Beyond Words

The magazine made the case for military intervention in the Balkans, persistently and passionately. It was a model of activist journalism, demonstrating how to step on the soapbox without turning into a bore. It didn’t hurt that the case was made by the likes of Samantha Power, who got her journalistic start with pieces on Bosnia, as well as the scholar Fouad Ajami. These articles helped shape the template for liberal hawkishness, a doctrine of humanitarian interventionism that aspired to enshrine the post-Holocaust admonition of Never Again. But the success of the Balkans did nothing to set a precedent. When we devoted a special issue to the crisis in Darfur, Leon Wieseltier wrote an editorial that began: “Never again? What nonsense. Again and again is more like it.”

—Franklin Foer, former TNR editor, Insurrections of the Mind: 100 Years of Politics and Culture in America

​“It’s beyond words,” a man of Tuzla said of the refugees who have been herded out of Srebrenica. “These people have lived through an unbelievable terror. Something completely evil happened in Srebrenica.” That is where we are, beyond words, where every good and urgent thing has been said and has scattered into the wind and been trampled by the killers and knights of Greater Serbia. There, amid those columns of misery on the road out of Srebrenica, lies the promise of American primacy and benevolent power, which in Bill Clinton’s hands had turned into a tarnished and uncertain inheritance.

We shall, of course, never know for certain whether the callousness toward the people of Bosnia would have been the same had these men and women and children taking to the road not been people of the Muslim faith. In the vast expanses of Islam, the inescapable conclusion has been drawn: the Bosnians have been marked for destruction because of their adherence to Islam. For those who love their civilizational and racial lines straight and unambiguous, the people of Bosnia must be a bit odd. There is a jarring quality to those columns of misery: the head-scarves of the women speak of Islam, the pigmentation and the features are those of Europe. The rituals of grief and bereavement have an Islamic echo to them in a crowd neither decidedly “Eastern” nor wholly European. Ours must be reckoned a terrible time for miscegenation.

We can exonerate the Clinton administration and its Bosnia policy of any civilizational bias or prejudice or religious favor. Ideology of any kind, a moral passion, is alien to this crowd. They are equal opportunity shirkers. Judging by their entire attitude toward America’s role in the world, the Clintonites would let down people of any color and creed and faith and national origin. They are a decidedly ecumenical lot.

Though we think of the president and his closest advisers as forever seared and defined by Vietnam, it is another, a far more proximate intervention, that has shaped much of what they have done in Bosnia: the expedition to Somalia. It is the lessons of Mogadishu that the Clinton White House have projected onto the Balkans. Somalia was the poisoned chalice handed to the Clintonites by their predecessors, the Bush people, and by Boutros Boutros-Ghali, who was keen to use the cant of multilateralism to hunt down Mohammed Farah Aidid and settle an old account with the Somali warlord from his time in the Egyptian bureaucracy. The trauma of Somalia happened on Clinton’s watch. We had rushed unaware into a place we did not fully understand, into a war of clans and bandits. With the gear we carried on that expedition we carried fantasies about reconstituting a place that had broken beyond repair. When we were rebuffed and exited with nothing to show for the effort, the expedition became a warrant for abdication elsewhere. It would be easy, henceforth, to project Somalia onto other foreign commitments. (Haiti was the exception. But that was a police operation forced on Clinton by a tide of refugees.)

For thirty long, cruel months, the thrust of the Clinton Bosnia policy would be reduced to what truly mattered: damage control. The one thing we would never grant the Bosnians was our candor. The one thing the Clinton people would not do was stand up in broad daylight and assert that, for them, Bosnia was a place of no consequence to America’s vital interests. The cavalry was always on the way. We would always promise to be there, with our guns and our war tribunals, after the next massacre. We would lift the arms embargo on the Bosnians if only we could, if only the Europeans and Boutros Boutros-Ghali would permit it. We would unleash the terrifying air power that broke the will of the Iraqis in the Gulf, if only we would be asked to do it. We would roll back the Serbian gains if only that division of authority (the “dual key,” in officialspeak) between NATO and the United Nations were to be resolved. Genocide is always handled by the next desk.

Power—great political, military and moral power—had passed to these men, but they don’t wish to use it. It is odd, this ambition and yearning for power and the reluctance to deploy it. Something Clinton himself said in accepting the Democratic nomination in the summer of 1992 is a fitting description of his own administration. In staking the claim of his generation to power, he ridiculed George Bush’s lethargic presidency by quoting Abraham Lincoln’s admonition to General George B. McClellan, the commander of the Army of the Potomac, who was forever refusing to engage the Confederacy: “If you’re not going to use your army, may I borrow it?” That is where the Clinton presidency now finds itself. Its Bosnia policy is but an embodiment on cruel display of its general abdication of America’s leadership in the world. In Lincoln’s words, the bottom is out of this tub.

It is easy to see the method in the mix of abdication and spin that constitutes Clinton’s policy toward Bosnia. The words would tire, the Clinton advisers reasoned, the outrage of the critics would be spent, the safe-havens would fall and Bosnia would be consigned to memory, a victim felled by those famed Balkan ghosts that are said to haunt that peninsula: the curse of the place having its way. Now all would be well if the conquest of Bosnia were to be completed before the 1996 campaign kicked in.

There have been endless pretexts and warrants for the American abdication. Most shamefully, we passed off our acquiescence to the Serbian project of conquest as something we owed Russia, an act of deference to the pan-Slavic spirit that was said to be blowing through that land. We fell for this great legend because it suited our needs. There is a Russianist, and a Russophile at that, in the inner circle, Deputy Secretary of State Strobe Talbott. But no Russianist was needed to see through that shameless pretense. Pan-Slavism has never run deep in that presumably mystical Russian soul. It was the calling of a few romantics and priests and literati; the Russian state looked at the pan-Slavic sentiment with cold-blooded disdain and caution. A cursory reading of the Congress of Berlin’s diplomacy, which settled the first great Balkan Crisis in 1878, ought to put an end to the legend of Russia’s commitment to the Serbs. Alexander II hated Balkan revolutionaries and their ruinous radical-ism; St. Petersburg played the game of the Great Powers when the scramble for the Ottoman Empire’s European domains had begun. Serbia got very little of its grandiose ambitions fulfilled; the Serbs had no sponsor among the powers. They had wanted Bosnia; it was ceded to the Habsburgs. They had wanted Novi Pazar, a territory separating Serbia from Montenegro; it, too, was denied them.

We gave currency to the pan-Slavic idea, summoned it from the world of the dead, when it should have been blatantly clear that the Russians were in this enterprise as a way of simple financial blackmail, of squeezing the best for themselves out of the industrial democracies. There was never an explanation why a ruined society on the ropes like Russia, riddled with all kinds of troubles, struggling to keep a political center alive amid plunder and chaos, was owed favors in the Balkans. That our concern for Russia had to be demonstrated by sanctioning genocide in Bosnia carried “Russia-firstism” beyond the call of duty. Were we serious about helping Russia get beyond autocracy and failure and chaos on that road toward political democracy and market reform that we say we want for her, the last thing we would do for Russia would be to indulge the darker, more atavistic part of her temperament. We ought to have given the Russians a choice: the company of outlaws and pariahs or the decent company of nations at peace.

A policy of spin and appeasement with thirty months on its hands gets to be good at playing the game of exculpation. It finds the pretexts and squeezes them as they come. Nor is this policy above seeing hidden victories and accomplishments in the ruins. The Clinton advisers have taken to claiming for the Bosnia policy an amazing defense: whatever its faults and cruel harvest in Bosnia, their policy, they say, has prevented the spread of a wider war in the Balkans. The killing rages in the northern Balkans, but peace (of sorts) reigns in the southern end of the peninsula. Greece, Turkey and Albania, we are told by the Clintonites on the Sunday talk shows, have stayed out of the fight, and all is quiet in Kosovo and in Macedonia between the Slavs and the Albanians. But the troubles in the southern Balkans haven’t happened simply because they haven’t happened, not because the southern Balkans have been incorporated into our zone of peace or been awed by the display of our might. The Serbs have no interest in a wider war. They have secured the submission of Kosovo and disinherited its Albanian population. Why risk a wider war when you can get what you want with a smaller, less costly enterprise? The warlords of Belgrade and Pale may be cruel, but they will take victories on the cheap when they come their way.

Future chroniclers of this Balkan crisis will puzzle over the disparity of (real) power between Pax Americana at the zenith of its influence in the aftermath of its twin victories in the cold war and in the Persian Gulf and the Serbian revanchists who stepped forth to challenge it and got away with their brazen defiance. They will be at a loss, the historians: they will have to write the history of this Bosnia calamity either as an epic of Serbian bravery or as one long chronicle of a generation’s failure to see that there were things that truly mattered in these sad hills and towns of Bosnia.

In one of the best scholarly accounts and histories of the former Yugoslavia, Bosnia and Hercegovina: A Tradition Betrayed, historians Robert Donia and John Fine tell us that America’s performance in the Gulf War made a deep impression on the Serbs. An analysis and a strategic review by the general staff of the Serb-dominated Yugoslav People’s Army, the two historians observe, concluded that Desert Storm was a “true paradigm” for interventions after the cold war but still held out the possibility that the Serbs could pursue their project of conquest without triggering the kind of response that thwarted the Iraqi bid. Grant the warlords of Greater Serbia their due: they read the world as it was. Luck came their way in the Western leaders they drew. Pity the man in his bunker in Baghdad: he must envy the Serbs’ exquisite sense of timing. Hitherto there had been a strong element of martyrology and self-pity at the core of Serbian history, their narrative of their history one long tale of sorrow and denial, material for the folk poets and the singers with their guslas (the one-string musical instruments). In their annals, they must make room now for the great change in their fortunes, for that one long season when they rode out and left a trail of misery and high crimes behind them and were never made to pay a price.