Playing President

The Washington Post, December 21, 1994

JIMMY CARTER seems now to be coaxing Bosnia’s warring Serbs and Muslims into a
cease-fire. It sounds promising enough: Who can oppose a halt in the carnage? But what is really
going on? How does an ostensible private person suddenly appear to acquire American and
“contact group” authority to make proposals, to pass around signed papers, to assign roles to
those not at his portable little table — in effect, to play a president? Is this not the same man who
insisted he represented only the “Carter Center”? Can his works be repudiated if a need arises? Is
he actually not operating in the penumbra of the Clinton administration’s self-doubt and
uncertainty and creating political facts whose consequences others will have to sort out?

A cease-fire: The Muslim-led Bosnian government wants a breather, the better to get through
the winter, rearm and fight on. The Bosnian Serbs want a permanent halt, the better to nail down
their gains. Unless the Muslims agree to this in two weeks, the Serbs say, the four-month
cease-fire supposedly accepted under Mr. Carter’s mediation is off. So what has been agreed to
beyond a Christmas respite?

The peace plan: The Muslim-led Bosnian government had favored the compromise plan written
up on a take-it-or-leave-it basis by the “contact group” consisting of the United States, Russia,
France, Britain and Germany. Bosnian Serbs had rejected it. They now accept the plan except for
its territorial and political provisions — except, that is, for its essentials. So, again, what has been
agreed to beyond an assertion of the familiar divide?

Jimmy Carter has used his own personal standing and negotiating skills and others’ pessimism
and fatigue to insert himself into a deadly stalemate in a manner defying order and accountability.
He has only his reputation to lose. Others have much more. It is incredible that he should have
gone so far.

And unless there is an entire dimension to both these proceedings and the trumpeted agreement
that has not been disclosed, it is more incredible that the Clinton administration should have let
him. Jimmy Carter is a man of peace. He has also all too often been a loose cannon. This was the
moment when Bill Clinton was supposed to be restoring his claim to be “presidential.” He has
done the opposite by appearing to fall into a Carter-fronted undercutting of the Muslim position.
Warren Christopher — you remember Warren Christopher, our secretary of state? — has condoned
an intervention that diminishes both his office and the foreign policy interests of the United States.