George Kenney

The Nation, January 8/15, 1996

(George Kenney who writes frequently on foreign affairs, resigned from the State Department in August 1992 to protest Bush Administration policy in the former Yugoslavia.)

In my bones, I feel that putting 20.000 American troops in Bosnia is a mistake.It's an invitation to a shipwreck because our maps aren't any good. and imagination and pluck aren 't enough to carry us through Balkan shoals. Insofar as U.S. policy toward Bosnia has more to do with idealistic American illusions than with genuine concern for parochial Balkan interests, this is our Vietnam experience all over again.

I became a Yugoslav desk officer at the State Department's headquarters in Washington in February 1992 where I worked until I resigned over policy that August, calling for American intervention. I had no background in the Balkans or Eastern Europe; I hadn't been to Yugoslavia: I didn't even speak Serbo-Croatian. I was on the desk long enough to convince myself I knew what was going on and become certain that missteps, delay and denial would produce a debacle for U,S foreign policy, but not quite long enough to see the bigger picture. I 've been on a learning curve ever since.

When I resigned I hoped to have more influence for intervention outside government but over time I've changed my mind substantially on the issues. Because of that, I've been attacked in The New Republic and vilified by American interventionists who now see me as a traitor to the cause though both, evolving conditions and additional information left me no recourse but to alter my initial conclusions. I was one of the original authors of "lift and strike" (lifting the United Nations arms embargo against the Bosnian government and backing it with NATO air strikes), arguing for it until early 1993; then, until late 1993. I argued for forcibly disarming all combatants; and after that for a variety of diplomatic plans backed by limited force.

My resignation brought immediate media attention and invitations to speak, all of which I took to like a duck to water. The first college I visited, William and Mary, turned out an S.R.O. crowd of several hundred for my two-hour extemporaneous address,and the crowd broke into a standing ovation when I finished. I quickly realized that the call for intervention in Bosnia was dynamite. That potency frightened me because it implied a huge responsibility not to distort the Truth for the sake of setting audience on fire. But I worry that many interventionists have felt the same power and been carried away.

When prominent intellectuals consistently level charges of "genocide," comparing events in Bosnia to the Holocaust, we must demand evidence. While any killing is to be condemned, circumstantial evidence isn't enough, and while it's unreasonable to expect absolute proof, there can be no disdain for facts. There has never been evidence presented for the widely accepted claim that 250,000 people were butchered in Bosnia. Throughout the war, we haven ' t known exactly what's happened, exactly how many have been killed who they were or how they died. Mass graves on all sides could contain civilians killed in cold blood or soldiers killed in battle who needed a rapid burial or, most likely, both. No doubt thousands were slaughtered in cold blood. This doesn 't mean, however, that Bosnia was a killing field on the order of Cambodia or Nazi Germany.

From contacts in the U.S. intelligence community, I am positive the US government doesn't have proof of any genocide. And anyone reading the press critically can see the paucity of evidence, despite interminably repeated claims and bloodcurdling speculation. Last April 23 I published some of my research on fatalities in The New York Times Magazine, in which I challenged allegations of 250,000 dead: my estimate was 25,000 to 60,000 deaths. for civilian and military on all sides in Bosnia, from the start of the war to the date of the article. One Pulitzer Prize winning correspondent harangued me for not giving up my sources, but never bothered retracing my steps, which he could have easily done. I have yet to see a written rebuttal, and I don't expect to, because a careful search through press reports shows unambiguously that estimates for huge numbers of fatalities came originally from the Bosnian government without documentation: journalists repeated them without corroboration, or even attribution, until the charges stuck. Reporters covering the Yugoslav war as NPR's Sylvia Poggioli put it (Nieman Reports. Fall 1993) " have been better at pulling emotional strings than at analyzing facts.

Much of the early war was fought not on the battlefield but, through, high-powered (and high-priced) lobbying firms. Since late 1992 there has also been a splendidly effective volunteer army of journalists, think-tank analysts, Capitol Hill staff and administration hawks pushing the Bosnian, and Secondarily Croatian, causes. The mainstream establishment couldn't bring itself to say "We don't know." To question Washington's bias is taboo, as William Maynes, the editor of " Foreign Policy" found out when he published such a critique. The Serbs, unlike the Croats and Muslims, had little understanding of the propaganda war and, without patrons to guide them, quickly lost it without firing a shot.

The result is that everywhere that counts in America. it is almost impossible to be too anti-Serb. And if you accept the premise that the Serbs are wholly evil, two patently false corollaries emerge: There can be no moral equivalence between Serb-perpetrated atrocities and others, and it's all right to give superficial attention to Croat and Muslim crimes. While "ethnic cleansing" deaths and atrocities are not equally distributed among the three sides, each group rightly feels it has suffered enormously. Although the Serbs started as the bloodier side and were responsible for the most atrocities they make up the largest share of recent victims and may be the most vulnerable potential victims. The Croats and Muslims have perpetrated equally horrific albeit fewer and less systematic, atrocities.

But if the United States gives the Croats and Muslims the wherewithal to exact further tribal justice, they will. For proof look at the Croats' scorched-earth practices regarding land they' re supposed to hand over to the Serbs under the Dayton agreement, or their refusal to deliver indicted war criminals to the International War Crimes Tribunal in the Hague. And the echelon of Muslim leaders, deeply penetrated by radical Islamist elements from Iran, continues to talk to its domestic constituency of prolonged warfare.

Since leaving government I've worked as a writer and consultant focusing on Balkan issues. I got to know the senior leadership of Croatia and Bosnia fairly well, and as time went by I found many were neither honest nor competent: and many others were driven by pathological nationalism (Croatian Defense minister Gojko Susan, for example, a former Canadian pizza king).

In December 1992 in Zagreb. I spoke at length with Bosnian President Allege Izetbezovic, who had minutes earlier come out of a meeting with Croatian President Fringe Tudjman. Lord Owen and Cyrus Vance (then the European Community and U..N. mediators respectively). He told me he had just been forced to make the most difficult decision of his life: to negotiate directly for the first time with the Bosnian Sorb leader Radovan Karadzic. Izetbegovic was clearly exhausted and anguished over his decision; as we tasked he kept wondering aloud whether he'd done the right thing. I said that by agreeing to negotiate he had inexorably set the logic for compromise that satisfied the Bosnian Serbs' most important claims, Izetbegovic replied he wasn't interested in compromise; he merely wanted to get from under Western pressure.

I saw this attitude more starkly the last time we talked in December 1993 in Sarajevo. lzetbegovic kept going over the pros and cons of his options, but ruled out taking a strong stand against Western mediators because he didn't want to be seen by history as the spoiler" of an agreement. His intention seemed to be to pretend to go along with negotiations while continuing the war. Never, in the course of those conversations or several others we had in Washington, did he voice doubts about the cost of the war to the Bosnian people. In this one certainty amid his otherwise incessant vacillation he has been consistent. Confirming this aspect of the man, The New York Times, reporting on the Dayton talks. noted American negotiators' amazement that Izetbegovic seemed to think war was more important than peace and reconstruction.

From the beginning, the United States should have engaged seriously in diplomacy: in particular. U.S. support for European efforts in the spring of 1992 might have prevented war. That March, the three factions had agreed to a plan similar to the Dayton agreement. Unfortunately, Izetbegovic reneged on his word after encouragement from U. S. Ambassador Warren Zimmerman, and the deal fell apart. Two weeks later U.S, and European recognition of Bosnia triggered the war.

I've often been asked at what point I changed my mind, But it wasn't ever so simple - I had no conversion. Rather, it was a cumulative process. As mistrustful as I was of the Serbs generally, and aware of their culpability for he war, nevertheless I began to feel some sympathy for the political dilemma they faced in the former Yugoslavia. Their search for elemental justice, however criminal their tactics, should have been considered. To be evenhanded, Washington should have treated in a procedurally equal way all the factions 'claims to self-determination. It goes beyond a consideration of power balances. American interests,as I understand them, flow from our philosophical support for local political legitimacy; we should not be in the business of imposing arbitrary solutions from above.

Slippery slope and tar baby arguments blinded George Bush's team to the harm done by America in not exercising diplomatic leadership. They failed to admit until the spring of 1992 that Europe couldn't pick up the slack; even so, the U.S. didn't directly participate in international mediation efforts until the first London Conference that August. By then, however, Bush and his Secretary of Stale James Baker, had used such heated rhetoric about the principles at stake (rhetoric I helped write) that it wasn't possible to seize pragmatic solutions and throw the rhetoric overboard without damaging American prestige.

But it wasn't possible to act on the rhetoric unless the United States was prepared to use force and escalate to whatever level was necessary to achieve our stated goals. Whether the American public was more prepared then than it is now to become engaged is not so clear, but leadership by the Bush Administration could have galvanized support. Its willingness to drift was the heart of the problem.

President Bush thus anchored the United States in a totally irresponsible position, which President Clinton uncritically adopted. Indeed the legacy of rhetorical excess has carried over to undermine the Dayton agreement. By granting U.S. forces authority (without requiring its use) to conduct an expansive mission covering everything under the sun, the Clinton Administration cannot then define in precise terms what the mission is - the yardstick for success or failure - and instead speaks vaguely of a one-year time limit, The U.S. army of occupation has an exit date, but no exit strategy. Instead of over determining the outcome of negotiations by promising too much, the United States should have continued negotiations until the parties themselves agreed to a settlement that was Iargely self-enforcing.

When I started on the Balkan desk I quickly became convinced by the strong consensus among intelligence analysts that recognition would worsen problems in Croatia and bring war in Bosnia, I went so far as to explore with a senior CIA Balkan analyst, possible land and population swaps in Bosnia that might reduce conflict before recognition. Once the United States recognized Bosnia, however, I wrongly thought the commitment implied by that decision - the most basic commitment the conservative state system can make - superseded objections because it required the people of the former Yugoslavia to play by our rules.

Reflecting on my mistaken judgment, I've often thought of the Iliad's deities. who knew better, when tipping the scales of The Trojan war, than to try to change the behavior of human warriors. It's arrogant to assume Americans can resolve all others' conflicts with a result that is guaranteed to be democratic. lf we tip the scales enough to make them stop fighting - and we can - they'll continue with their own political evolution.

Recognition of Yugoslavia's successor states was the tap root of European and American policy failure. We had not thought through principles of self-determination: instead, Western governments recognized Bosnia as a way to punish the Serbs because we believed they were guilty of aggression. In a vicious circle, recognition then put off-limits the issues that caused the war in the first place because it automatically defined one side as an international aggressor, subject to further punishment. It also violated centuries of international legal tradition not to recognize separatist bodies in a civil war until the dust clears. (Actually, there may be fewer reasons to worry about the consequences of admitting a mistake than there are principled reasons to avoid such a mangled precedent for the next case of international intervention in a major civil war.)

The Clinton team correctly realized in mid- 1995 that unless recognition was amended somehow, the problems of self-determination in the former Yugoslavia couldn't be fully addressed. Since withdrawing recognition was too politically costly, the Administration accepted de facto partition. Officials erred though, that the implications of Bosnia's sovereign status still make a good justification for beating up on the Serbs. I believe, to the contrary, that ephemeral larger interests allegedly associated with recognition pale in importance beside the real suffering in the region and the useless deaths we will incur as we try to impose an unwelcome settlement. American objectives should be limited simply to ending the war, using minimal force as required. We have missed the opportunity to negotiate an inherently more stable agreement. Ideally, a European ground force of 20,000 to 30,000,backed by American air power and having robust rules of engagement but without a hidden nation-building mission, could police the confrontation lines of a genuine cease-fire, which the parties could agree to without international coercion. lntervention on other grounds predisposes us to take sides and (unintentionally) subsidize the very same horrors we condemn.

Tom Gjelten of NPR once remarked to me that it's hard to make sense of the Yugoslav war because everyone is seen as having a vested interest, or is accused of having one. For intellectuals who believe they influence policy, those vested interests have until now been affected less by events in the former Yugoslavia than by wanting to stand on the right side - for truth, justice and so forth. The American intellectual establishment. indeed has lost its collective lead over imperialistic panaceas, putting itself squarely at odds with the vast majority of public opinion. When there are questions about that kind of vested interest people don't really respond in the sophisticated way Gjelten meant, but instead turn Bosnia into a foreign policy Rorschach test. I think-and I hate to admit this- the real story as far as the public debate is concerned has been mainly about popular illusions and ordinary human incompetence at learning foreign politics, a far cry from the notion that Bosnia is the moral proving ground of my generation. Government officials must now think clearly for American troops to have the best chance of getting out of the Balkans safely.