Paying for the Powell Doctrine

...In 1999, when NATO's bombing campaign led to the withdrawal of Serb military forces from Kosovo, ethnic Albanians celebrated by "cleansing" Serb civilians who had not retreated ; this retaliation was an embarrassment for the Western countries that had ended Serb barbarism, only to see it replaced by an Albanian variant...

...I want to work to save every child out there...

...A NATO bombing campaign was begun...

...In the spring of 1994, as the genocide in Bosnia progressed like a plow digging into the earth, and as a new and worse genocide began in Rwanda, President Clinton's national security adviser, Anthony Lake, who had the most famous conscience in an administration famous for its famous consciences, explained that the U.S...

...They don't know what is happening...

...When the 'surgery' is over and the desired result is not obtained, a new set of experts then comes forward with talk of just a little escalation—more bombs, more men and women, more force...

...In his occasionally candid memoir, Waging Modern War, published in 2001, General Wesley Clark, who commanded NATO forces during the bombing of Serbia in 1999, recalled that once he got involved in Bosnian issues in the summer of 1994, "I became increasingly concerned about our staff's lack of experience with the situation on the ground...

...Perhaps Dallaire was over-reacting, as commanders in the field might do...

...Of course not every genocide can be stopped with a modest dose of military intervention, and it would be unfair to demand that DISSENT / Winter 2002 n 57 YUGOSLAVIA the United States sacrifice as many lives as it takes to stop mass murder in country X or Y. There are limits to what the United States can do, and limits to what the United States should be expected to do...

...we should not be surprised that politicians retreat in its presence...

...The crucial role of the U.S...

...I don't know what happened to Boris, but it seems unlikely that he would have stepped forward when a call went out in his unit for volunteers for dangerous missions...

...Powell cherished the warning from George Santayana that those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it...

...My God, what are we paying $200 billion a year for—what is our military for...

...In 1995, when Croatia reconquered the Krajina region, the scene was not pretty...

...In Bosnia, the rationale did not hold, because one side, which started the war, had plenty of weapons, and the other side, which had few weapons and did not want or expect a war, was being slaughtered...

...they had no stomach for close combat against people who could defend themselves...

...But by the summer of 1995, Serb behavior in Bosnia became too odious for Western leaders to overlook any longer—the "safe haven" of Srebrenica had been stormed by Serb troops, who massacred thousands of prisoners and took UN peacekeepers hostage...

...The opportunity existed to prevent the killing—and to put the negotiations back on track...

...BOSNIA'S GOVERNMENT did not need foreign troops to fight its war...

...Impossible to say, of course, but the degradation of the Bosnian Serb Army was a slow-moving affair...

...Albright realized this...

...When Croatia re-armed and, in 1995, retook a swath of territory that had been held by ethnic Serbs since 1991, the Serbs hardly bothered to fight...

...Their principal strategy was not to attack, but to bomb and besiege and wait for the other side to surrender...

...In October 1993, Dallaire, a lieutenant general in the Canadian Army, was sent to Kigali, Rwanda, to command a lightly armed UN peacekeeping force of twenty-five hundred soldiers that was overseeing a fragile peace accord between the Hutu-dominated government and the rebel Tutsi army...

...The Croatian troops who attacked in 1995 were fighting on behalf of a government that was every bit as nationalist and thuggish as the Serbian regime led by Slobodan Milosevic...

...In Washington, Slobodan Milosevic was not viewed as a Balkan Saddam or even a Balkan Mussolini...

...And that was rousingly the case when the Bush administration started its war on the Taliban...

...THE BLIND spot at the Pentagon was exceptionally broad...

...and geographical terrain that was unfavorable to the weapons and warriors of a superpower (yet the rugged Afghan mountains did not protect the Taliban from destruction...

...These failures stain the mind forever, like dye on a shroud...

...From the first day, an aerial blitz by NATO would have tipped YUGOSLAVIA the conflict in favor of the Bosnian side, forcing the Serbs to retreat, militarily and diplomatically...

...soldiers who had been sent to Beirut as peacekeepers were killed in a suicide-bomb attack...

...THE BOSNIAN Serb Army consisted of approximately fifty thousand soldiers, according to most estimates...

...To be sure, revenge killings would have occurred if their army had retaken Serbheld territory, but not, I believe, on a significant level...

...Most men and women don't join the armed forces because the pay is good or the food delicious...

...I think he knew the sad answer but he shrugged it off, telling me, in the caustic way that grunts in Vietnam handled queries about the morass they knew they were in, "I'm not paid to think...

...The response from Annan came quickly: The UN forces in Kigali were to do nothing more than oversee the disintegrating peace accord...

...The majority of Bosnia's Muslims did not wish to live in an ethnically pure state...

...it is monstrous, but not a monster...

...Everyone wanted to know, why doesn't America do something...

...Our GIs would not have objected...

...The situation was more shameful than that...

...In Vietnam, the White House wanted to defeat a communist insurrection and persuaded itself that this was possible to do, even though, in reality, it wasn't...

...Then-President George Bush took his advice to heart and, fearing another Vietnam, opted to keep U.S...

...As the wars began in the former Yugoslavia, the United Nations imposed a weapons embargo on all sides in the disintegrating country, and this strategy played into Bosnian Serb hands, because they had ample stockpiles of armaments and a vibrant weapons industry in Serbia to resupply them...

...We have Boy Scouts...

...For the most part, they had not fought to capture the territory they held in Bosnia...

...Pentagon and administration officials talked up a geopolitical doomsday in which lifting the embargo would spark a much broader conflict, because Milosevic might send the Yugoslav National Army into Bosnia to defend Serbs, or perhaps the Russians would become involved, leading to a U.S.-Russia face-off in the Balkans...

...The warfare in Bosnia was primitive...

...Return fire was infrequent, more a nuisance than a threat...

...Even if Milosevic was guilty of war crimes that threatened our national interest—a big "if" at the time—what should our intervention seek to achieve: a cessation of fighting, a withdrawal of Serb forces from Bosnia, or the downfall of Milosevic...

...A few miles up the road from his lair, I visited one of his leaders, Biljana Playsic...

...General Dallaire sensed, early on, that Rwanda was slouching toward genocide...

...The newly formed Bosnian Army, however, had few YUGOSLAVIA weapons and no factories...

...If we could crush the Taliban in Afghanistan, we could have crushed the Serbs in Bosnia...

...How could a country that most Americans had never heard of become, all of a sudden, so important that we should shed blood for it...

...We talked some more and then accepted his invitation for a meal in his canteen...

...The rapid introduction of robust combat forces, authorized to seize at one time critical points throughout the country, would have changed the political calculations of the participants...

...Often the best and only chance to stop genocide is before the violence becomes widespread...

...It needed weapons...

...Once ten Belgian peacekeepers were massacred by Hutu extremists on the first day of the genocide, April 7, the Security Council decided to withdraw its force from the country, even though Dallaire urged the opposite course, insisting that with more troops, and a mandate to use them in combat, the violence could be stopped...

...David Owen, lead negotiator for the European Union, memorably accused 56 n DISSENT / Winter 2002 pro-intervention editorialists of being "laptop bombardiers...

...He liked being in the presence of someone who had carnal knowledge that was not months old...

...government, when intervening abroad, would rely on the military equivalent of a sledgehammer, never a chisel...

...They were a less-than-awesome force, not for any lack of armaments—they had adequate stocks of small weapons, mortars, artillery and tanks—but for their training and morale...

...It is understandable that Annan, or anyone, would hesitate to intervene before genocide occurs...

...There was no heat, no electricity...

...The missing factor, in the Balkans, was quite simply the desire to fight that war...

...Defeating these bullies would not have required massive intervention...

...But one of the lessons politicians and generals drew from those debacles—that the American public has no tolerance for sacrificing GIs overseas—is wrong...

...we must be ready to act early and quickly, especially, as was the case in Rwanda, when the required acts are modest...

...In Washington, defeating genocide was less important than getting it off the front page, even if that meant letting genocide succeed...

...His articles and extracts from his book are archived at www.petermaass.com . DISSENT / Winter 2002 n 59...

...But we should not feel helpless in the search for the DNA of genocide and ways to defeat it...

...We have to ask the hard questions about where and when we can intervene...

...We received the usual anti54 n DISSENT / Winter 2002 NATO, anti-Muslim spiel, then were invited to his office, where the ashtray consisted of a spent artillery shell...

...Genocide is a strange animal...

...The spectator, who just wants the bloody spectacle to end, balks at the request and urges the boxer to take a fall...

...Bosnia was in the grip of genocide, and genocide, as everyone knows, is a massive and infernal machine—Evil and Apocalypse entwined—and it cannot be defeated on the cheap...

...They are not afraid to put their lives on the line...

...So we have to make distinctions...

...His job, and the job of the three soldiers he worked with, was to fire occasionally at the Sarajevans below them...

...After all, the Serbs were not great or even good fighters...

...There was another route...

...PETER MAASS covered the war in Bosnia for the Washington Post and is the author of Love Thy Neighbor: A Story of War...

...It was the kind of realpolitik that brings great satisfaction to the Henry Kissingers of our world, and to the Colin Powells...

...bombing campaign—in giving Northern Alliance fighters the edge they needed to roll over the Taliban...

...But journalists were not the only ones who failed to genuflect before the lessons of history that Powell worshipped...

...Powell sensed a quagmire...

...On January 11, 1994, three months before the genocide began, Dallaire sent a coded cable to his superior at the United Nations, Kofi Annan, who at the time was head of peacekeeping, and now is secretary general...

...Here is how, in a PBS interview that aired in January 1996, Powell described his preference for "decisive force" in a foreign engagement: "If this is important enough to go to war for, we're going to do it in a way that there's no question what the outcome will be, and we're going to do it by [using] the force necessary to take the initiative away from [the] enemy and impose [our] will upon him...

...Many foreign soldiers in Bosnia were dismayed because they had to stand aside as genocide unfolded before them...

...But I did not know the appropriate answer in this case, and neither did my colleagues...

...It's better than jail...

...Perhaps the Hutus would pull back from the brink on their own accord, without the UN's firing a shot (which, who knows, could make matters worse, not better...

...Powell's estimate seemed reasonable because the fighting in Bosnia was vicious, and under the Powell Doctrine, the U.S...

...This truth had the misfortune of going against conventional wisdom and political convenience, and so it was ignored or disbelieved for far too long...

...Over bowls of bean soup, he complained about his hard life on the frontline, telling me that his unit seemed to be forgotten by higher-ups, that he was bored, and that he hadn't had sex for ages...

...Photograph by Ron Haviv/VII 52 n DISSENT / Winter 2002 YUGOSLAVIA DISSENT / Winter 2002 • 53 YUGOSLAVIA war crimes, had a sufficient number of loyalists to lead his troops, but the troops themselves were reluctant to stick their necks out...

...In the winter of 1992, as he fended off demands for U.S...

...That has been the case with the generation of officers who fought in Vietnam and who decided that the next time they were called upon to do violence in a distant land, they would make sure they had all the resources needed to win...

...Shelling was so great during the last days of the siege that it was impossible to bury the dead...

...most Albanians in Kosovo shared their goal...

...Powell was thus able to stand before journalists on January 23, 1991, and announce with the confidence of a general who had a half-million troops preparing to attack, "Here's our plan for the Iraqi Army: We're going to cut it off, then we're going to kill it...

...It was surrounded by Serbia and Croatia (a part-time ally, parttime enemy) and resorted, in dire moments, to handmade mortars...

...ethnic Serbs who had lived there for centuries were so terrified that they fled to Serbia, and many who stayed behind were brutalized or killed by vengeful Croats...

...It was a limited affair, with just thirty-five hundred sorties on Serb targets in Bosnia over eleven days...

...The lessons of Vietnam should not be forgotten, nor should those of Lebanon and Somalia...

...Dallaire has said, on many occasions, that he would have needed just three battalions to "break the embryo of genocide...

...government played a key role in keeping YUGOSLAVIA the UN out of Rwanda's genocide...

...He was afraid that Powell would figure out who was behind the swipe and exact some form of bureaucratic revenge...

...The Pentagon brass received CIA reports and diplomatic cables, Clark wrote, and perused CNN and the Washington Post, but had not bothered to send anyone of importance to Bosnia to figure out, from a military perspective, what was happening there and what could be done...

...military action in Bosnia, Powell described the flip side of his doctrine...

...We wish to stress," Annan's cable concluded, "that the overriding consideration is the need to avoid entering into a course of action that might lead to the use of force and unanticipated repercussions...

...Ho Chi Minh would have booted his fat ass out of the army...

...I was traveling with two British colleagues, and because we didn't have passes to be in the area, the commander at Rogatica greeted us by threatening to shoot us...

...With skill and luck, it can be defeated by military intervention...

...We should always be skeptical," he continued, "when so-called experts suggest that all a particular crisis calls for is a little surgical bombing or a limited attack...

...The hypothetical force described by General Dallaire—at least five thousand strong— could have made a significant difference in Rwanda," the report concluded...

...The embargo was immoral because it abetted genocide...

...Our interpreter volunteered that he had had sex with his girlfriend a few days earlier...

...BUT WHAT IF the Bosnians committed atrocities with the weapons we supplied or allowed them to be supplied with...

...This was no Berchtesgaden...

...My view, which is not a minority one, is that lifting the embargo—and, going a step further, providing the Bosnians with weapons— would have stopped the genocide and enabled the Bosnians to retake territory seized by Serbs in the first weeks of the war...

...If Powell imagined Vietcong-like resistance and fortitude in the hills of Bosnia, I wish he could have been with me in Rogatica...

...Why don't we bomb targets in Bosnia and Serbia...

...In the following years, when troops of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization made occasional arrests of Bosnian Serb war criminals, there were no revenge killings of NATO personnel...

...Except for the early days of the war, there were no queues at recruiting outposts in Serb-held territory...

...Dallaire also asked permission to provide protection to the informant...

...Lake's heart may have been in the right place, but his mind was not...

...He would turn eighteen soon, draft age, and when I asked what he would do he didn't need to think about it...

...Dragisa, the Serb with the big gun in the hills above Sarajevo, was not much of a warrior in 1992, nor was the commander in Rogatica...

...Yes, he would not hesitate to order another round of shelling of Gorazde, but he seemed more interested in his own well-being and self-pity than anything else...

...The Serb people are being seduced," he told me...

...This argument is no sturdier than a two-legged table...

...I met and occasionally shared a glass of brandy with more than a few war criminals in Bosnia, and I learned that these were not brave men and women, and that their numbers were not so immense...

...Shortly after, a Serb mortar attack killed thirtyeight people in Sarajevo...

...The ground offensive certainly helped drive the Serbs to Dayton, but again, in its absence NATO had much more to throw at the Serbs from the air...

...bombing in Afghanistan is a perfect illustration of the extent to which our Air Force can turn the tide of a foreign conflict...

...The Bosnian Army needed simple materiel, such as anti-tank guns, mortars and artillery pieces, as well as ammunition...

...The Bosnians needed to realize they could not win the war, and the best way to make them realize that was to make sure they could not acquire weapons that might enable them to win...

...soldiers in the United Nations Protection Force, and as far as I could tell, Roth was the only uniformed GI in Bosnia's capital, where he worked as a communications specialist at the residence of the UN commander...

...when compared to NATO's seventy-eight-day bombing of Serbia in 1999 with more than thirty-eight thousand sorties, the campaign in Bosnia is revealed as a mild slap...

...The rationale for arms embargoes is that if you starve a conflict of weapons, the fighting will stop or slow down, even if there is leakage due to blackmarket deals...

...There were kids like Boris throughout the Bosnian Serb Army, kids who would much rather watch MTV than risk their lives in a war that was destroying a way of life that had been quite agreeable to them...

...The bombing worked in 1995, they say, because the Serbs were weaker, militarily, than they had been in previous years...

...in reality, the military equivalent of a nudge would have done the job, and eventually did...

...Powell was a hero, hailed as a visionary who knew when and how to fight...

...I learned this lesson in Banja Luka, the largest city under Serb control...

...She was not afraid to speak her mind to Powell, asking him, during one contentious meeting, "What's the point in having this superb military you are always talking about if we can't use it...

...This state of affairs was illustrated, vividly, in the winter of 1992, when I visited the town of Rogatica, a choke point of the four-year Serb siege of Gorazde, where thousands were killed by the shells or the cold or the lack of food...

...Americans understood that...

...soldiers in Somalia pretty much eliminated any appetite Bill Clinton might have had for using the world's strongest military for anything beyond oil-protection duty...

...Regarding Rwanda, just ask Romeo Dallaire...

...It is implemented, often imperfectly, by men and women, not Goliaths...

...Raiding arms caches and protecting informers was out of the question...

...But what if it had...

...Skeptics also argued that lifting the embargo would not have been enough...

...I know we shouldn't go sticking our noses everywhere, but this is too close to our NATO allies to sit back and do nothing...

...In the war on Iraq, Bush the Elder's administration provided a clear mission—liberate Kuwait—and authorized the decisive force requested by the Pentagon...

...It was an effective strategy...

...But the Iraqi Army had been forced from Kuwait, and the loss of American life was slight...

...History has not been kind to this approach to war-making...

...When schmoozing with frontline soldiers, I prefer to offer appropriate answers rather than accurate ones, if the two happen to vary...

...The headlines from Bosnia told stark tales of torture, executions, concentration camps, and sieges...

...It was dangerous for American officials in the Balkans to bring inconvenient facts to the attention of their superiors back home...

...He was a bully, not a fighter...

...How could the UN refuse to protect the Bosnians and prohibit them from purchasing weapons to protect themselves...

...After threatening, again, to kill us, he quieted down and apologized for his behavior...

...I will go to the army," he replied...

...The cowardice of other nations should not be an excuse for our own...

...It's important to remember, too, that the provision of weapons to Afghanistan's Northern Alliance, by Russia and the United States, played a key role—along with the U.S...

...In Afghanistan, we have had no trouble looking the other way as Northern Alliance soldiers executed Taliban or al Qaeda fighters...

...For all but the final stage of the war, the feeble UN peacekeeping force had strict orders to use its weapons only in self-defense...

...The Serbs swiftly agreed to a peace conference, held in Dayton, Ohio, that ended the war, although on terms that, it turned out, were unduly generous to the architects of the genocide...

...In this way, the lesson of the genocides of the 1990s are not much different from the lesson of Vietnam: our political and military leaders can be so out of touch with on-the-ground reality—even if, as was the case in Vietnam, they have plenty of people on the ground—that they are 100 percent wrong in their analysis of what can be done...

...When the dust settled after the hundred-hour ground war, the Iraqi Army had not been killed...

...Powell made the mistake of treating a genocidal policy as an unbeatable monster...

...To better understand the unfortunate logic of the situation, imagine a lopsided boxing match in which the losing boxer has one hand tied behind his back and pleads with a spectator to free the tied hand...

...Would not their weapons be like spears against a tidal wave...

...If you want to defeat Hitlerian evil, you must, it follows, amass the forces of D-Day and have a great generation on hand to storm the beaches (or mountains or deserts or jungles, as the case may be...

...Opponents of bombing also note that NATO's attack coincided with a summer offensive by Croatian and Bosnian troops that swept through northwestern Bosnia, threatening to overrun Banja Luka...

...In Bosnia, the White House and Pentagon feared that stopping genocide might become a quagmire involving massive intervention, and persuaded itself that this was the case...

...When NATO bombed the Bosnian Serbs in 1995, they caved in after two weeks...

...His memoir of the Bosnian conflict won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for nonfiction and the Overseas Press Club's Cornelius Ryan Award...

...Playsic is now on trial at The Hague as an architect of Bosnia's genocide, but in 1992 she DISSENT / Winter 2002 n 4 9 YUGOSLAVIA operated out of a hotel at the Jahorina ski resort, which was closed for business because of the war...

...WHY ARE America's leaders reluctant to intervene except in the most obvious, national-security-threatening situations, as in the Gulf War...

...If we demand that an army be atrocityfree to merit international support, then no army including, our own, could ever meet that criterion...

...Were they widespread...

...This was a frequently heard objection, and it had some validity...

...The genocides of the 1990s in Bosnia and Rwanda succeeded not because they were unstoppable, but because international opposition was almost nonexistent...

...His blond hair was tied into a ponytail and he wore the sort of smalllensed glasses worn by John Lennon...

...Americans tend to equate the face of genocide with Adolf Hitler, not Radovan Karadzic...

...The Serbs are not ten-foot-tall headhunters who would fight to the last drop of blood," an American diplomat in Zagreb told me one day...

...About two hundred thousand people, mostly Muslims, were killed in the war, according to an estimate used by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees...

...What other options were available, short of dispatching 250,000 troops...

...There was a Wizard-of-Oz quality to the Serb military machine—look behind the curtain and you will not find the ten-foot tall monsters you expect...

...government for failing to stop the genocide in Rwanda or the one in Bosnia...

...If you're not serious enough to do that, then you ought to think twice about going to war...

...No one had been there personally...

...And the reality is that we cannot often solve other people's problems...

...He asked when we had last had sex...

...You can't miss with a sledgehammer, Powell believed...

...government was not, unfortunately, in a position to stop the bloodbaths that were staining our television screens...

...In Washington, few politicians challenged Powell's judgment...

...For hardly the first time, the quick solution was preferred to the just solution, even though the just solution could be reached at an acceptable cost...

...Notice a pattern...

...That is what Bosnia's genocide looked like from the inside—cowardly and pathetic...

...This is true, but that only means the mild campaign in 1995 would have needed to be a bit stronger if it had taken place in earlier years...

...Would the bombing have succeeded without that ground threat...

...How much stronger...

...Bosnia was different...

...for all I knew, Boris was a Beatles fan, too...

...The U.S...

...Would we have then become accomplices to their revenge killings...

...To this day, many opponents of bombing insist they were right...

...these soldiers— I use the word with great caution— were excellent killers of civilians and takers of whatever loot they could find, but they would not have fared well against an army, which, at the beginning of the war, the newly independent Bosnian government did not have...

...On a hot afternoon in the summer of 1992, I came across a teenager named Boris...

...They join for other reasons, including a dose of altruism...

...The Kosovo Liberation Army, responsible for the killings of Serbs, was a generally disreputable assemblage of young men who wanted to purge every Serb from Kosovo...

...And in 1999, when NATO bombed Serbia, the Russians stood aside, grumbling...

...The threat to U.S...

...In an October 8, 1992 New York Times opinion piece entitled "Why Generals Get Nervous," he did not hide his disdain for reporters whose dispatches indicated a need for American action...

...Bosnia was everything Iraq was not, or so it seemed...

...The war was not six months old, but already Boris had no appetite for it...

...The cable outlined the informant's story and requested permission, as a first step, to raid a Hutu arms cache...

...As Lake was murderously slow in realizing, the U.S...

...In fact, there was no shortage of American officials treating him as a respectable statesman...

...So, too, does the story of American intervention in Lebanon, where, in 1983, 241 U.S...

...The Bosnian Army, despite the cruelties inflicted on civilians it was trying to protect, did not engage in systematic killing sprees when it managed to retake slivDISSENT / Winter 2002 n 55 YUGOSLAVIA ers of territory...

...That is why the Serbs were able to seize so much territory at the start—they faced no organized opposition...

...The conflict in Afghanistan presented American policymakers with all of the obstacles that stopped them in 50 n DISSENT / Winter 2002 their tracks in Bosnia: an apparently fearsome opponent (the Taliban, which wasn't so fearsome once the fighting began...

...How can a few thousand GIs defeat it...

...An uncomfortable silence prevailed...

...Different experts provide different opinions on the effect of arming the Bosnians...

...I strongly doubt it...

...instead, there were roadside checkpoints to prevent fighting-age males from escaping to Serbia...

...He understood less about Bosnia, and what was needed to stop genocide there, than Sergeant Roth from Maquoketa, Iowa...

...Enough of it remained to keep Saddam Hussein in power...

...it had plenty of troops of its own, more than 100,000...

...You might have wondered, as I did, where Powell was planning to put all those troops, and what they would do...

...Among soldiers, defeat lingers longer than victory because it involves a loss of pride and a loss of lives on a mission that failed...

...If force is used imprecisely or out of frustration rather than clear analysis, the situation can be made worse," he wrote in a Foreign Affairs YUGOSLAVIA article entitled "U.S...

...security was not apparent...

...Distilled to its essence, the Powell Doctrine calls on civilian leaders to do two things in considering war—provide the military with a clear mission and give the military whatever resources it deems necessary to carry it out...

...ambassador to the United Nations, was the principal advocate for intervention within the Clinton administration...

...But the UN, like the Security Council members that decide its policies, has what seems to be a standing rule (or should we say a sitting rule...

...And I know the president does, and I know the American people do...

...We have learned the lessons of history," he wrote, "even if some journalists have not...

...The daughter of a Czech diplomat who fled to America as the Second World War began, she knew a genocide when she saw it, and she knew the genocide in Bosnia could be stopped, if only the men with stars on their shoulders could look at Bosnia without seeing Vietnam...

...Forces: Challenges Ahead...

...Their aim was to terrify as much as kill...

...Colin Powell, an Army major in Vietnam during the heaviest fighting there, turned those sentiments into national policy when, as chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff from 1989 to 1993, he formulated his eponymous doctrine...

...They see what they want to see, or what others want them to see...

...The Clinton administration opted, in the early years of the Bosnian war, to limit to a handful the number of U.S...

...Little training or assembly would have been required by outsiders...

...the army that crumbled under NATO's bombs in 1995 wasn't that different from the army that existed in the first year or two of the war...

...It's only a slight exaggeration to say that President Clinton wished the killings would finish as quickly as possible, on any terms...

...They ran...

...BUT ANNAN and the Security Council did worse than that...

...rOR THE SAKE of argument, let us assume that maintaining the embargo was a wise policy...

...More recently, the killing in 1993 of eighteen U.S...

...They pretty much took what they wanted in the first weeks of the war, when there was no organized opposition to the paramilitary death squads that were the shock troops of genocide...

...In fact, this approach has been tragic...

...to dither until blood begins to stain the carpets along the East River and at Foggy Bottom...

...government could have solved the problems in Bosnia and Rwanda at acceptable rather than extravagant costs, in political and military terms...

...Serbs held about 70 percent of the country almost from start to finish...

...GENOCIDE IS A fearsome word, evoking a phenomenon nearly biblical in its fury...

...Our cups rattled as another shell hit its target nearby...

...That was the case in the Gulf War, as it was when NATO finally bombed Serb targets in Bosnia in 1995, and four years later, when NATO bombed Serbia...

...Although the vast majority of Serbs in Bosnia supported the war, few wanted to die for the cause...

...It nonetheless suited the U.S...

...But Powell turned the warning into dogma, failing to realize that the future may not resemble the past, and yesterday's lessons may not solve tomorrow's problems...

...Not always, but sometimes...

...Everybody but the Serbs hopes the Americans will get involved," Roth said as we sipped tea from porcelain cups, which rattled on their saucers when a shell landed nearby...

...I think the Serbs are the bad guys, but that's not the UN's position...

...One of us said something that enraged the commander and he proceeded to blow up again, grabbing my notebook and ripping pages from it...

...It is not surprising that General Powell, long before he became Secretary of State Powell, threw around inflated force estimates in the early 1990s...

...If a mission is honorable or if Americans believe it is honorable, they will support it...

...The Vietnam precedent plays a paramount role, of course...

...troops at home, safe and sound...

...General Ratko Mladic, the Bosnian Serb military leader who has since been indicted for DISSENT / Winter 2002 n 51 YUGOSLAVIA Bodies lie unburied outside a hospital in the Croatian city of Vukovar...

...Maass, whose overseas postings included Brussels, Seoul, and Budapest, is now a freelance writer living in New York...

...This was an accusation, and as Powell recalled in his 1995 autobiography, "I thought I would have an aneurysm...

...The panel consisted of more than a dozen senior military officials, including a half dozen U.S...

...The Bosnians were not in the market for smart bombs...

...THE SIEGE OF Sarajevo was maintained by heavy weapons and lazy soldiers like Dragisa, who made a point of not volunteering his last name when I visited him in the fall of 1992 at his place of work, a fortified machine-gun nest in the hills above the Bosnian capital...

...Because there were no other American soldiers based in Sarajevo at the time, Sergeant Roth got a lot of attention when he walked around the city in his uniform, with an American flag on his sleeve...

...For three years, the Clinton administration and its European allies insisted that bombing could not end the war...

...But neither we nor the international community have the resources nor the mandate to do so...

...It would be wrong, however, to condemn the U.S...

...Once it took shape, Bosnia's army found itself fighting an uphill battle and suffering from an international arms embargo that starved it of the weapons it needed to mount offensives (or defensives...

...Genocide is a policy, not a monster...

...a potentially slippery slope beginning with limited intervention (which wasn't so slippery in Afghanistan, because, as of this writing, there appears little prospect of long-term military action...

...its mission was restricted to helping deliver relief supplies...

...After walking down a maze of empty corridors, I found her alone in a small office, shivering in a winter jacket...

...A window of opportunity for employment of such a force extended roughly from about April 7 to April 21, 1994, when the political leaders of the violence were still susceptible to international influence...

...In any event, once the Serbs became pinned down by NATO's warplanes, a ground offensive against them could have begun at any time during the war...

...The army was an ad hoc collection of new conscripts and veterans of the Yugoslav National Army...

...Even so, it worked, with no lives lost by the Western alliance...

...In the crucial first year of the Bosnian War, Madeleine Albright, U.S...

...and its allies on the Security Council because they wished for the fighting to cease as soon as possible, and the embargo meant the Bosnians had to accept whatever terms the stronger Serbs demanded...

...Those missions were a political mess, and the deaths were close to pointless...

...The United States, they said, would have needed to train the Bosnians to use the new weapons, and as everyone knows, military trainers are the first step on the slippery slope to full-scale intervention...

...This convention puts a special burden on the United States, the world's "indispensable nation," as Madeleine Albright liked to say in her secretary of state days...

...Did atrocities occur...

...He made himself comfortable in a cozy bunker with a stove...

...I sensed, as we talked in a reception room at the commander's villa, that Roth's bosses at the Pentagon would not have been satisfied with what he was saying...

...The delusions are visceral...

...When I wake up every morning and look at the headlines and the stories and the images on television of these conflicts, I want to work to end every conflict," he said...

...This revelation cheered the commander...

...Would the same pattern have occurred in Bosnia...

...A few hours later, the diplomat called and asked that I not use the quote, even though, as he knew, I would not cite his name...

...What are those limits...

...He was not unusual...

...If you define our army as a force that won't risk taking casualties, then we don't have an army...

...In the first winter of the four-year siege of Sarajevo, a cosmopolitan city that had hosted the Winter Olympics in 1984, I met Richard Roth, a sergeant in the 82nd Airborne and a farm boy from Maquoketa, Iowa...

...The informant told Dallaire that lists of human targets were being drawn 58 n DISSENT / Winter 2002 up, death squads were being trained and deployed, and provocations to start the killing were imminent...

...I mention this incident only because the commander was a losing figure...

...If you were in Bosnia at the time, as I was, the situation would not have appeared so fuzzy...

...Many of the atrocities in the war were committed by paramilitary squads drawn heavily from Serbia's underworld...

...The metaphor is a simplification but useful to keep in mind...

...The 1948 Convention on the Prevention of Genocide requires signatories to punish genocide when it occurs...

...He returned my notebook...

...Understandably, few politicians wished to send untold numbers of GIs to an obscure and violent country where it was hard to figure out who was committing genocide against whom and where American blood would seep into soil that contained no oil...

...They believe that maybe they will have the opportunity to represent their country on a just mission that will save lives...

...As subsequent events showed in Croatia and Bosnia, Milosevic did not send in his troops to defend Serbs once they were attacked by stronger forces...

...In 1998, the Carnegie Commission assembled a blue-ribbon military panel to examine his claim...

...The United States did not need to use its ground troops to stop the genocide...

...They are not Boy Scouts, although their timid leaders treated them as such in the Balkans...

...Dragisa, who had a middle-aged paunch, possessed the high ground as well as a big gun and was surrounded by folded coils of ammunition that evoked the image of a pit of lazy snakes...

...Gorazde suffered a shortage of everything but ways to die...

...generals...

...It is difficult to sift the false alarms from the real ones...

...But Boris was no dissident...

...This scenario was paraded around like a strategic missing link, and it, too, was lacking in reality...

...The government failed to attempt to stop the genocides...

...In fact, he had hard information from a senior official inside the Hutu Power movement that a mass extermination was being planned...

...Until the final months of the war, little territory changed hands...