HARLAN COUNTY II: ANOTHER COUNTRY, ANOTHER SHIP — BUT THE SAME INCOMPETENT CLINTON FOREIGN POLICY DEMEANS U.S. PRESTIGE, POWER

(Washington, D.C.): The U.S.S.
Harlan County has long served as the
“poster child” for efforts to
depict — and correct — President
Clinton’s hapless conduct of U.S. foreign
and defense policy. After all, the
ignominious withdrawal in October, 1993
of that Navy vessel and its small
contingent of American peacekeepers from
the harbor at Port au Prince, Haiti in
the face of a mob of angry,
machete-wielding Tonton Macoutes
seemed to epitomize the Administration’s
wrong-headed notions about the use of
American military power, peacekeeping
operations and nation-building.

Administration apologists — witness,
most recently, a front-page story
published yesterday in the New York
Times — argue that the Harlan
County episode was a turning point
for the Clinton presidency. After this
debacle, they contend, Mr. Clinton
undertook a course correction that has
resulted in one Administration foreign
policy “success” after another.
Preeminent among these accomplishments is
said to be the Dayton Accords it brokered
in the name of bringing peace to Bosnia.

Bosnia is No ‘Success’

Evidence continues to accumulate,
however, that the Dayton Accords have
succeeded only in papering over the very
real problems that inspired and prolonged
the genocidal Bosnian conflict. As the
Center for Security Policy noted last
week:

“…The U.S.-brokered Dayton
Peace Accords are increasingly being
shown for what they were: odious
deals with war criminals, deals that
have served only to postpone until
after the U.S. election execution
of the ‘final solution’ for
multi-ethnic Bosnia-Hercegovina
envisioned by Bosnia’s Serb and Croat
neighbors.” href=”96-D105.html#N_1_”>⁽¹⁾

Another Harlan County?

Now comes word that the United
States is in the midst of a policy fiasco
eerily reminiscent of the Harlan
County debacle: A
commercial vessel transporting $100
million worth of U.S.-supplied M-60
tanks, armored personnel carriers,
helicopters and other military hardware
to Bosnia has now been withdrawn from its
disembarkation point in Croatia. This
step was reportedly taken at the
insistence of the Pentagon in light of
the Administration’s refusal to turn this
materiel over to the Bosnian government
so long as it remains manifestly and
embarrassingly in the thrall of Iran.

Specifically, the U.S. government has
demanded that the Deputy Defense Minister
Hasan Cengic — a wholly owned subsidiary
of Teheran — be removed from power. To
date, there is no indication that he will
be replaced. To the contrary, as recently
as yesterday, Cengic met with a
high-level Turkish military delegation
led by General Ersin Yilmaz — hardly the
activities of a man on his way out the
door. Other as-yet-unaddressed American
demands call for the dismissal of the
Defense Minister Vladimir Soljic and the
closure of the Bosnian Agency for
Investigation and Documentation — which
has become an Iranian-dominated secret
police organization used to terrorize
those who do not subscribe to the
political agenda of Bosnia’s more extreme
Islamic elements.

Be Careful What You Wish
For

This is a particularly serious
political liability — not to say
geostrategic problem — for the Clinton
Administration insofar as its policies
have been substantially responsible for
driving the Bosnian government into the
arms of Iran. As the House Select
Subcommittee on Iranian Arms Transfers —
chaired by Rep. Henry Hyde (R-IL), a
distinguished member of the Center for
Security Policy’s Board of Advisors —
noted in a report released on 10 October
1996:

“President Clinton’s
decision to give Iran a green light
in the Balkans allowed Iran to expand
its economic and diplomatic
relations, as well as establish a
military, security and intelligence
presence so expansive it became the
largest concentration of official
Iranians outside the Middle East.
The consequences have been
far-reaching and pernicious. They
persist to this day….As
a result [of Mr. Clinton’s decision],
the Bosnian government became less
secular and democratic and more open
in its embrace of a radical Islamic
political agenda acceptable to Iran
but inimicable to U.S. national
security interests and democratic
values.”

“Despite the Administration’s
public assurances to the American
people and Congress to the contrary, Iranian
influence in the highest Bosnian
ruling circles remains pervasive and
Iranian terrorist and intelligence
capabilities in Bosnia remain great
cause for U.S. concern. The
Iranians are biding their time, and
the radicalized Bosnian Muslim
political leadership (in contrast to
a largely secular population), may
yet succeed in turning Bosnia into a
radical and authoritarian state.
There appears to be little hope that
the situation will improve since the
Bosnian government is fighting
tooth-and-nail U.S. efforts to cut
its ties to Iran. The probability
that the green light will end up
costing American lives is all too
great given Iran’s track
record.” (Emphasis added
throughout.)

In the face of the Clinton
Administration’s refusal to give the
Bosnian government arms under these
circumstances, the question occurred:
What to do about the shipload of heavy
weapons? Apparently, the Pentagon refused
to go along with off-loading and storing
them in Croatia — an indication of the
serious misgivings that abound concerning
Zagreb’s intentions and reliability as a
“partner for peace” in Bosnia.
The Defense Department also wanted no
part of leaving it aboard the chartered
commercial vessel under circumstances
where the ship could be hit, and possibly
sunk, by a rocket-propelled grenade or
other ordinance. Hence, the decision to
beat a retreat out of Croatian waters
where it now awaits clarification of U.S.
policy and new orders at a cost to
taxpayers of many tens of thousands of
dollars per day.

The Bottom Line

The Center for Security Policy has
long believed that the U.S. arming of the
Bosnian government was an essential
prerequisite to achieving a just
conclusion to the conflict in
Bosnia-Hercegovina and to preventing an
early resumption of hostilities. It is
highly regrettable that the Clinton
Administration has, with its misbegotten
policies, created conditions that are
certain to have the opposite results.

By denying American arms to the
victims of Serbian and Croatian
aggression and by facilitating Iran’s
efforts to fill the vacuum thus created,
the Administration has encouraged the
very environment that is now impeding its
ability to establish a reliable
alternative supplier arrangement. By
forcing the Bosnian and Croatian armies
last year to halt their rout of Serb and
Serb proxy forces from territory seized
through aggression and ethnic cleansing, href=”96-D105.html#N_2_”>⁽²⁾
the Clinton team created conditions that
would preclude the perpetuation of a
multi-ethnic state in Bosnia. And, by
brokering inequitable and unsustainable
terms in the Dayton Accords, the
Administration has set the stage for the
eventual, probably violent, partition of
Bosnia-Hercegovina.

It can only be hoped that the new Harlan
County-style imbroglio will serve —
like the first one did — as a wake-up
call to the American people about the
true character of the Clinton security
policy. At a minimum, it should make
clear that President Clinton can no more
take credit for bringing a genuine and
durable peace to Bosnia than he can honor
his claim to have all U.S. troops out of
that country by December 1996.

– 30 –

1. See ‘What’s
Wrong With This Picture?’ Even the
‘Office for Securing Clinton’s Election’
Cannot Obscure His Failure in Bosnia
(No. 96-D 102,
25 October 1996).

2. See Dr. Albert
Wohlstetter’s dissection of this odious
chapter in American diplomacy that
appeared in the 23 October Wall
Street Journal, “A Photo-Op
Foreign Policy.”