There was a legal and moral imperative to protect Bosnia's integrity.

Fundamentally, the international community violated its own treaties and practices when it failed to protect the integrity of former Yugoslavia - its long-time, well-respected member in good standing. Bosnia is merely an unviable artifact of Yugoslavia's illegal breakup, and its "statehood" can not be viewed outside this larger context. Practically, if the main Yugoslav ethnicities were seemingly unable to live together in a larger, established Yugoslavia - insisting they should do so in Bosnia was certainly neither logical, nor moral.

"Robert W. Tucker and David C. Hendrickson note that under international law a better case could be made that the recognition of Croatia's and Bosnia's independence 'constituted an illegal intervention in Yugoslavia's internal affairs, to which Belgrade had every right to object.'

Washington and the EU states insisted on regarding the boundaries of Croatia and Bosnia as thenceforth sacrosanct international boundaries. But those boundaries were purely artificial creations, imposed by Communist dictator Josef Broz Tito shortly after he consolidated his power at the end of World War II. They were meant to be internal (virtually the equivalent of provincial) lines of political and administrative demarcation within Yugoslavia, not the boundaries of independent, sovereign states. Those jurisdictions also had extremely weak historical roots and made little sense from the standpoint of ethnic distribution or economic relations. In particular, Tito's creation of such 'republics' left large Serb minorities in both Croatia and Bosnia-a deliberate move to dilute Serb political influence."

In 1991 the Yugoslav National Army was not allowed to
protect the state integrity of Yugoslavia,
yet our government is spending tax payers' money
to protect integrity of Bosnia & Herzegovina.

"Having previously taken the position, as James Baker did in Belgrade in the summer of 1991, that the United States favored the preservation of Yugoslavia's territorial integrity, American diplomacy did a sharp turn and pronounced itself in favor of Yugoslavia's partition. Once this partition had taken place, however, we once again insisted that the territorial integrity of the states was something sacred and inviolable. Having defiled the principle of territorial integrity, the American government immediately rediscovered it in all its purity."

" 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."