Hell Hole Spectator: A Dayton Relationship
Garfinkle, Adam
"Hell Hole Spectator: A Dayton Relationship" by Adam Garfinkle A Dayton Relationship The Dayton accord to bring "peace" to Bosnia is a very strange artifact of the diplomatic craft. Administration rhetoric suggests it is...
...If the real aim of this mission is, as administration spokesmen have explained in lucid moments, to rescue NATO's credibility and reputation, it is hard to see how that can be accomplished by a narrowly defined mission with a fairly tight departure schedule...
...Bosnian sovereignty must devolve into something less than that, and the challenge is to manage that transition with the least damage...
...The need to avoid a clear-cut failure will counsel running faster, if need be, just to stay in the same place...
...The Dayton agreement calls for a military build-down before anyone outside the former Yugoslavia aids any party militarily...
...If we arm and train them directly, we alienate our allies in a mission whose most significant aim is to heal alliance wounds...
...The Bosnian peace accord was signed essentially unread...
...What is expected to come to pass is that a local balance of military power will have been established by the time NATO ADAM GARFINKLE is executive editor of the National Interest and a research associate at the Foreign Policy Research Institute...
...There will also be the temptation to escalate the military commitment in order to better command the overall political environment...
...Arming the Bosnians is opposed not only by Russia but also by America's closest NATO-European allies, including the two, Britain and France, that are shouldering the main burden of the deployment with us...
...It would not be too...
...The very attributes of the mission that make it relatively safe and marginally acceptable domestically render it incapable of achieving its real goals...
...The Bosnian Croat area, the so-called Republic of Herzog-Bosna, has its own army, schools, post office, and tax collectors...
...This mismatch — between the real requirements of the mission and the pratfalls of the Bosnian theater—suggests that the United States will not be able to simply bug out of Bosnia if things get uncomfortable...
...But the terms are so patently silly that no one expects this to take place...
...One of the small mercies afforded by long and complicated agreements—this one has eleven lengthy appendices—is that few people take the trouble to read them...
...A military balance alone cannot save Bosnia...
...And we all but destroy any rationale for U.S.-Russian cooperation in the Balkans into the bargain...
...It is hard, then, to take the letter of agreement seriously...
...But Senators Bob Dole and John McCain toiled to get the administration to shift positions...
...This is why the Bosnianization solution is not the panacea its proponents claim it to be...
...A bug-out would be diplomatic disaster, and faced with such a prospect, the Clinton administration would be tempted to travel longer paths that hold out some prospect of success...
...If either Serbia or Croatia rejects the buffer, then the other cannot have it no matter what...
...diplomats have "saved" the Bosnians from the Serbs only to feed them to the Croats...
...The terms of these appendices could not possibly have been seriously debated among the delegations, or even within them...
...If Serbia and Croatia decide to carve up Bosnia after NATO has left, the Muslims will be slaughtered again —and the more weapons there are on hand throughout the region, the more efficient that slaughter will be...
...What good could possibly be served by providing a temptation for Iranians and other ne'er-do-wells to fill the gap—something that probably wouldn't work well in military terms but that would be a political and diplomatic calamity for NATO...
...But this is a weak reed on which to rely...
...The appendices, all written by lawyers in the pay of the U.S...
...Administration rhetoric suggests it is a promising pact, but many of its provisions are simply ridiculous, and its basic architecture is deeply flawed...
...But under the Dayton accord the Croats and Serbs can get new weapons, too...
...There is simply no evidence that the Croat-Muslim federation is working on the ground, or even that the Croats want it to work...
...surprising if politicians in Zagreb and Belgrade see the Dayton accord as a convenient charade presaging the double Anschluss of Bosnia after all NATO forces have departed...
...The dilemma remains: If we don't arm the Bosnians, the job doesn't get done properly, and we jeopardize a credible NATO exit strategy...
...Perhaps taking a winter breathing space and hoping to re-arm, collect Western cash, and prepare for the next round...
...The idea that we can arm and train the Bosnians sufficiently to prop up the state from afar—the "Bosnianization" solution—is ludicrous...
...It can provide the major part of a NATO exit strategy, but Bosnianization can't save Bosnia anymore than Vietnamization saved South Vietnam...
...Neither side seems to relish the prospect of fighting again so soon, with so little at stake...
...indeed, they can probably get and absorb them more easily and more quickly than can the Bosnian Muslims...
...The former presumes neutrality, the latter commitment to one side...
...As Harvey Sicherman of the Foreign Policy Research Institute has elucidated, an independent Bosnia can survive in its current borders —at peace without massive numbers of foreign soldiers—only if the political elites in Zagreb and Belgrade come to see the fiction of a unitary Bosnian state as a serviceable buffer between them...
...Should that happen, Bosnia would be at war once again, standing at the door of final capitulation unless NATO returns to save it...
...Even more bizarre is the evasive language used to describe just what it is to which NATO is committed...
...0 bad, live bodies after dead -.=,-- ---•:--- --- .- --...-.._ ones...
...But the accord proclaims that there is to be one Bosnian foreign policy, two Bosnian armies, and three Bosnian administrations (Central, Croat-Muslim Federation, and Serbian...
...54 February 1996 • The American Spectator Part of that partition, the Republic Srpska, is obvious, even though it isn't called a partition in the agreement...
...They and others argued that if the United States were not directly involved, the Muslims would be shortchanged, and remain militarily underwhelming...
...The Pentagon argued that NATO should not be directly involved because that would make the Serbs mad at us and jeopardize our neutrality...
...Before the December 13 Senate vote approving the U.S...
...While it is surely right in principle to allow a beleaguered community to defend itself, it is irresponsible to conflate principle with true effectiveness...
...State Department, were accepted without significant amendment by all three parties...
...HELL HOLE SPECTATOR by Adam Garfinkle A Dayton Relationship The Dayton accord to bring "peace" to Bosnia is a very strange artifact of the diplomatic craft...
...This, in fact, seems to be the view of the protagonists, too...
...There remains another, more hopeful possibility...
...Since the November 21 climax of the Dayton negotiations, there has been a swirl of debate over who is to do the arming and training...
...This dilemma speaks directly to the broader contradiction inherent in the mission between NATO's twin roles as peacekeeper and nation-builder—and the mission, seen broadly, encompasses elements of both tasks...
...officials insist that the Dayton agreement insures a unitary Bosnian state...
...For all these reasons—and because the administration could not otherwise secure Senate support for the deployment of U.S...
...a wider geopolitical balance is required, and that is unfortunately unavailable...
...The other part, pertaining to the Croatian region of Bosnia, isn't as obvious, but is real all the same...
...Nonetheless, proponents of the Bosnianization solution have pressed on...
...forces—the administration has accepted more direct involvement but may shift back again if problems arise...
...Leveling the playing field" is bandied about as if the Balkans were some kind of pool table that can be adjusted, cleaned, and re-felted at Western will...
...If its signatories don't take it seriously, why should we...
...Hence the inherent logic built into this Balkan adventure for throwing good money after...
...The Serbian and Croatian leaderships already have more or less what they want: their own areas to themselves, and a potentially threatening Muslim entity eliminated...
...While the Bosnians can be adequately armed to defend against either the Croats or the Serbs, the state is too small, underpopulated, and poorly endowed to be defensible against a joint Croatian-Serbian determination to destroy it...
...This, in addition to the fact that, just hours before final agreement, it looked as though the whole negotiation had collapsed, sheds an eerie light on what the negotiators thought they were doing...
...It is the logic of incremental entangle- g ment, and we have seen it fail before...
...forces leave...
...Bosnia's problem remains what it has been since its improbable birth as a state in 1992: the country is not viable as a stand-alone entity...
...The means of achieving this balance is a side agreement to the accords wherein the American government has pledged to arm and train Bosnian forces...
...Bosnian Croats use Croatian license plates, carry Croatian passports, vote in Croatian elections, and even route their telephone calls through Croatia...
...The administration has tried to clear up the confusion by using the word "evenhanded" to describe what NATO is doing, as if the problem were one of vocabulary...
...Terminating the mission by pointing to broken terms of the Dayton agreement will turn a limited effort into an unlimited political failure...
...Quite possibly they have...
...This seems to include even the Bosnian, Serbian, and Croatian representatives in Dayton...
...For the United States, mission sucess in Bosnia is affected by yet another problem...
...6. The American Spectator • February 1996 55...
...It is clear enough that the Dayton accord amounts to a de facto partition of Bosnia...
...deployment, the Clinton administration favored this view...
...Recalling Croatian president Franjo Tudjman's now infamous visit to London, during which he drew on a menu his vision of Bosnia ten years hence —a map that had no Bosnia—it is worth asking whether U.S...
...Besides, this argument went, the Serbs are already mad at us—and why shouldn't they be after NATO air forces bombed them for two weeks straight thispast summer...
...The pledge itself was necessary to secure Bosnian acceptance of the agreement, but its absence from the accord itself was necessary to enable Slobodan Milosevic to sell it to the Serbs...
Vol. 29 • February 1996 • No. 2
