‘WHAT’S WRONG WITH THIS PICTURE?’ EVEN THE ‘OFFICE FOR SECURING CLINTON’S ELECTION’ CANNOT OBSCURE HIS FAILURE IN BOSNIA

(Washington, D.C.): Even as President
Clinton takes credit on the campaign
trail for his Administration’s diplomatic
accomplishment in bringing peace to
Bosnia, the evidence is mounting that —
despite the commitment of thousands of
U.S. forces and the expenditure to date
of some $4 billion in American tax
dollars there — a real and
durable peace is nowhere in sight.
To the contrary, 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.

Wohlstetter: Discredit
Where it is Due

A characteristically brilliant essay
by Dr. Albert Wohlstetter, which was
published in the Wall Street Journal
on 23 October, established that this
odious outcome is no accident.
Professor Wohlstetter — one of this
century’s foremost American strategists
and a recipient of the Center for
Security Policy’s Freedom Flame award
(among many other distinctions) —
describes steps taken by the Clinton
Administration in the months leading up
to the Dayton Accords.

In so doing, Dr. Wohlstetter shows
that these agreements were but the
logical by-product of a
Clinton-Holbrooke campaign to preserve
the despotic Serb regime of Slobodan
Milosevic and enable the ultimate
partition of Bosnia. As he put
it:

“Just when the Bosnians were
on course to recover all of the
territory that Serbia had seized,
Richard Holbrooke and other Clinton
aides moved to stop the rout into
Serbia of its own and proxy armies.
At Dayton, Mr. Clinton rolled back
essentially all of the territory the
combined [Croat and Bosnian] armies
had regained in Bosnia….Mr.
Clinton’s policies left the remnants
of an indivisibly mixed Bosnia in
indefensible, disconnected fragments,
under siege by Franjo Tudjman’s
Croatia as well as Mr. Milosevic’s
Serbia.”

The Iranian Foothold

In contrast to Mr. Clinton’s
self-serving characterizations of his
Bosnia policy, an honest
appraisal of the Administration’s record
shows it to have been immoral
in its indifference to the plight of the
victims of Serbian aggression, shortsighted
in its de facto support for Serb
territorial ambitions and strategically
disastrous with respect to its
acquiescence in the Iranian penetration
of the European continent. With respect
to the last of these, some sense of the
enormity of the Iranian-Bosnian arms
debacle was recently provided by the
House Select Subcommittee on Iranian Arms
Transfers chaired by Rep. Henry Hyde
(R-OH), a distinguished member of the
Center for Security Policy’s Board of
Advisors. On 10 October, the Subcommittee
published its findings which concluded,
among other things, that:

“The President’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.”

“The consequences of the
green light policy have been much,
much worse in Bosnia. After the
Administration gave the green light,
Iran virtually overnight became the
unrivaled foreign benefactor of the
Bosnian government. As a
result, 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.”

“The Iranian presence and
influence jumped radically in the
months following the green light. Iranian
elements infiltrated the Bosnian
government and established
close ties with the current
leadership in Bosnia and the next
generation of leaders. Iranian
Revolutionary Guards accompanied
Iranian weapons into Bosnia and soon
were integrated in the Bosnian
military structure from top to bottom
as well as operating in independent
units throughout Bosnia. The Iranian
intelligence service ran wild through
the area developing intelligence
networks, setting up terrorist
support systems, recruiting terrorist
‘sleeper’ agents and agents of
influence, and insinuating itself
with the Bosnian political leadership
to a remarkable degree.”

“[In short,] the
Iranians effectively annexed large
portions of the Bosnian security
apparatus to act as their
intelligence and terrorist
surrogates. This extended to the
point of jointly planning terrorist
activities. The Iranian embassy
became the largest in Bosnia and its
officers were given unparalleled
privileges and access at every level
of the Bosnian government.”

“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.”

In releasing the Subcommittee’s
report, Chairman Hyde bluntly warned:

“We will rue the day that
President Clinton gave the green
light to the Iranians to play the
savior to the Bosnians, because there
is a significant Iranian influence
remaining in Bosnia. Sure the numbers
are down, but it is not the
quantity that creates the
difficulties, but rather the type of
presence and the influence they
wield.”

“…The New York Times
of September 23, 1996, quot[ed] a
senior NATO official as saying, ‘[The
presence of Islamic mujahedeen in
Bosnia] is a time bomb waiting to go
off. These mercenaries are all well
trained, both as fighters and
terrorists. While they are
being kept under wraps now, the
moment they are given the order to
set off car bombs or carry out
assassinations, this whole mission
could go up in smoke…‘”

“With the U.S. preparing to
keep our troops in the Balkans for
longer than originally promised by
the President — well into next year
— it cannot be doubted that with
reports like these, the risk of harm
posed to American citizens, and
American military personnel currently
serving in the Balkans, and about to
be deployed, cannot be
understated.”

In recent days, even the Clinton
Administration has been obliged — at
least implicitly — to acknowledge the
dangers represented by the continuing
influence of Iranian and other radical
Islamic forces Bosnia. For example,
today’s Washington Post reports
that the U.S. will not turn over $100
million worth of arms pledged to the
Bosnian Muslim-Croat federation pursuant
to the Dayton agreements until the
government removes from office the Deputy
Defense Minister Hasan Cengic — a wholly
owned subsidiary of Iran. The Center has
learned that this is only one of the
preconditions being stipulated by the
Clinton Administration before it releases
45 M-60 tanks, 80 armored personnel
carriers and fifteen helicopters that
arrived by ship in Croatia yesterday.
Others reportedly include: the firing of
the Defense Minister Vlademir 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 radical
Islamic elements.

Watch This Space

Other ominous indications that the
Dayton Accords will not promote
a stable and durable peace in the Balkans
— to say nothing of the survival of an
integrated, multi-ethnic
Bosnia-Hercegovina — include the
following:

• Municipal elections
  scheduled for next month had to
  be postponed to some unspecified
  date next year. This
  action was taken at the
  insistence of the Organization
  for Security and Cooperation in
  Europe (OSCE) in light of
  indisputable evidence that the
  consolidation of power by
  extremist Bosnian Croat, Serb and
  Muslim factions has reached a
  point where balloting cannot be
  conducted in a “free and
  fair” manner.
• Interestingly, that was
  also true of the national
  elections for the
  collective presidency and
  parliament held last month. But
  postponing those elections — as
  was strongly recommended by most
  experts and diplomats monitoring
  developments in Bosnia — would
  have been inconvenient
  for the Clinton campaign’s claim
  to have brought peace to Bosnia.
  Indeed, the degree to which the
  OSCE has been made subservient to
  Administration dictates has
  caused some among its demoralized
  officials to suggest that the
  organization’s acronym now should
  stand for the “Office
  for Securing Clinton’s
  Election.”
• Predictably, the national
  elections produced only more
  signs of the non-viability of the
  Dayton-promulgated governing
  institutions. The
  collective presidency has only
  met twice; the Serb
  representative Momcilo Krajisnik
  has made no secret of his
  contempt for the loyalty oath to
  a unified Bosnia that he only
  took under duress; and the
  Parliament has yet to meet in
  plenary session with all its
  ethnic groups represented.
• The elections also served
  to underscore the fact that there
  is still no real freedom of
  movement in Bosnia and refugees
  are unable to return in safety to
  their homes. In fact,
  Bosnian Serb military units that
  have recently been trained by
  IFOR in de-mining procedures have
  reportedly applied their skills
  to booby-trapping and blowing up
  buildings in villages surrounding
  Brcko (e.g., Jasici) so as to
  deny them to would-be returning
  refugees.
• The melding of Croat and
  Muslim forces in an integrated
  Federation army has substantially
  foundered on the grounds
  that the Croats profess fears
  about the radical Islamic
  elements in the Bosnian army.
  Meanwhile, U.S. leverage over
  Zagreb has been substantially
  reduced by the Council of
  Europe’s decision to welcome
  Croatia as a member nation —
  possibly encouraging Franjo
  Tudjman to believe that he can
  eventually seize the Bihac
  corridor he has long desired to
  improve his capital’s access to
  the Dalmatian coast. Concerns
  over Tudjman’s intentions were
  only intensified by his
  declaration on Croatian
  television this week that a
  unified Bosnian state is “a fantasy.”
  And
• There has been a virtually
  complete failure to bring
  war criminals to justice.
  According to the Washington
  Post, the president of the
  international tribunal in The
  Hague has declared that he and
  his fellow judges were
  “prepared to pack up and go
  home” unless indicted
  suspects were arrested.

The Bottom Line

The fact that the Dayton
Accords are unraveling makes all the more
deplorable the Clinton Administration’s
failure to develop an “exit
strategy” for Bosnia. As a
practical matter, its campaign-motivated
policy toward Bosnia-Hercegovina has left
the United States with two highly
unpalatable options: 1) The U.S.
can cut its losses by
disengaging after the IFOR contingent has
been removed, virtually assuring that the
last vestiges of a Bosnian multi-ethnic
nation will go under. Such a step would
inevitably be perceived as a major blow
to what is left of American prestige and
leadership in international affairs and
amount to a humiliating write-off of the
more than $4 billion invested in Bosnia
peacemaking.

Alternatively, 2) the United
States will have to support the
open-ended deployment of as many as
40,000-60,000 troops on the ground
(with a substantial percentage American
forces) and perhaps as many as 20,000
international police in order to reduce
the chances of a resumption of
hostilities in Bosnia. It is unclear that
the American people will support such a
step — and the concomitant expenditures
required — especially if fears about
Islamic mujahedeen action against U.S.
personnel are realized.

Worse yet, if this Hobson’s
choice brought about by the Clinton
Administration’s mismanagement of the
Bosnia portfolio amounts to a lose-lose
situation for the United States, it is
likely to prove a win-win situation for
Iran. In the event the Bosnian
government continues to mutate in a
radical Islamic direction effectively
under the protection of the United States,
the Iranians and their ilk will
consolidate a strategic beachhead in
Europe of incalculable significance. On
the other hand, if the next phase of
Balkan genocide occurs upon the
withdrawal of U.S. and allied forces,
Iran stands to garner still greater
credit around the Muslim world — and
beyond — as the only reliable friend of
the victims of violence animated by
ethnic and religiously hatreds. Some
triumph for American diplomacy!

The American people are entitled to a
thoughtful debate about these issues —
and their implications. Will it be
allowed to occur before Election Day, or,
like so many other global flashpoints,
will the United States reap this bitter
harvest when there is no near-term
political recourse?

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