Why America Must not go into Bosnia
KRAUTHAMMER, CHARLES
Why America Must Not Go Into Bosnia By Charles Krauthammer Now that we are marching into Bosnia, we will hear endless debate about the rights and wrongs and origins of the war. Everyone has a...
...Whatever the strategic folly of having our troops in Bosnia, the argument goes, our allies expect us now to take the lead on the ground-a reasonable and powerful expectation that is based on a presidential promise...
...But this is not 1914: There is no Austria-Hungarian empire on the verge of collapse...
...My view is quite straightforward: The deployment of 20,000 or so American ground troops to police a cease-fire in Bosnia would be a serious mistake for the United States...
...It is, nonetheless, far too late for history...
...It is far, far harder for a superpower to remain neutral, and even harder still to be perceived as neutral, in most conflicts...
...It would demonstrate to our allies-particularly our Gulf War allies, the British and the French-that our decision not to send 20,000 ground troops on peacekeeping duty is animated neither by timidity nor by any unconcern about them...
...Or it lingers painfully: We persist in a thankless, unwinnable, and costly operation, a source of constant recrimination and resentment among the allies that erodes and finally exhausts the alliance's 50-year store of solidarity...
...It is decidedly not the role of a superpower to place itself between the combatants in a civil war of marginal importance to the world balance of power-indeed of marginal importance to the regional balance of power-among unreconciled parties who have already shown a propensity for killing and kidnapping peacekeepers, and who will have a much greater incentive to do exactly that when the peacekeepers are wearing the uniform of the most powerful and, one might add, the most mediagenic country in the world...
...But the responsibility for that cost lies squarely with the administration that made that foolish promise without proper reflection, not with a Congress trying to avert the consequences of that ill-considered promise...
...With the Croatian reconquest of the Krajina in August and the recent Serb-Croat accord on Eastern Slavonia, the war is in fact contracting...
...Its geopolitical role is to intervene militarily when a regional balance has been catastrophically overthrown and global stability threatened...
...There are warnings all the time about the war spreading to Macedonia or Kosovo or Albania or even Greece and Turkey...
...Indeed, we would risk our own soldiers to extricate them...
...These practical, tactical reasons are obvious and have been well rehearsed in the current debate on a Bosnian peace force: no definable objective, no identifiable enemy, no exit strategy...
...Well, you might say, don't we have American peacekeepers in the Sinai...
...It is weak because it is circular: We are going in because we have said we are going in...
...Europe...
...But nothing less...
...There is no good way out...
...By severing American involvement from any concrete national interest, the credibility argument creates a new interest of ever expanding demands...
...Such a deployment can end in one of two ways...
...We have made our sympathies with the Bosnian Muslim side abundantly clear in our declarations, in our use of air power, and indeed in our promises to arm the Bosnian government even as we act as peacekeepers-an absurd contradiction of the very idea of peacekeeping...
...But not to join them in a quagmire...
...Most advocates of Bosnia intervention have given up arguing that the United States has any significant inherent interest in Bosnia...
...By offering the immediate deployment of American ground troops in sizable number with the sole objective of evacuating any ally who wishes to withdraw now that we would not be going in...
...That is the role of a superpower...
...And that is: To use heavily armed, combat-ready American ground troops as peacekeepers is to fundamentally misunderstand America's role as the world's sole remaining superpower, and to fundamentally miscast the finest, most powerful military in the world...
...Indeed, the single most powerful argument in favor of deployment invokes NATO: To renege on this promise of American relief for our NATO allies already trapped in Bosnia would be the worst blow Clinton has yet dealt to NATO cohesion...
...What should the Congress do...
...And that is the key point...
...Nonetheless, following through and actually sending the troops would be worse...
...When America sends peacekeepers, it is not sending peacekeepers...
...It is sending targets...
...It should reject the idea of sending a large, heavily armed American combat presence to be an active peacekeeping or implementation force in Bosnia...
...A sole superpower is the ultimate balancer of power in the world, or, to put it another way, the balancer of last resort...
...Ask yourself: Is American credibility greater after our entry and then withdrawal from Somalia than it would have been had we never gone into Somalia in the first place...
...who are of no particular geopolitical importance to the combatants...
...But there is a larger strategic reason to be wary of a Bosnian involvement...
...to some settlement agreed to by the warring parties, I could see no objection to that...
...The threat of the Bosnian war spreading to the rest of Europe has been raised monthly for the last four years...
...That would be an unfortunate result, but it would have to be laid at the feet of the Bosnian parties themselves...
...And in the Bosnian war, in particular, the United States has been decidedly not neutral...
...The idea of great European powers occupying other countries for the glory of God and country exists only in parody and old movies...
...Iraq's conquest of Kuwait and its looming threat to the rest of the Arabian peninsula was just such an event...
...Which leaves us with the last question: American credibility . Yes, whenever the United States makes a commitment and then reneges on it, its credibility is damaged...
...If all that was required of the U.S...
...Yes, there was 1914...
...Imagine a president who came before Congress and said that the Israeli-Palestinian peace process required the presence of 20,000 American troops on the ground in the West Bank to separate the combatants and help them make peace...
...It would be lightly armed, easily deployed, and easily withdrawn...
...The second national-interest argument is that we must intervene in Bosnia because of the continuing, indeed, intensifying threat the war poses to European stability...
...in Bosnia was a token observer force as in Sinai, to lend the prestige and the moral support of the U.S...
...There is no Ottoman empire waiting to be carved up...
...That is a tacit way of saying "no escalation...
...Yes, reneging on such a promise would be a blow...
...That is a cost of refusing to deploy, and it must not be denied...
...Either it results, as I indicated above, in humiliating retreat-in which case our allies are left high and dry and betrayed...
...The idea of the Great Powers going to war over the control of this cursed, tragic piece of land is simply absurd...
...But then what kind of credibility are we demonstrating when the greatest power on the globe injects itself massively into a small war pledging in advance to slink away on a railroad timetable regardless of the outcome...
...We will have to go back to them and redo any agreement until it becomes one that can stand on its own, with perhaps a token NATO observer force or even some UN blue helmets to act as the local constabulary and police a separation zone...
...They base their national interest argument, instead, on the collateral damage non-deployment would do to less disputable American interests: NATO cohesion, European stability, and American credibility...
...There is no European interest in the Balkans other than staying out of the morass...
...And it was so reversed...
...First, a humiliating retreat, as in Somalia, but with the stakes higher and the commitment larger, after some incident involving a major loss of American life and cries from the Congress and from the American people for withdrawal...
...It is dangerous because it can only be vindicated by success, and thus is a spur to continuous escalation in pursuit of success...
...Moreover, one has to weigh what would happen to American credibility were we to deploy and then withdraw under pressure after a demonstration of impotence as in Mogadishu or Beirut...
...He would be summarily shown the door...
...This one, a staple of the congressional testimony offered by administration officials pushing the peacekeeping force, is nonsense...
...It could be reversed only by American will and American action...
...Peacekeeping is the job of small countries with no particular interest in the outcome of a conflict...
...Its function would not be to fight or to prevent others from fighting, but simply to give the imprimatur of the United States to a self-enforcing agreement among the parties themselves...
...It is your country...
...Better, therefore, to inflict one blow to NATO now than an inevitable series of blows in agonizing succession later...
...It may cause the current agreement, based on an expectation of American involvement, to unravel...
...Their basic weapons are binoculars and cell phones...
...They cannot expect the United States to impose a peace that they are unwilling to make on their own...
...There is a reason why, for the last 50 years, Americans have generally not been used in peacekeeping operations...
...And between such antagonists is no place to interpose American troops...
...They do not use heavy tanks...
...Yes, this will occasion great diplomatic difficulty...
...This is a no-win situation for the U.S...
...There is no doubt and no denying that non-deployment would be a blow to NATO...
...We make the parties this offer: Make a real peace as in Sinai and we will support you...
...The issue looming before the nation today has the potential to create an entirely new history whose origins will not at all be obscure-the history of the peace "implementation force" (IFOR) that the administration wishes to dispatch to Bosnia to enforce the peace accords initialed last week in Dayton...
...Or, more likely, we will persevere, indeed escalate our involvement, send more troops to protect existing troops and be caught in a long-term, static, and defensive deployment with painful losses, ambiguous rules of engagement, escalating friction among NATO allies-most of whom do not want to remain there but would do so under American leadership-and no way out...
...What will happen if Dayton unravels because we are unwilling to enforce it...
...Yet Bosnia is a situation where even the most ardent advocates of intervention are so skeptical of success that they promise to leave in one year...
...Credibility is not just the weakest reason for intervention...
...Where is the evidence for the spread of this war...
...Everyone has a theory of what went wrong and why...
...Yes, but they are observers...
...If they are not, then there is no peace to keep...
...It is your choice...
...The most plausible, in my view, is that the seminal mistake was the West's recognition of Croatia and Slovenia and then Bosnia-in effect, the de-recognition of the Yugoslav federation-without having first demanded, as a condition for recognition, ironclad provisions for respecting the rights of minorities and prior agreement with the other member republics of Yugoslavia on final frontiers...
...If the combatants in Bosnia are serious about ending the fighting and accepting roughly the distribution of territory and roughly the balance of power now on the ground, then they should do it and enforce it themselves, perhaps with the help of a few blue helmets from truly neutral countries...
...whose very marginality is an affirmation of credible neutrality...
...The article is adapted from the author's testimony before the House National Security Committee, November 15, 1995...
...No good outcome of such a deployment is foreseeable...
...There is no drive for territorial expansion among the European powers...
...But these are our soldiers...
...And yet he is asking the Congress to approve a similar deployment in not a two-sided but a three-sided civil war that has been conducted with a much higher level of ferocity than any Israeli-Palestinian encounter of the last 25 years...
...Imperialism is now 50 years dead...
...Yet one does not abandon a promise blithely...
...What about the final argument, the case based on purely American national interests...
...What will happen is that, if the parties are interested in peace, they will have to reconvene in Dayton or elsewhere...
...We should-and can-demonstrate concern for our allies and assuage whatever feelings of disappointment or betrayal might follow our decision not to deploy a peacekeeping force...
...It is the most dangerous...
...This, at least, would be a mission with a beginning and an end, with a clear operational objective and a clear political objective as well...
...Take them in turn: NATO...
...It proves more hollow by the day...
Vol. 1 • December 1995 • No. 12
