ “vital national interest.” That is, that US policy tends to privilege relationships with its potential peers. That is to say, Russia and China are potential or actual “superpowers,” depending on how one defines that term: “George Bush was so knowledgeable about China, and so hands on in managing most aspects of our policy, that even some of our leading sinologists began referring to him as the government’s desk officer for China.”30
And its policy towards regional or civil conflict between third parties tends to be strongly influenced by its relationship with the other major powers, in particular, is a conflict occurring either within the borders or in close proximity of another major power? And second, are other “superpowers” intervening in a conflict, or is there any likelihood that they might? In the case of the former Yugoslavia, the answers to these questions were that Yugoslavia was neither close enough to any other major power to risk spilling over the borders, and there was little prospect, despite occasional bluster to the contrary, that the Russian Federation would intervene in the former Yugoslavia if the US chose not to.
The second major security interest driving US policy toward the former Yugoslavia was the desire to try and define a limit to US involvement in European affairs now that the Cold War had come to an end. This is not to say that the US no longer felt it had any security interests in Europe; indeed, maintaining and possibly expanding NATO were seen as vital elements of US security policy. However, both the Bush and Clinton Administrations did not want the US to be seen as the world’s policeman with the moral responsibility to intervene to prevent every regional conflict that came along. The following quotation is an extract from George H.W. Bush’s personal diary and comes in the middle of a passage written at the very start of the war between Serbia and Croatia: “the concept that we have to work out every problem, everywhere in the world, is crazy. I think the American people understand it … I don’t think we can be looked to for solving every problem, every place in the world.”31 Married to this was the fact that it was very difficult for US policymakers to judge what exactly the stakes were in regional conflicts. During the Cold War, US policy towards regional conflicts was centered on the idea of preventing or rebutting Soviet interference and stopping any attempt by the Eastern Bloc to widen its sphere of influence:
However, with the demise of the Soviet Union leaving the US as the world’s only superpower, there was now no danger of Yugoslavia in any way altering a European balance of power that the US utterly dominated. If conflicts such as those in the former Yugoslavia were no longer going to have even a tangential effect on the balance of power, did the US have sufficient interest in ending the conflict to be willing to risk the lives of its own troops?
US confusion over the stakes of the Yugoslav conflict was matched by a new determination on the part of the nations of the European Union (EU) to be more proactive in managing European security. With the threat of the Soviet Union gone, European nations were now hoping that the time had come for them to take the lead in settling European conflicts, and that the time had come for the US not to completely disengage in Europe, but to step back from what many in Europe saw as its micromanaging and overbearing role.
There is a third generalization to be made at this point, which is that, for a variety of reasons, the US did not want to be seen as the world’s “policeman.” In some ways, the Cold War had dragged a nation that historically had been extremely wary of foreign entanglements to a position of global pre-eminence. Now that the Cold War had ended, there was a strong undercurrent in US politics, both on the left and the right, that it was time for the US to scale back its overseas commitments. On the left, the end of the Cold War promised to free up both financial and political capital needed to enact political and social reform:
If you think we need to continue to spend $160 billion to subsidize Europe’s defense against the Soviet Union, or whatever it’s called now, put your ballot in the Bush box. But if you believe like I do that Europe is strong enough and rich enough and powerful enough to defend itself, and that we can take that wealth and invest it in better roads and mass transit and education and better health care for our people, you take your ballot and put it in the Harkin box and come home to the Democratic Party.32
It should not be forgotten that whilst trying to deal with Yugoslavia Bill Clinton was also trying to pass one of the most ambitious pieces of domestic legislation ever written with his plan for healthcare reform. The rightwing argument articulated by former Nixon speechwriter Patrick Buchanan in his unsuccessful campaign for the Republican nomination in 1992, was that the kind of activist foreign policy pursued during the Cold War had led to the inexorable growth of the state, rising taxation, and the neglect of American competitiveness in the global economy:
The first challenge we face, then, is economic, presented by the rise of a European super state and a dynamic Asia led by Japan. The 20th Century was the American Century, but they intend to make the 21st, the century of Europe or the Century of Asia. So, as we Americans congratulate one another on the victory for freedom that we, first and foremost, won, and won together for all mankind in the Cold War, we must begin to prepare for the new struggles already underway.33
This message, the last point in particular, had a great deal of resonance at a time when the US was gradually losing pre-eminence in the global economy: “The budget deficit was growing larger every year, as was the trade imbalance with Japan. Ordinary people who did not usually monitor such economic trends felt squeezed and believed they were working harder and harder just to stand still.”34
There was a great deal of superficial appeal in the argument that whilst the US had protected its “Allies” for the past 50 years, the nations of Europe and Asia had effectively taken advantage of the US by getting a free ride when it came to paying for their own defense and that, in return for US protection, they had pursued trade policies that directly damaged the US economy, and in particular that these policies had done enormous damage to the manufacturing base in the United States.
Those such as George Bush Senior and Bill Clinton once he was in office who still wished to maintain an activist US foreign policy had to be aware of the dangers posed to this policy from both left and right. Therefore, both the Clinton and Bush Administrations took exceptional care to demonstrate to the public at every available opportunity that the US would not and could not be expected to deal with every conflict in the world on its own, and also both Administrations took care to try and make sure that when the US did decide to intervene in regional conflicts such as Bosnia and Somalia, that it did so in the context of multinational missions that had UN approval. In answer to a question about why the US had not taken stronger action in the former Yugoslavia, President Bush responded as follows:
I think the sanctions—I’m not prepared to give up on the sanctions at all. They’ve only been in effect for a few days. As you know, first on this question of Yugoslavia, out in front was the United Nations. You had Cyrus Vance as a representative of the United Nations, did a superb job trying to negotiate, ably supplemented, I might say, by Peter Carrington. They tried to work that problem, had our full support.35
The same point was perhaps made more bluntly by a senior official of the incoming Clinton Administration speaking on background before a visit by President Mitterrand of France. The question being answered is “why the US had stopped trying to set up a no-fly zone in Bosnia?”
Well, we haven’t given up at all. We have not yet convinced our partners that a no-fly zone enforcement resolution should be adopted by the Security Council, and I think perhaps the President and President Mitterrand will be discussing that tomorrow. It’s not a unilateral action that the United States can take.36
On technical grounds this argument is clearly nonsense. The US, with relatively minor assistance from the British, was able to enforce two no-fly zones in Iraq for 12 years. Therefore the “senior Administration official” can only be referring to the fact that the US would, on political grounds, rather not be seen as acting unilaterally.
This kind of multilateral approach was seen as a way of being able to pursue US policy in a way that spread the cost and responsibility for intervention. It also dealt with the second problem. The US feared that if it did become seen as a global policeman this would inevitably lead to resentment by other nations, who could see the US as throwing its weight around and potentially, over time, come to see the US as an overgrown global bully. US political commentator Joel Klein, writing on Bill Clinton’s foreign policy, makes the following observation: “ … he also understood the long-term value of diplomatic humility, of not making unnecessary enemies, of pursuing American interests within the context of multilateral organizations.”37
The perception of not wanting to be seen as a bully was particularly acute in its relationship with Russia and China, as these nations saw themselves as equals on the world stage to the US. The Russians in particular had a hard time dealing with the fact that the Russian Federation was no longer in the same league as the old Soviet Union. Therefore, from the perspective of the Bush and Clinton Administrations, it made good long-term strategic sense for the US to be seen as acting in concert with other nations and sensitive to their opinions, particularly to those nations who could in the future become potential rivals. The problem with this attitude is that, when no consensus for a particular action existed, what started out as a policy of seeking collective action became paralysis. Also, despite the fact that the many nations would bemoan unilateral US action, they had become used to the idea that the US would take a lead on issues and that they would position themselves in response to what the US did.
When the US did not act unilaterally but sought to engage them in collective action, this reflex of responding to US policy was no longer available, and that in turn led to a great deal of resentment. After all, the US is the “superpower”; they are supposed to take a lead.
We will now move on to look at the “humanitarian” interests that the US had in the conflicts in the former Yugoslavia.
Because Yugoslavia had been such an ethnically heterogeneous state, there were substantial minorities of Serbs living in both Bosnia and Croatia, and a substantial Croat minority living in Bosnia. The leaders of these groups did not see why Bosnia should be allowed to exercise its right to be independent of Yugoslavia, while the Bosnian government blocked their right to be independent of a Bosnian state in which they were going to be minorities. As Milan Martič, a prominent Serb separatist in Croatia put it, “What cannot be bought is our Serb dignity. We would rather go hungry, as long as we are together with our Serb people. We will eat potatoes and husks, but we will be on the side of our people. We will remain human.”38
The aim therefore for both Bosnian-Serbs and Bosnian-Croats was to carve ethnically homogenous states out of Bosnia which could then become parts of Serbia and Croatia. The inevitable consequence of these war aims was that a great deal of the violence in the former Yugoslavia was directed against civilians. As Laura Silber and Alan Little put it, Bosnian refugees were not, “the tragic by-product of a civil war; their expulsion was the whole point of the war.”39 The conflicts in Bosnia and Croatia gave the world the term “ethnic cleansing”; what this euphemistic term meant was the forced deportation of non-Serb (and to a lesser extent non-Croat) populations from their homes, and a systematic attempt to destroy any trace that Muslims or Croats had ever lived in a particular area. To this end, churches, mosques, and other sites of cultural significance were destroyed, along with property deeds, or any document that could prove ownership of land.40 Aside from these forced deportations, rape was used as a weapon of war, both to terrify people into leaving an area faster, and to try to destroy the Bosnian Muslims and the Kraija Croats as distinct ethnic groups.
These atrocities were unusually well reported. Those perpetrating the atrocities took remarkably little concern to conceal what they were doing, the massive movement of refugees allowed easy access to witnesses, and several reporters, most notably Newsday’s Roy Gutman and John Burns of the New York Times, wrote extensively on war crimes committed in the former Yugoslavia, indeed Gutman won the 1993 Pulitzer Prize for his reporting. The following quotation is taken from one of Gutman’s articles headlined “Ethnic Cleansing: Yugoslavs Try to Deport 1,800 Muslims to Hungary”: “In a practice not seen in Europe since the end of World War II, the Serbian-led government of Yugoslavia chartered an 18-car train last week in an attempt to deport the entire population of a Muslim village to Hungary.”41
Burns even managed to interview a handful of the soldiers responsible for acts of ethnic cleansing. The following quotation is taken from one of Burn’s interviews with a Bosnian-Serb soldier called Borislav Herak:
In the killing techniques he claimed to have used, including throat-cutting and machine-gunning, and in the apparently casual and random fashion in which most of his victims were selected, the young Serb’s story closely matched accounts by thousands of Muslims who managed to escape Serbian offensives in the last 12 months.42
As well as this media coverage, the US Government was extremely well informed about what was going on. The CIA in particular was able to give policy makers an almost minute by minute chronology of certain instances of ethnic cleansing. To say nothing of the fact that US Embassy officials and NGO workers had exactly the same access to refugees that the press did. David Halberstam quotes John Fox, who in the summer of 1992 was a junior member of the State Department’s policy planning staff:
There was a network of us, working for different agencies both in and out of government, sharing information and keeping each other tuned. And we had a lot of information very much like that which Gutman came up with about the camps and the atrocities.43
The reaction of the US Government to these events can tell us a great deal about where “humanitarian” interests fall in the scale of national interests. Although both the Bush and Clinton Administrations were by no means indifferent to ethnic cleansing, both Administrations consistently condemned it and both supported the creation of a War Crimes Tribunal. Neither Bush nor Clinton ultimately sanctioned military intervention in order to prevent ethnic cleansing, although there is an important distinction to be drawn between these two Administrations. The Bush Administration was quite clear that although what was happening in the former Yugoslavia was deplorable and ought to be stopped, it was not sufficiently important to the US that it would justify the use of force. The way the Bush Administration seems to have viewed the former Yugoslavia is that although it was an important issue, it never quite passed the threshold of importance for military action to be seriously considered: “There was never any thought at that time of using US ground troops in Yugoslavia—the American people would never have supported it.”44
The Clinton Administration, although it did not commit to military action for purely humanitarian reasons, did weight the importance of humanitarian interests slightly differently to the Bush Administration. In stark contrast to Baker’s standoffish attitude, Clinton’s Ambassador to the United Nations Madeleine Albright seemed in the early stages of the Administration to be almost evangelical about peacekeeping:
The decision we must make is whether to pull up stakes and allow Somalia to fall back into the abyss or to stay the course and help lift the country and its people from the category of a failed state into that of an emerging democracy. For Somalia’s sake, and ours, we must persevere.45
Although Clinton himself came to office without having particularly strong convictions on foreign policy in general, several senior members of the Administration, in particular Vice President Al Gore, National Security Advisor Anthony Lake, and UN Ambassador Madeleine Albright, had taken a keen interest in the former Yugoslavia and were prepared to see the US take some sort of military action in order to alleviate the situation:
“There are people on his staff who just want to go ahead and bomb, and damn the consequences,” said one deputy. Secretary of State Warren Christopher was opposed, at least initially, to military action. Defense Secretary Les Aspin favoured action, but only with a clear-cut objective he could sell the chiefs, especially Powell.46
However, even the most hawkish elements of the Clinton Administration were only prepared to contemplate a very limited range of military action; in particular no-one at senior level advocated the large scale deployment of ground forces. Vice Chief of Staff of the Army, Lieutenant General Gordon Sullivan, accurately described the attitude of the Clinton Administration and its effect on the European allies: “The Europeans were looking for leadership from the United States. With troops on the ground. And it was not forthcoming. Only air.”47 This immediately touched off fierce resistance on the part of the Military.48 In the end the Clinton Administration came to the conclusion that the case for military intervention in Bosnia was not strong enough to overcome the resistance of the Military domestically or, just as importantly, of its European allies who had troops on the ground as part of a humanitarian and peace-keeping mission, and it feared retribution should the US undertake military action.
What one can see from the Bosnian case study is not that the US is indifferent to violations of human rights, or that it is prepared to look the other way when war crimes are being committed, but that there is a distinct limit on what US policy makers are prepared to contemplate in order to stop such acts. The US under both a Republican and Democratic Administration, putting different emphases on the importance of human rights, came to the conclusion that they could not justify a military intervention in the former Yugoslavia on humanitarian grounds alone, despite the fact that the US could not claim to be ignorant of the enormous scale of the suffering being inflicted mostly on a civilian population.
The second “humanitarian interest” we can detect in US policy towards the former Yugoslavia is in a sense a negative one. During the Cold War both the US and the USSR had to weigh up the likely response of the other superpower should they choose to intervene in regional or civil conflicts. Superpower intervention always carried with it the risk that the other superpower would engage in counter-intervention. This was no longer a realistic prospect, as President Clinton put it in his address at the American University,
The Soviet Union itself has disintegrated. The nuclear shadow is receding in the face of the START I and START II agreements and others that we have made and others yet to come. Democracy is on the march everywhere in the world. It is a new day and a great moment for America.49
The US was now free to shape policy without the realistic threat that it would trigger a superpower standoff. By the end of the Cold War, the US stood as indisputably the strongest military power in the world and remained the lynchpin of a Western economic system that now dominated the globe. The point to be noted here is that there was nothing standing in the way of US intervention in the former Yugoslavia except the attitude of US policy makers themselves. Because of all of these factors, wars in the former Yugoslavia presented a situation not only of exceptional human suffering, but also a situation where the US had every opportunity and every capability to prevent suffering. In other words, many people when faced with the question “Why should we intervene in the former Yugoslavia?” came to the conclusion, “Because we can.”
Not only did the demise of the Soviet Union remove one of the principal reasons why US intervention in civil conflicts has been potentially geopolitically risky, it also, at a stroke, removed the rationale that had underpinned US foreign and defense policy for 50 years. Ever since the end of the Second World War, US policy had been built around how the US was going to deal with the Soviet Union. Although the Cold War had been a time of great international tension it had also served as a very effective organizational principle for US and to an extent Western foreign policy:
Policy was built around the need to contain Soviet expansionism, and prevent nuclear war, and grudgingly to try and reduce and then reverse, the nuclear arms race. Now that the Soviet Union was gone, there seemed to be no organizing principle behind foreign policy, there seemed to be no criteria against which to judge how the US should respond.
The wars in the former Yugoslavia seem to offer one potential rationale for future foreign policy and that was to use the extraordinary power that the US had at that point in history, to try to create a more stable and a more just world order:
Today, our policies must also focus on relations within nations, on a nation’s form of governance, on its economic structure, on its ethnic tolerance. These are of concern to us, for they shape how these nations treat their neighbors as well as their own people and whether they are reliable when they give their word. In particular, democracies are far less likely to wage war on other nations than dictatorships are.50
In particular there was an argument that the UN could now be used as its authors had initially intended it should be used, as a genuine instrument of collective security. There was a strong argument that what was happening in Bosnia contravened the 1948 genocide convention51 which, simply put, placed an obligation on all signatories to do all in their power to prevent genocide taking place. The argument was made that if the US allowed what was happening in Bosnia to take place unchallenged, it would set the worst possible example for what the new post Cold War world might look like. What was going on in Bosnia may not have been a direct threat to the security of the United States, but it was certainly a direct threat to any aspiration to build a more just world now that the Cold War was over.
These arguments are nothing new in debates over how the US should frame its interests. Rhetorically, the United States has always liked to see itself as a nation apart, as the world’s preeminent democracy and a source of hope and inspiration for the rest of the world. At least since Thomas Paine and the French Revolution this self-image has gone hand in hand with the idea that the US should use its power to help the spread of its ideals. As Ronald Reagan put it, “We—today’s living Americans—have in our lifetime fought harder, paid a higher price for freedom and done more to advance the dignity of man than any people who have ever lived on this Earth.”52 More recently, during the Cold War, a significant section of US elite opinion favored a policy not of containment towards the Soviet Union but a policy ending in nothing less than the destruction of Communism and the liberation of Eastern Europe: “By contrast many of the Reagan people had cared not just about national security but rather which side was right and which side was wrong.”53
This idealism does not sit well with the rest of the Powell Doctrine. By definition, if your aim is the continuous spread of democracy and the American ideal of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, there is no “exit strategy,” there will always be new challenges for the US to overcome by force. Second, although rhetorically the objective of this kind of foreign policy is clear, on a more practical level there are a number of important questions that this kind of idealistic foreign policy leaves unanswered. First, is the spreading of democracy the same thing as spreading American style, institutions and the notion of a capitalist, property owning, democratic system? And if so, how do you deal with the inevitable clash once these institutions are introduced into areas of the world that are outside of their cultural frame of reference? Also, the Powell Doctrine’s demand for continued public and Congressional support could be difficult to satisfy in the context of commitments which are difficult to justify in the absence of a direct threat to the security of the nation. As Colin Powell put it, even though the Military occasionally has to operate in unclear circumstances:
Decisive means and results are always to be preferred, even if they are not always possible. So you bet I get nervous when so-called experts suggest that all we need is a little surgical bombing or a limited attack. When the desired result isn’t obtained, a new set of experts then comes forward with talk of a little escalation. History has not been kind to this approach.54
Also, here we see two different concepts of the “national interest” in direct competition with one another. On the one hand, we have the desire mentioned earlier that the US should not find itself in a position of having to play the world’s policeman. On the other hand, we see a desire to be seen as a force for good in the world. In the context of the wars in the former Yugoslavia, this contradiction tended to play itself out as a situation in which US rhetoric, both under Bush and Clinton, tended to outrun US actions. Time and again, both the Clinton and Bush Administrations would in the strongest possible terms condemn what was happening in the former Yugoslavia. The following quotation from a news conference President Bush gave in August 1992 is fairly typical of Bush and Clinton’s rhetoric towards what was happening in Bosnia:
Like all Americans, I am outraged and horrified at the terrible violence shattering the lives of innocent men, women, and children in Bosnia. The aggressors and extremists pursue a policy, a vile policy, of ethnic cleansing, deliberately murdering innocent civilians, driving others from their homes.55
However, neither the Bush nor the Clinton Administration demonstrated any willingness to actually do anything to reverse it. In this context, the discussion of whether what was happening in Bosnia was sufficiently serious to be called genocide is extremely interesting. Both the Bush and Clinton Administrations went to great lengths to avoid using the term genocide, or, if they did use the word, they went to great lengths to ensure that it was modified, i.e. acts of genocide, acts tantamount to genocide, but never just the word genocide on its own. This is because, if the US admitted there was genocide and then did nothing about it, not only would it be violating its treaty commitments, but, on a more fundamental level, it would be violating its sense of itself as a just nation. As the former Yugoslavia Desk Officer Richard Johnson points out, admitting a genocide was taking place in Bosnia would have produced, “ … more political pressure to take effective action, including the use of force, to end and punish the genocide.”56
In the title of this chapter we used the phrase “vital national interest,” rather than “national interest.” This is a distinction that Powell himself uses when talking about the doctrine in his 1992 Foreign Affairs article,57 and so it is to the issue of what constitutes “vital interest” that we now turn our attention.
The first thing to be said is that vital-ness is not a fixed concept. What looks vital in one moment may not under shifting circumstances remain vital for long.
As we can see by looking at the Yugoslav case study, the opposite is also true. What looks like a peripheral interest at one point can, under changing circumstances, come to look vital relatively quickly. For example, in 1992 the Bush Administration saw its policy towards the former Yugoslavia largely in the context of what it considered to be its much more important relationship with the Soviet Union and the newly born Russian Federation. By 1995, only three years later, the Clinton Administration saw the situation in Bosnia as a key test case in forming the shape of a post-Cold War world. These differences can partly be ascribed to the different world views of the Bush and Clinton Administrations discussed above. But they are also in large part due to changing international circumstances which altered the relative priorities of the United States.
To offer just a brief list of these changes in international circumstances should suffice to make the point. With the deployment of a largely European peace-keeping force into Bosnia and parts of Croatia, the conflict in the former Yugoslavia had taken on the dimensions of an Inter-allied problem as most of the US’s allies had committed peace-keeping forces. This would be a demonstration of when the actions of other states can be perceived to alter what counts as “vital” or “not vital.” Changing public awareness can also help decide vital-ness. In 1992 Yugoslavia was a side story in a time of profound change to the political landscape of the world with the end of the Cold War. By 1995, because of the horrific humanitarian situation discussed above, the wars in the former Yugoslavia had become one of the leading foreign news stories in the United States and both public and elite opinion were now much more aware of the situation and much more vocal in demanding that the United States take action to improve it. Likewise, as the Clinton Administration was gearing up for re-election in 1995,58 it was acutely aware that foreign policy was not a highlight of the record of its first term in office. Being able to come up with a durable peace in the former Yugoslavia was seen as essential if the Clinton Administration wanted to portray itself as successful when it came to issues of foreign policy. Importantly, here we can see that vital-ness of an interest may easily bleed over into general political perceptions of the strength and competence of an Administration, even if the issue itself does not directly threaten the security of the United States.59
The issue of vital-ness, as well as being in a state of constant flux, is also a matter of deeply subjective judgment at any given time. Certainly in the case of the former Yugoslavia, this subjective judgment as was briefly discussed above was, to a great extent, shaped by the personnel making it in the bureaucracies of the State Department, National Security Council and the Department of Defense.
US policy towards the former Yugoslavia was marked by the phenomenon that State Department officials, as a rule, tended to be more hawkish than those in the Department of Defense. It is not easy to pin down any particular reason why this was so although certainly it was true that there were many more people at a senior level in the military and in the Department of Defense that had had some firsthand experience of the war in Vietnam, than there were in the State Department. What we can say for sure is that the subjective judgments of policy makers as to whether or not what was happening in the former Yugoslavia constituted a “vital national interest,” were by and large conditioned by the level of seniority they held in the policy making process and also it is possible that their perceptions were influenced by the point in time at which they entered the policy making process. What is certain is that Colin Powell was less than impressed with the coherence of the policy making process under his new boss Bill Clinton, “ … the discussions continued to meander like graduate-student bull sessions or the think-tank seminars in which many of my new colleagues had spent the last 12 years while their party was out of power.”60
Equally, when writing his biography between 1994 and 1995, Powell was skeptical that any US president would ever decide that what was happening in Bosnia would constitute “vital national interest”:
The west has wrung its hands over Bosnia, but has not been able to find its vital interests or matching commitment. No American President could defend to the American people the heavy sacrifice of lives it would cost to resolve this baffling conflict. Nor could a President likely sustain the long-term involvement necessary to keep the protagonists from going at each other’s throats all over again at the first opportunity.61
Interestingly, Powell’s very gloomy prognosis was proved completely wrong, the Dayton Accords have, to date, managed to keep the peace in Bosnia, and indeed at the time of writing there is even the suggestion that Bosnia may join the European Union at some date in the not too distant future.
We will now move on to look at how the different conceptions of national interest we have laid out in this chapter sit with the rest of the Powell Doctrine. We will again begin by looking at the “security” interests laid out at the beginning of this chapter.
If we look first at our generalization that the US tends to privilege its relationships with the other potential great powers and its possible competitors, this certainly has implications for the need to gain and hold public and Congressional support because it should be relatively straightforward to explain why maintaining good relations with other potential superpowers is important to the US. These potential superpowers constitute the only really plausible threat to the United States in the arena of relations between sovereign states. Therefore, it should be a relatively simple matter for politicians to be able to explain to the general public why these relationships are important, why it is in the US’s “interests” to maintain them. Also, the benefits of maintaining stable relations between the US and potential competitors are relatively tangible and easy to demonstrate in terms of maintaining peace between nuclear armed powers, and in terms of the opportunities for expanded trade and economic relations. These are all issues around which it ought to be possible to shape and maintain a relatively stable political consensus.
The distinction in opinions between different levels of policy makers could also potentially be explained in terms of maintaining public and Congressional support. The higher up the policy making process one goes, the more one’s position is dependent upon public support. The lower to mid-levels of the State and Defense Department are by and large staffed by career officials who remain in their jobs regardless of which party is in power. As such they are relatively impervious to public opinion and also relatively anonymous. At the higher levels of the State and Defense Department officials rotate in and out of office depending on the results of elections. It is therefore essential for them to maintain public and Congressional support in order to win elections and maintain themselves in office. Also, the higher one moves up the policy making chain the more known one becomes to the public at large and the more public opinion turns against a particular policy the more likely you are to come up against extremely public criticism.
This is most acutely true of Presidents themselves. Not only is holding onto public support vital to maintaining themselves in office in the short and medium term, being able to say that their policies emerged as a result of public consensus is also important in terms of maintaining their historical reputation. Presidents that are seen to have divided the nation, particularly if it turns out that their policies were not successful, are generally not fondly remembered by historians. In the case of Yugoslavia, George Bush was himself a keen amateur historian and had a very definite sense of how he wanted to be remembered by history. He most certainly did not want to be remembered as a President who divided a nation to go to war three times in one term in office.62
In terms of the need for overwhelming force, again the “security interests” that we looked at earlier in this chapter would seem to have a better fit to the Powell Doctrine than “the humanitarian interests.” Because the whole rationale behind intervention on humanitarian grounds is to eliminate or at least drastically reduce human suffering, the logical coda to that is that you cannot use more force in an intervention than was already present in the situation as it stood, lest you make the situation worse and undermine the whole purpose of intervention in the first place.
Not only does humanitarian intervention place a premium on the amount of force it is logically consistent to use, it also requires force being delivered with a high degree of accuracy, so that those causing humanitarian suffering are the ones that feel the consequences of any use of force. Time and again in the debates on whether to use force in The Former Yugoslavia it was argued that the use of force would exacerbate an already intolerable situation for the civilian population. One could argue that this rationale, based on the limited utility of force in humanitarian interventions, could break down in a case of humanitarian suffering on such an overwhelming scale that no amount of damage inflicted by military intervention could make the situation any worse than it already is. This argument has two major flaws to it. First, whilst it might be easy to identify such cases of overwhelming human suffering in hindsight, governments have to deal with such situations in real time, and with necessarily limited information. Therefore it is not a straightforward process to clearly identify situations in which military intervention will clearly and unambiguously not make the humanitarian situation worse.
Second, if military intervention is being undertaken exclusively to prevent humanitarian suffering, even if one accepts that a large scale use of force would not make the humanitarian situation worse, one could still argue that the inevitable destruction caused by any large military intervention makes those intervening at least partially responsible for causing the human suffering that their intervention was meant to prevent.
Overwhelming force also fits in with the idea of the security interests discussed earlier in this chapter in that, in viewing national interests through the prism of security interests, one is more likely to see force as an instrument used by one state against another. This gives you an obvious set of targets against which overwhelming force can be used. It also assumes that the damage inflicted by overwhelming force would be enough to compel an enemy state into altering its behavior. On the other hand, the humanitarian interests this chapter has looked at posit that it is legitimate for the US to intervene forcefully in civil wars. Here we see the enemy not as another state but as a civilian population that contains enemy elements. As can be seen by the US experience in Vietnam, the use of overwhelming force can have unintended and indeed counterproductive consequences. In particular it can create a situation in which the civilian population is in fact more rather than less sympathetic towards the enemy. When considering the possible use of air strikes against the Bosnian Serbs, the US Air Force was relatively confident that degrading conventional Serb forces would be a relatively straightforward proposition. Their fear was that the temptation would then be for the Serbs to break their main force units into smaller guerrilla elements and continue the war intermingled with a sympathetic Bosnian Serb population that felt itself to be under attack by the West. Those opposed to air strikes never tired of reminding the world that Bosnia had been the site of an extremely bloody guerrilla war during the Second World War, and that the Serbs in particular had a reputation for being excellent guerrilla fighters.
The Powell Doctrine is also logically more sympathetic to the security definition of national interest outlined earlier in this chapter on the grounds that the security paradigm clearly delineates clear objectives. “Humanitarian objectives” are by their very definition difficult to limit both temporally and specially. The time limit to a humanitarian operation is however long it takes to alleviate the suffering of a population. First, this is dependent on a number of factors beyond military control, such as infrastructure and the cooperation of the local population. Second, the extent to which a situation can said to have been improved enough to allow the withdrawal of forces is a deeply subjective one and there is the constant temptation to expand the mission to achieve ever more ambitious goals. In the case of the Former Yugoslavia, military policy makers strongly did not want to repeat the experience of Somalia, where US forces had originally been deployed to facilitate the delivery of food aid and the mission had gradually expanded until it included restoring a legitimate Somali government. It is difficult to spatially limit humanitarian operations because once you concede the point that humanitarian motives are justification enough for a military intervention, then as a matter of moral principle that justification holds true wherever and whenever there is judged to be a humanitarian crisis. This links back to the point made earlier in this chapter about the Bush and Clinton Administrations not wanting the US to be seen as the world’s policeman. Equally they did not want the US to be seen as the world’s nanny, a superpower on call to solve the world’s humanitarian ills. Yet once you accept humanitarianism as a motive anywhere, it is hard to rationally reject it as a motive to intervene everywhere.
The above discussion should also make it clear that intervention on humanitarian grounds also makes the task of defining a clear well-defined “exit strategy” difficult. First, because it is difficult to draw a line as to exactly how much humanitarian suffering it is the responsibility of the US to prevent. For example, in the case of Somalia, the initial US intervention did prevent widespread famine, by ensuring that food reached those in greatest need. However this did nothing to solve the underlying problems of Somalia, principally, the lack of any kind of governing authority. Once the initial task of preventing famine had been achieved, there was a great temptation to try and expand the US mission to try and overcome the long-term problems facing Somalia, rather than just alleviating short-term suffering. Second, even if US forces were successful in re-establishing order and ensuring a humane standard of living for the inhabitants of somewhere such as Bosnia, Somalia or Haiti, there is no way of knowing what will happen once US troops leave. After all, left to their own devices, these states had for all intents and purposes imploded, resulting in respectively, civil war, famine and dictatorship. There is a strong temptation in such an environment to say that once US forces have established order, it would be a good idea to keep them there. Part of the US Military’s reluctance to get involved in the Balkans was based on the fear that any commitment would turn into a completely open-ended venture that would last for decades. The US Military did not want to find itself in the same position the UN has found itself in Cyprus, a situation where outside military forces have effectively become a permanent part of the political landscape, unwilling to stay, yet unable to leave for the fear that any exit would lead to renewed violence.
What we have seen in this chapter is that there is no single set of ideas and concepts that add up to some kind of permanent and magisterial concept known as “the national interest.” What there is, are different competing assumptions and world views that at any time may legitimately call themselves “national interests.” We have seen that these concepts can be shaped by proximity to particular issues, by political affiliation, and by media and public perception. We have also seen that the Powell Doctrine sits most comfortably with notions of national interest that define the concept quite narrowly in terms of interstate relations and, particularly from an American point of view, relations from actual or potential peer-competitors. Finally, we have seen that with the end of the Cold War and the proliferation of civil conflict and humanitarian catastrophe, it has become increasingly difficult, in the face of a globalized media, to maintain this narrowly statist concept of national interest.
1 Hereafter referred to as “Bosnia.”
2 See Chapter 5, this volume, pp.115–44.
3 Assistant Secretary of State for Public Affairs (Greenfield), 1965. Memorandum to Secretary of State Rusk. Washington February 16th. Department of State, Central Files. POL 27 VIET S. [Online]. Available at: http://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1964–68v02/d127 [Accessed December 9, 2013].
4 President Lyndon B. Johnson, 1965, Peace Without Conquest. Address at Johns Hopkins University. April 7th. [Online]. Available at: http://www.lbjlib.utexas.edu/johnson/archives.hom/speeches.hom/650407.asp [Accessed November 17, 2010].
5 President Johnson and Eugene McCarthy, 1966, Telephone conversation on the Assassination of Dgo Dinh Diem, February 1st. Conversation Number: WH6602.01. [Online]. Available at: http://tapes.millercenter.virginia.edu/clips/1966_0201_lbj_mccarthy_vietnam.swf [Accessed November 17, 2010].
6 H.R. McMaster, Dereliction of Duty. Lyndon Johnson, Robert McNamara, The Joint Chiefs of Staff and the Lies that Led to Vietnam (New York: Harper Perennial, 1998). p.185.
7 Mark Perry, Four Stars. The Inside Story of the Forty-Year Battle Between the Joint Chiefs of Staff and America’s Civilian Leaders (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1989), p.146.
8 Perry 1989, p.132.
9 Secretary of State Rusk, 1965. Paper by Secretary of State Rusk. Washington, July 1st Johnson Library, National Security File, Country File, Vietnam, Vol. XXXVII. [Online]. Available at: http://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1964–68v03/d39 [Accessed December 9, 2013].
10 Randall B. Woods, LBJ. Architect of American Ambition (New York: Free Press, 2006), p.510.
11 President Lyndon B. Johnson, 1967. State of the Union Address delivered on January 10th 1967. Available at: http://www.infoplease.com/t/hist/state-of-the-union/180.html. [Accessed November 20, 2010].
12 LBJ. Architect of American Ambition, p.597.
13 Dereliction of Duty, p.184.
14 President Lyndon B. Johnson, 1966. State of the Union Address, delivered on January 12th 1966. Available at: http://www.infoplease.com/t/hist/state-of-the-union/179.html [Accessed November 22, 2010].
15 For a discussion of the recurrent problems the US had trying to deal with the South Vietnamese government see Chapter 6, this volume.
16 Colin Powell with Joseph E. Persico, My American Journey (New York: Ballantine Books, 1995), p.79.
17 See Colonel (RET) Harry G. Summers, Jr, American Strategy in Vietnam: A Critical Analysis (Mineola: Dover Publication, 2007), p.66.
18 Summers 2007, p.62.
19 Bruce Palmer, The 25-Year War: America’s Military Role in Vietnam (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1984), p.189.
20 Steven Hurst, The Foreign Policy of the Bush Administration. In Search of a New World Order (London: Cassell, 1999), p.1.
21 An illustration of where Yugoslavia fitted in the Bush Administration’s overall scheme of priorities is given in Michael R. Beschloss and Strobe Talbott’s At the Highest Levels. The Inside Story of the End of the Cold War (London: Warner Books, 1993), a book that deals with American foreign policy between 1988 and 1992 in great detail, Yugoslavia is only referenced four times, and doesn’t reference Bosnia at all. Bush’s own memoirs of the period, George Bush and Brent Scowcroft’s A World Transformed (New York: Vintage Books, 1999), only references Yugoslavia four times and always in the context of its relationship with the Soviet Union.
22 See Chapter 2, this volume, pp.41–62.
23 James A. Baker, III with Thomas M. Defrank, The Politics of Diplomacy. Revolution, War and Peace, 1989–1992 (New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1995), p.636.
24 David Halberstam, War in a Time of Peace. Bush, Clinton and the Generals (London: Bloomsbury, 2002), p.33.
25 At the Highest Levels, p.106.
26 George H.W. Bush, 1991. The President’s News Conference with Prime Minister Brian Mulroney of Canada in Ottawa, March 13th, 1991. [Online: Public Papers of the President. Volume 1, p.263]. Available at http://frwebgate5.access.gpo.gov/cgibin/TEXTgate.cgi?WAISdocID=530871389297+7+1+0&WAISaction=retrieve [Accessed November 22, 2010].
27 The Politics of Diplomacy, p.480.
28 See: Graham T. Allison, Essence of Decision: Explaining the Cuban Missile Crisis (Boston: Little, Brown & Co, 1971).
29 Stjepan G. Mestrovic (ed.), The Conceit of Innocence (Texas: A&M University Press, 1997), p.230.
30 The Politics of Diplomacy, p. 100. It is worth noting that in Bush’s own memoirs A World Transformed he deals almost exclusively with three topics; relations with the Soviet Union, relations with China, and the Gulf War. The US Intervention in Somalia is dealt with in three lines and the US invasion of Panama, the largest military operation since Vietnam at the time, is dealt with in five pages.
31 Christian Alfonsi, Circle in The Sand: The Bush Dynasty in Iraq, (New York: Vintage Books [Random House], 2007), p.296.
32 Senator Tom Harkin (Democrat-Iowa), 1991. Speech Announcing the Start of his Campaign for the Democrat Nomination in 1992. [Online]. Available at: http://www.4president.org/speeches/tomharkin1992announcement.htm [Accessed November 23, 2010].
33 Patrick Buchanan, 1991. A Crossroad in Our Country’s History. [Online]. Available at: http://www.4president.org/speeches/buchanan1992announcement.htm [Accessed November 23, 2010].
34 War in a Time of Peace, p.15.
35 President George H.W. Bush, 1992. The President’s News Conference, June 4th, 1992. [Online]. Available at: http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/index.php?pid=21050&st=international+leadership&st1= [Accessed November 24, 2010].
36 Background briefing by Senior Administration Official, March 08, 1993. Full text can be found at: http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/index.php?pid=59988&st=bosnia&st1=european+union.
37 Joel Klein, The Natural. The Misunderstood Presidency of Bill Clinton (London: Hodder and Staunton, 2002), p.77.
38 Laura Silber and Alan Little, The Death of Yugoslavia (London: Penguin, 1996), p.99.
39 Silber and Little 1996, p.244.
40 For a graphic description of these practices see: Ed Vulliamy, Seasons in Hell: Understanding Bosnia’s War (London: Simon & Schuster, 1994).
41 Roy Gutman, A Witness to Genocide (New York: Lisa Drew Books, 1993). p.20.
42 John Burns, 1993, “Bosnia War Crime Trial Hears Serb’s Confession,” New York Times Published. March 14. Full text available at: http://www.nytimes.com/1993/03/14/world/bosnia-war-crime-trial-hears-serb-s-confession.html?scp=3&sq=war+criminals&st=nyt.
43 War in a Time of Peace, p.133.
44 The Politics of Diplomacy, pp.635–6.
45 Madeleine K. Albright, 1993. “Yes, there is a reason to be in Somalia,” New York Times. Published August 10. Full text available at: http://www.nytimes.com/1993/08/10/opinion/yes-there-is-a-reason-to-be-in-somalia.html.
46 Nigel Hamilton, Bill Clinton. Mastering the Presidency (London: Century, 2007). p.131.
47 Hamilton 2007, p.131.
48 See Chapter 5, this volume, pp.115–44.
49 William J. Clinton, 1993. Remarks at the American University Centennial Celebration, February 26th. [Online: Public Papers of the Presidents, 1993 Book 1]. Available at: http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/index.php?pid=46220&st=bosnia&st1=global+leadership# [Accessed November 27, 2010].
50 William J. Clinton, 1993. Remarks to the American Society of Newspaper Editors in Annapolis, April 1st. [Online: Public Papers of the Presidents 1993. Book 1]. Available at: http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/index.php?pid=46392&st=soviet+union&st1=foreign+policy [Accessed November 30, 2010].
51 For the text of the convention, see: http://www.hrweb.org/legal/genocide.html. Also see Samantha Power, A Problem from Hell: America and the Age of Genocide (London: Flamingo, 2003), chapters 1 and 2, for a discussion of how the convention came about and the arguments over its drafting.
52 Ronald Reagan, 1979. Official Announcement of Candidacy for the Republican Presidential Nomination, November 13th.[Online]. Available at: http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/index.php?pid=76116&st=city+on+a+hill&st1= [Accessed November 30, 2010].
53 War in a Time of Peace, pp.58–9.
54 Colin Powell, 1992. ‘Why Generals get Nervous.’ New York Times. Published October 08. Full text available at: http://www.nytimes.com/1992/10/08/opinion/why-generals-get-nervous.html.
55 George H.W. Bush. 1992. Remarks on the Situation in Bosnia and an Exchange with Reporters in Colorado Springs. August 6th. [Online: Public Papers of the President. 1992–3, Book II]. Available at: http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/index.php?pid=21303&st=bosnia&st1=genocide [Accessed November 30, 2010].
56 The Conceit of Innocence, p.67.
57 Colin Powell, “US Forces: Challenges Ahead,” Foreign Affairs, [Online] 71(5) 1992, pp.32–45. Available at: http://www.cfr.org/world/us-forces-challenges-ahead/p7508 [Accessed November 30, 2010].
58 For a discussion of how Bosnia and foreign policy in general became election issues in 1996, see: Bob Woodward, The Choice (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1996).
59 For an in-depth discussion of the evolution of the Clinton Administration’s policy towards Bosnia, see: Richard C. Holbrooke, To End a War, rev. ed. (New York: Modern Library, 1999).
60 My American Journey, p.560.
61 Powell and Persico 1995, p.562.
62 The other two occasions being the US invasion of Panama and the First Gulf War.