See No Evil, Make No Policy
Kenney, George
See No Evil, Make No Policy by George Kenney A former State Department insider reveals how his bosses ignored atrocities in Yugoslavia and stayed a step behind the journalists The Bush...
...Of course, it did so at the expense of civilian casualties in numbers that are not yet known...
...Department of State who deals with Yugoslavia believes that over the past year and a half, U.S...
...was actually going to do something significant about it...
...Before I left, however, I got a first-hand, behind-the-curtain look at how the State Department bureaucracy, taking its cues from Bush and Baker, created policy that could not be squared with reality, let alone defended...
...was active and concerned about the situation and, at the same time, give no one the impression that the U.S...
...The skeptics need only have picked up a telephone...
...I suggested we set up teams to debrief refugees and collate accounts to get a better picture of events, and that we begin to lay the groundwork for possible war crimes trials...
...The European Bureau at State firmly squashed this idea...
...Bush refused to take even the most timid of steps—like demanding a full accounting of the rumors of atrocities...
...Supported by others at the working level, I drafted press guidance—material for State Department spokesmen—which consistently referred to and condemned Serbian shelling of Bosnian civilians...
...By my own count only six staffers below the level of under secretary supported the administration's line...
...In fact, virtually every official at the U.S...
...There is plenty of blame to go around...
...It gives me no pleasure to say that I was right about the need for food...
...While I spoke with her on only a few occasions, I passed material to her—cables marked with highlighter, for instance—outside the regular chain of command...
...But senior officers didn't believe that Sarajevo was experiencing or would necessarily ever experience real shortages...
...But they took the most superficial of steps, seeking what were essentially unenforceable UN Security Council resolutions...
...The goal from the beginning was not good public policy, but good public relations, and from that perspective, the administration's approach was a smashing success...
...On the one hand, State officials were not prepared to consider journalists' accounts "credible," or "authoritative...
...Only then did State and White House officials wake from their slumber...
...Our discussions about how to characterize the conflict without taking sides often bordered on the absurd...
...So timid were State bureaucrats—both senior foreign service officers and appointed officials—that they refused even to probe into reports of Serbian concentration camps...
...Public pressure might force us to do what our own reports had not...
...Most of them knew better...
...Later, when the sordid details were exposed by the press, State officials refused to acknowledge either a policy failure, or more importantly, an institutional failure to persuade the White House to seek constructive alternatives...
...If we officially talked about the problem, I reasoned, the press would keep asking what we would do about it...
...In late April, when the United States sent several planeloads of supplies to Bosnia, I had information indicating that Sarajevo would quickly face food shortages unless the West made delivery of supplies to Sarajevo a priority and formalized a relief operation...
...The senior officers in the European Bureau bent over backwards to be "even-handed" in attributing responsibility for the conflict...
...Making matters worse, officials at State made virtually no effort to spark Bush to action...
...Currently, the only way to make an audible sound of protest is to resign...
...As a result, their policy recommendations, when they did turn them out, were illconceived...
...I proposed sending teams of foreign service officer volunteers into Bosnia to corroborate the journalists' reports...
...For seven months, in addition to other duties, I was responsible for drafting most public statements on the crisis in Bosnia from the State Department's Yugoslavia desk in Washington...
...The danger, from the seventh floor's point of view, was that discovering additional horrifying details would multiply demands that the United States intervene...
...To them, aid seemed a "slippery slope" leading inexorably to U.S...
...The front office was so committed to stasis that eventually it no longer believed reports of starvation coming from our embassy in Belgrade...
...I won most of my fights with the Bureau on the issue of starvation because I had an ally in Margaret Tutwiler...
...But for more than five months the American embassy in Belgrade had sent to Washington at least one cable per day on the situation in Bosnia, and each cable reported up to dozens of cases of Serbian atrocities...
...Unable to abide this policy, I resigned on August 25...
...I actually heard this argument from senior officers...
...The European Bureau worried that a precipitous U.S...
...That makes at least 500 incidents the department did not forward to the UN...
...Two weeks or so later, when more Gutman stories began to appear and when ITN television broadcasted shocking footage of Serbian concentration camps filled with starving and physically abused men, the public reacted...
...But senior officers in the Bureau pressed repeatedly to have spokesmen say that "all sides" were shelling each other, without focusing blame on Serbian forces...
...The Bureau hated her changing "their" statements, but she had the power and they had to comply...
...Its incentives distort reality with rules that reward caution but penalize imagination...
...Because the situation in Bosnia was deemed too dangerous, U.S...
...This was essentially a Serbian siege in which the Bosnians were shooting back as much as they could...
...After all, officials could talk only to a limited range of people, many of whom, the front office thought, brought strong biases to their comments...
...State of disgrace American policy was most difficult for me to accept in late July and early August, when Roy Gutman's Newsday stories provided the first detailed account of concentration camps...
...But the real issue was what State would do to find out more...
...On the other, the State Department would not seek information on its own...
...There was no way for dissonant information to get through the door, making State Department brass look something like children who block out the world by covering their ears and humming loudly...
...Nearly every other appointee and civil and foreign service person—senior and junior—knew that the policies of economic sanctions and diplomatic pressure against Serbia could not be expected to produce results...
...The bureau judged from CNN pictures of Sarajevans running from mortar fire that there were still plenty of wellfed people in Sarajevo...
...Bosnia was an instance in which good policy did not necessarily make for good politics, and Bush was committed to staying aloof for reasons that, as far as I could tell, had everything to do with cowardice, apparently fearing an election-year backlash in the polls for intervening abroad...
...I wrote them...
...the ethos was that because we can't get involved, we won't get involved...
...Abserb There were also internal debates about starvation...
...A defeatist mentality pervaded the State Department to the lowest ranks...
...On September 24, the administration submitted a report to the UN, in accordance with UN Security Council Resolution 771, which called upon members and international humanitarian organizations to submit whatever material they possessed relating to atrocities and war crimes...
...military involvement...
...I also recommended that we request a strong, new UN Security Council resolution condemning the camps and demanding access and proper treatment of detainees...
...Guided by the notion that higher-ups at the White House were concerned more with winning in November than righting any wrongs abroad, department brass simply lacked the guts to confront Bush's senior cabinet officers with arguments that American policy was off course...
...See No Evil, Make No Policy by George Kenney A former State Department insider reveals how his bosses ignored atrocities in Yugoslavia and stayed a step behind the journalists The Bush administration pronouncements on the Yugoslav crisis between February and August exhibited the worst sort of hypocrisy...
...That a great many people were administering a policy they recognized as futile was only part of the problem...
...The result was that the administration continued to ignore stories while doing nothing to pursue actions which would prevent the deaths of innocent people...
...George Kenney, the former desk officer for Yugoslav affairs at the U.S...
...Even to the administration, Gutman's reports were a revelation...
...It is inwardly centered and more concerned with procedural protocols than with competition of ideas...
...We could not corroborate his details, but the reports seemed plausible...
...We were nudged by journalists with questions like, "What did the State Department know about these concentration camps...
...We had had some reports of concentration camps, but essentially we knew very little and far less than Gutman...
...Remarkably, we had no Americans there who could provide credible information to advise us one way or the other...
...The only senior person who clearly stood against the administration policy was State Department spokesperson Margaret Tutwiler, but acting essentially alone, she had little impact...
...Department of State, is currently a consultant at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace...
...response might prove unnecessary as much as it worried about the Sarajevans' welfare...
...When it was published, I made copies and circulated it widely within the department: to the State Department's European Bureau's "front office"—specifically to Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for European Affairs Ralph Johnson—and to senior aides in Washington on the "seventh floor," where the State Department's top management sits...
...The United States could easily have conducted an investigation of its own...
...This was to be the pattern throughout: Policy was media-driven, responding only when confronted by what the press had been able to find out, and then in ways that were entirely inadequate...
...Underlying the atrocities, the camps, and the starvation was the fact of Serbian aggression...
...report listed 31 violent acts...
...The Serbs, after all, had more than 100 pieces of heavy artillery around Sarajevo, while the Bosnian government defenders had fewer than a dozen...
...The trick in this instance was to ignore any facts—whether they pertained to atrocities, rumors of concentration camps, or starvation—that would complicate the policy goal of not getting involved...
...I knew about the first story before it was in print because Gutman had talked with the U.S...
...Denying the overwhelming preponderance of evidence that Serbia was responsible for the conflict, senior officers took every opportunity to find fault with Croatian and Bosnian efforts to defend themselves...
...Around the building, I argued that we had to react...
...responses have been a monumental debacle...
...I talked to the political section in Belgrade every day and I knew there were desperate food shortages in Sarajevo and throughout Bosnia...
...they neither demanded a fuller accounting, nor passed along any sense of urgency to officials at the White House...
...The chief concern was that the United States could send lots of aid only to discover Sarajevans eating pasta and drinking brandy in their basements...
...By May, the embassy was telling me informally that up to 20,000 Sarajevans could die of hunger and hunger-related illness unless they got food soon...
...Maybe the embassy didn't have the full story...
...I know...
...The West, however, did not begin relief flights until the end of June...
...embassy in Belgrade...
...It managed to downplay the gravity of the crisis and obscure the real issues...
...What happened...
...My job was to make it appear as though the U.S...
...Senior officers listened politely, told me I had some "good ideas," then did nothing...
...And while the administration was not seeking out reliable data, it also withheld what little information it had...
...officials were not allowed to travel in Bosnia as Gutman did...
...The system was—and still is—at fault, too...
...Tutwiler regularly overruled the Bureau in deciding to give details of what we knew to the press...
...I was told that Gutman had an important article coming out and to watch for it...
...The U.S...
...Democrats were already pounding Bush for caring more about foreign affairs than America's domestic woes...
...So every day, openly and subversively, I tried to get the State Department spokesman to describe the gravity of the situation...
...The system is there to make our country look good, as opposed to making it do good, and it is politicized from top to bottom...
Vol. 24 • November 1992 • No. 11
