Clinton Legacy Watch # 4: Meltdown of Dayton Accords is But The Latest Proof That 'Peace Processes' Produce No Peace

(Washington, D.C.): Events of the past
week suggest that President Clinton’s
favorite general⁽¹⁾
— Supreme Allied Commander, Europe
(SHAPE) General Wesley Clark
— has become the latest Administration
figure to turn Teddy Roosevelt’s famous
dictum on its head. Instead of speaking
softly and carrying a big stick, Gen.
Clark orally threatened some of the thugs
that pass for leaders of the Bosnian
Serbs at virtually the same moment he was
emboldening them by ordering his troops
to retreat from physical confrontations
with their followers.

On 3 September, he told reporters at
the Pentagon: “…We’re going to be
effective in accomplishing the missions
that we’ve been assigned in Bosnia….And
so that’s why I want to make it very
clear that NATO forces are not going to
be deterred or intimidated.” He
added:

“Whether there’s
confrontation or not is entirely
up to those who might seek to
produce it. We’re staying
strictly within our mandate.
We’re moving forward to assist
civil implementation. We’re
working to avoid conditions which
might go against NATO’s
requirements of creating a secure
environment. And that’s the
story.”

‘Mission Creep’ or Creepy
Mission?

While General
Clark did not specify precisely what are
“the missions that we’ve been
assigned” to “assist civilian
implementation” and to
“avoid…creating [an insecure]
environment”, it appears that they
have, in recent days, included at least
two critical objectives:

denying the followers of
Radovan Karadzik access to and
control over broadcasting
facilities that have
been used with devastating effect
for years to propagandize and
otherwise fan the racist impulses
that produced Serbian
“ethnic cleansing”⁽²⁾;
and

holding a bridge
in the contested and highly
strategic town of Brcko — a
bridge made accessible to the
public just three months ago for
the first time in years. As the Wall
Street Journal noted in its
lead editorial today: “The
bridge had been reopened in June
in the presence of U.S. Secretary
of State Madeleine Albright, who
announced at the time that the
act symbolized a turning point
away from ethnic violence.”

As it happens, on General Clark’s orders,
troops under his command abandoned both
of these assets this week to Karadzic
partisans. Implausible rationalizations
notwithstanding, the reality is that, as
the Journal points out, nothing
but grief can come from this
latest example of the international
community’s penchant for belligerent
rhetoric towards the Serbs coupled
with deeds that accommodate them —
a pattern that has characterized the
West’s conduct throughout the crisis in
the former Yugoslavia:

The withdrawals sent a dangerous
signal to Mr. Karadzic’s senior
loyalists. “They are calling
it ‘the Bay of Pigs,'”
says Colin Soloway, a
correspondent based in Sarajevo. “They
think they faced down the
international community and
won.” He adds,
‘They are planning to consolidate
their position in the east and
are predicting that they will
begin to win back towns under
[Bosnian Serb President, Biljana]
Plavsic’s control in the
west.'”

‘I Remember Ratko’

Among Gen. Clark’s words at his
Pentagon press conference that rang most
hollow were those implying that part of
SFOR’s mission will be to fulfill NATO
Secretary General Solana’s expectation
that “…All the war
criminals suspects [will] be in the Hague
for trial by June of 1998.” Such a
feat is made all the more unlikely by the
camaraderie Gen. Clark exhibited not so
long ago with one of the premier Serbian
war criminals, General Ratko Mladic. As
the Center noted in September 1994:

“[On 27 August
1994]…General Wesley
Clark…consorted with one of the
most despicable war criminals on
the planet: the Bosnian Serb
commander, General Ratko Mladic.
The visit occurred in the Serbian
enclave of Banja Luka, scene of
horrific and continuing
ethnic cleansing; it was
captured on film by Serb
propagandists delighted at being
able to portray Gen. Clark
jovially exchanging military caps
with the man responsible for many
of those atrocities and accepting
gifts of brandy and an inscribed
pistol. An unnamed, but
clearly disgusted U.S. official
is quoted in today’s Washington
Post as saying that this
episode ‘is like cavorting with
Hermann Goering.’ Actually, it is
more like palling around with Adolf
Eichmann, Hitler’s chief
executioner.”

Even more odious is the fact that General
Clark — while serving as the military
aide to the principal architect of the
Dayton agreement, Ambassador Richard
Holbrooke — helped seal that deal with
Mladic’s boss and one of the most
odious war criminals of all: Serbian
dictator Slobodan Milosevic.
In so doing, they awarded Milosevic the
diplomatic equivalent of the Good
Housekeeping Seal of Approval as an
international statesman and pillar of the
Bosnian “peace process.” As a
result, neither Secretary General Solana
nor anyone else expects to see him in the
dock in The Hague — to say nothing of
trying to use NATO forces to put him
there.

To Make the
Punishment Fit The Crime

Were so many American lives — and so
much national treasure and prestige —
not on the line, it would be delicious
poetic justice that the chickens
associated with the Dayton Accords Gen.
Clark helped craft are coming home to
roost on his watch as SACEUR. As a
practical matter, in his present
capacity as NATO’s top military officer,
General Clark is now the spear-catcher
for the policies he helped set in train.
These policies — which are now
compelling the United States and its
forces under NATO command to play their
present, increasingly risky role — were
thoughtfully analyzed in an essay
released on 22 August by the Foreign
Policy Research Institute’s Adam
Garfinkle. Among its highlights were the
following:

“The [Clinton
Administration’s] hope,
presumably, is that Karadzic will
take the hint and disappear from
political life, allowing the full
implementation of the Dayton
Accords to move ahead. But we
have to assume that NATO forces
are ready for the next stage if
he doesn’t disappear — if he
either tries to outwait us or, as
likely, takes aim against NATO
soldiers instead with the hope of
‘doing another Somalia,’ i.e.,
driving a risk- averse American
public to demand the withdrawal
of U.S. forces.

“To pressure Karadzic
further, NATO has also put itself
firmly on the weakest side of the
Bosnian Serbs’ domestic disputes,
specifically in support of
Biljana Plavsic, whose only
attractive feature is that she is
not Karadzic. By doing
so–and by splitting the Republic
Srpska into two geographically
detached areas–NATO is now
committed to the micro-management
of a devil’s den of murderers,
racists, and pathological liars.

‘Policy Vice’:
“U.S. officials speak of all
this as a risk, and hint at the
possibility of violence. Foreign
diplomats on the scene are more
blunt; they speak of war, and
body-bags. If Washington
chose to avoid such risks since
U.S. troops first came to Bosnia
in December 1995, why is the
Clinton administration taking
such risks now? The answer is
because the Clinton
Administration has got its head
stuck in a policy vice.
On the one side is the fear that
the non-implementation of Dayton
will drive Congress to refuse an
extension of [the] Bosnia force
beyond its expiry in June, and on
the other is the fear that
failure in Bosnia will sour
efforts to get NATO expansion
ratified come spring.

“It’s the combination that
is really worrisome: If come
April it looks like Congress will
not pay for an extension, and the
local parties begin acting like
war is inevitable without the
NATO force present, then
persuading the Senate that NATO
expansion makes sense will be far
more difficult. It will seem
churlish indeed for NATO to be
promising security to some while
it abandons others right next
door to another round of
savagery.

“Hence the sudden resolve to
implement Dayton now: Do it right
and, with any luck at all, the
administration will achieve both
an IFOR extension and
ratification of NATO expansion.
Congress will be more inclined to
continue a mission that is
showing signs of progress, and a
sense of success in Bosnia will
build confidence that NATO can
succeed elsewhere, too, thus
inclining undecided votes in
favor of NATO expansion.

Uh Oh: “There
is only one problem with this
rosy scenario: It won’t work.
It won’t work because Dayton is
itself unrealistic in the
extreme; it can’t be fully
implemented. Dayton is a de
facto partition whose
stability rests either on a
foreign force presence or on a
local balance of fear. It is not,
and cannot be, a formula for the
creation of a multiethnic,
democratic, stable, and fully
independent Bosnian state. To try
to force into being the symbols
of such a fantasy state –Bosnian
refugees returning to live
peaceably in Serb- or
Croat-dominated areas, a
multiethnic Bosnian diplomatic
service, ethnic leaderships
turning over their own people to
war crimes tribunals in any but
token, low-level ways — is to
engage in unnatural acts. And
that, in turn, creates a
lose-lose situation for the
United States.

“If [SFOR] fails to force
such unnatural acts, then it
loses straight out. But if it
succeeds, it only creates a
greater need for a foreign
presence to keep those acts from
coming undone. In other words, as
long as the goal remains the
impossible goal of the Dayton
accord, there is no way to
extract NATO forces under benign
circumstances. Either they leave
under duress (just substitute
Radovan Karadzic for Mohammah
Farah Aideed), they leave and war
recommences, or they stay to
await whatever unknown fate local
Balkan intrigues have in store
for them.”

The Bottom Line

In Bosnia, as elsewhere, the United States
has been badly served by the Clinton
Administration’s penchant — as
exemplified by General Clark’s conduct
both this week and in the years that
preceded it — to pursue phony
“peace processes” and other
expediency-driven, narcissistic exercises
in “conflict resolution” and
“conflict management.” The
phenomena and a sense of its long-term
costs to the Nation, costs likely to
prove one of Mr. Clinton’s most durable
legacies, are brilliantly dissected in an
op.ed. in today’s Wall Street Journal
by Irving Kristol ( href=”97-D_127at.html”>see the attached).

– 30 –

1. See the
Center’s Decision Brief entitled
Fraternizing With the Enemy
Should Be the Last Mischief Perpetrated
By Bill Clinton’s Favorite General
(No. 94-D
91, 1 September 1994).

2. The Center has
long believed that the failure of the
United States government to appreciate
the importance of such broadcasts and to
counter them with alternative sources of
information like those available through
Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty
(RFE/RL) has been a scandal. It applauds
Senator Joseph Biden (D-DE) — who has
appreciated for years the indispensable
contribution the Freedom Radios make to
U.S. interests and who has, upon his
recent return from Bosnia, called on
President Clinton to help establish a
free press there by, among other things,
“reinvigorating Radio Free Europe
.” In an article that appeared in
the Wilmington News Journal on
29 August, Sen. Biden was quoted as
saying: ” Radio Free Europe was cut
back after the end of the Cold War….It
is needed again, not only by the
Bosnians, but to help democratic
interests throughout Eastern
Europe.”