Coping with Bosnia
SCHORR, DANIEL
Washington Notebook BY DANIEL SCHORR Coping with Bosnia A sense of lost innocence was palpable when President Clinton, speaking in mid-April of the conflict in Bosnia, said, "It is the most...
...Instead, the Security Council, with Russia abstaining, voted stiff economic sanctions that were to go into effect on April 26, the day after the referendum...
...Britain and France shrank from military engagement, and not only because they had peacekeeping troops on the ground...
...I went back to read the transcript of the Reverend Jim Jones' words to members of the People's Temple in Jonestown, Guyana, cajoling his flock in 1978 to drink the cyanide-laced Kool-Aid...
...The mistakes, however, were glaring...
...Remember how, two days later, he strapped on grenades and talked of blowing himself up on national television—but didn't do it...
...The slogans from past American tests of resolve?brinksmanship," "eyeball to eyeball," "quarantine the aggressor"?came back...
...Don't be afraid to die," he said...
...The Fiery Furnace Presidential popularity is like natural gas...
...After all, Koresh often quoted from the Book of Daniel, in which Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego are thrown into the fiery furnace yet come forth unscathed...
...Adding to Clinton's woes as he neared the hundred-day mark was the Gotterdammerung in the Waco, Texas, Ranch Apocalypse compound of David Koresh—with the President making the tactical error of letting Attorney General Janet Reno take the political heat alone for the first day...
...orchestrated...
...Nothing remarkable...
...Not unexpectedly, the Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic, in a dramatic course reversal at a hastily-arranged summit conference in Athens, signed on to the partition peace plan drawn up by UN special envoy Cyrus R. Vance and European Community representative Lord David Owen...
...it can evaporate quickly...
...But once he was in the White House, everything looked very different...
...It's just stepping over to another plane...
...A new Attorney General, her own staff far from complete, relied on the experts of the FBI just as President John F. Kennedy relied on the experts of the CIA in proceeding with the 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion...
...Surely it could have been expected that a besieged and brainwashed community would view battering rams and tear gas as an assault, not a liberation...
...That also involved a "problem from hell"—an American-supported resolution to send an international peacekeeping force to Lebanon to try to maintain stability after the withdrawal of the Israelis and the American Marines...
...With the advent of Mikhail S. Gorbachev, and afterward Yeltsin, there had been no Soviet or Russian veto in nine years...
...The Europeans simply refuse to view the Balkan killing fields in the same stark terms as the President...
...The last Soviet veto was cast in February 1984...
...Lay down your life with dignity...
...Clearly, any suggestion of Pentagon foot-dragging at this point would not be helpful...
...He might well have faced down Yeltsin with a warning thatareturntouseofthe Cold War instrument would chill the climate for American aid to Russia...
...Remember how he talked about writing a book that would be a national best-seller when this was all over...
...No Easy Way Back All this ushered in a tense time...
...It's nothing to death...
...Remember how he retreated from the line of fire during the February 28 gunfight with Federal agents...
...Discussion of military action was put off...
...Obviously, if I had thought that the chances were great of a mass suicide, I would never have approved the plan...
...The flame began to dissipate when his $19.5 billion "stimulus package," piddling by comparison, was killed by a filibuster in the Senate that Minority Leader Robert Dole (R.-Kan...
...In this case, Reno allowed herself to be guided by the judgment of a hostage rescue team trained to negotiate with rational, if criminal, types holding people against their will, not with a psychotic millen-nialist who couldn't be depended upon to ensure his own survival...
...Securing an international consensus for military action proved to be a formidable task, as did securing a consensus in the Joint Chiefs of Staff...
...But by now our government—if not our law enforcement authorities—should be familiar with some of the extreme manifestations of the cult mentality...
...Making the prospect of military intervention believable was not an easy task either...
...We cannot have this...
...This was one of many biblical illusions turned into delusions...
...The profile of Koresh concluded that he was definitely not suicidal...
...I advise the President and we do what he wants," the General said...
...So what went wrong...
...But this was a gamble, risking American involvement in an overseas war that could stymie his vision of American renewal the way Vietnam undermined President Lyndon B. Johnson's Great Society program...
...Secretary of State Warren Christopher, chiming in, called it "a problem from hell.' During the campaign Bill Clinton had declared that he would be tougher on the Serbs than President George Bush...
...By then President Clinton was in the position of a baseball pitcher going through an overlong windup, saying the pitch was coming any time no w. Serbia, having lost its Russian protection, starting to feel the pinch of tougher sanctions, began urging the Bosnian Serbs to let up in their relentless mauling of the Muslims...
...You'll see people land out there...
...Surely the history of religious fanatics from Masada to Jonestown should have taught us the potential for self-destruction among zealots under pressure...
...The greater problem for American credibility was that Clinton had said he did not want to act alone, yet he had little international support...
...The FBI's behavioral scientists thought they had Koresh figured out...
...To keep the pressure on, if for no other reason, the President assembled his national security advisers on May 1, made his decisions on the use of air power to help stop the killing in Bosnia, and sent Secretary of State Christopher to Europe to enlist support for the American position...
...But Jonestown was 15 years ago, and there was no collective memory in the law enforcement agencies that stormed the Waco compound to restore law and order...
...Could the FBI's experts conceive of the Branch Davidian leader expecting to write his book after the great conflagration that would leave him unharmed...
...For there was always the possibility that the combined impact of tougher sanctions, belated Russian pressure on Serbia and the threat of American air strikes would finally fail to stay the bloody hand of the Bosnian Serbs...
...President Clinton evidently hoped the U.S.' expressed willingness to use force would obviate the need for using it...
...Surely the warning from the U.S...
...This was the most concrete symbol of the "New World Order...
...When I talked to General Colin L. Powell, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, at the White House correspondents' dinner on May 1, he reacted testily to reports that he had opposed military involvement...
...Once again the issue was credibility...
...There is no easy way back from a commitment of American power...
...Russia presented a special difficulty?particularly in the period before its April 25 referendum on President Boris N. Yeltsin and his policies...
...They'll torture our people...
...It is hard to say what would have happened if President Clinton had decided to push ahead and risk a Russian veto...
...Following the devastating blaze at the compound, Attorney General Reno said, "all the risks were weighed...
...That put the Western allies on a parallel two-track course—consultations on the American proposal for air strikes proceeded, while everyone waited to see if Karadzic and Serbia's President Slobodan Milosevic might yet persuade the self-styled Bosnian Serb parliament to agree to stop the fighting...
...The embattled Russian leader, fearful of giving an issue to pro-Serbian nationalists in his country, signaled that he might feel constrained to veto any drastic action against Serbia in the United Nations Security Council...
...These experts sometimes have bureaucratic tunnel vision views of their mission...
...It flares brightly...
...President Clinton's approval rating was brightened by his masterful February 17 message to Congress and the quick passage of the guidelines for his $1.52 trillion budget...
...Some900 died that way...
...Secretary Christopher faced the challenge of trying to convince the nato allies, familiar with the doctrine of deterrence from 40-odd years of Cold War, that here, too, peace would be served by a collective resolve to use force if necessary...
...It seemed then a simple matter to arm the Bosnian Muslims, or let them arm themselves, and to use some of the Air Force's renowned pinpoint bombing skills against Serbian artillery and supply routes...
...His step represented a bold, if belated, assertion of American political and moral leadership, but it put the President out on a perilous limb...
...In retrospect, the mishandling of the Branch Davidian cult seems to have been less a persons failure than a systems failure...
...Embassy in Australia, where many cult members had lived, should have alerted the FBI agents surrounding the compound to the possibility of some combination of mass suicide and mass murder...
...Jones' followers first used syringes to feed the poisoned brew to their children, then lined up with paper cups to drink it themselves...
...They'll torture some of our children here...
...President Clinton's decision in principle to use force was dictated less by geopolitical considerations than considerations of conscience, spurred by anniversary reminders of the Holocaust and new pictures of brutality in Bosnia...
...The experts on cults, who were not consulted, could conceive of that...
...But Clinton, as is his nature, agreed to accommodate Yeltsin and his electoral predicament...
...In a new version of the onetime linkage between human rights and arms control, he could have linked human rights and alms control...
...Washington Notebook BY DANIEL SCHORR Coping with Bosnia A sense of lost innocence was palpable when President Clinton, speaking in mid-April of the conflict in Bosnia, said, "It is the most difficult and frustrating problem in the world today...
...Surely it could have been discerned that fire might play some part in the plans of Koresh, whose visions were full of fiery Armageddon...
Vol. 76 • May 1993 • No. 6
