America's War for the Greater Middle East: A Military History (29 page)

To the influential academic Fouad Ajami, the Bosnians represented the potential for reconciling Islam itself with modernity. Bosnian Serb leaders such as Radovan Karad
ž
i
ć
claimed that they were “defending Christianity against militant Islamic fundamentalism.”
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Just the reverse was true, Professor Ajami insisted. Bosnian Muslims were the “true bearers of a universal culture, children of the secular environment of the West.”
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Here, according to observers such as Ajami, was the reason it was imperative for the United States to come to Bosnia’s defense. The typical Bosnian Muslim identified with Islam no more than the average Frenchman identified with Catholicism or the average Brit with the Church of England. In these quarters, religion had become a cultural artifact not worth fighting about. From a strategic perspective, it was incumbent upon the United States to encourage this tendency wherever it existed in the Islamic world. The ultimate objective was not to promote religious tolerance but to make religion itself redundant. Secularization ostensibly facilitated peace.

Concerns related to cultural pluralism, human rights, and protecting Muslims said to share a Western secular outlook kept Bosnia on the front pages. However, they did not suffice to prod the Clinton administration to take the more muscular approach that Bosnia’s sympathizers were demanding. What ultimately prompted Clinton to act was a core geopolitical interest: preserving the viability of NATO. For decades, the alliance had formed the cornerstone of Washington’s claim to European leadership. Deny Flight represented a first post–Cold War attempt to demonstrate the alliance’s continuing relevance. Viewed from this perspective, that operation’s evident failure was intolerable. If Bosnian Serbs could defy NATO and get away with it, the alliance was finished, perhaps fatally undermining America’s claim to European preeminence.

Throughout this period, well-meaning efforts to negotiate a settlement to the war while preserving Bosnian territorial integrity had proven futile. By the summer of 1995, the Clinton administration accepted that diplomacy had failed. U.S. policy priorities now shifted: Ending the war became imperative, even if that meant accepting de facto ethnic partition. Defeating the Bosnian Serbs militarily (thereby refuting the charge that NATO had become toothless) provided the means to achieve that end.

Although President Clinton’s post-Mogadishu aversion to committing U.S. ground troops to combat remained intact, his administration was more than open to collaborating with surrogates. Since 1993, in acts of solidarity more substantial than Sontag’s, the governments of Iran and Saudi Arabia (not sharing Sontag’s or Ajami’s outlook on religion) had competed with one another in funneling weapons worth hundreds of millions of dollars to Bosnian Muslim forces. Although these efforts violated the UN embargo, they reportedly occurred with Washington’s knowledge and tacit assent.
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Several thousand “holy warriors” from Iran, Pakistan, and elsewhere in the Islamic world converged on Bosnia to wage jihad on behalf of their fellow Muslims.
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Just as they were not innocent, Bosnians were not powerless.

Simultaneously, the United States had been quietly building up Croatian military power. To judge by his retrograde views, the epithet
fascist
fit Croat leader Franjo Tu
đ
man no less than it did Serbs like Milo
š
evi
ć
and Karad
ž
i
ć
.
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So rather than sullying itself through direct involvement in training and advising Croat forces, the Pentagon sublet the project to a contracting firm run by recently retired U.S. Army generals. Here was another distinguishing feature of America’s War for the Greater Middle East, one destined to become more prominent with time: a tendency to farm out traditional military functions to de facto mercenaries.
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The pursuit of policy objectives was merging with the pursuit of profit.

Still, the upshot was that by the time the Clinton administration finally decided on a policy of coercion, it found local partners ready and willing to forge an anti-Serb axis. With the massacre of some eight thousand Bosnian Muslim men and boys at Srebrenica in mid-July rendering any further “peacemaking” efforts untenable, the United States and its NATO allies now became parties to a war against the Serbs. The shelling of a Sarajevo marketplace on August 28, which killed thirty-seven Bosnian civilians and wounded dozens more, provided the immediate impetus for implementing the new policy.

On August 30, Operation Determined Force supplanted Deny Flight. Policing no-fly zones gave way to bombing. Nominally, the purpose of Determined Force was to prevent further attacks on Bosnian civilians.
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The real aim was to “inflict enough pain to compel Serb compliance” with various NATO demands.
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Chief among those demands were the following: lift the siege of Sarajevo, agree to a cessation of hostilities, and give up aspirations for creating an ethnically pure Greater Serbia.

Operationally, inflicting pain meant degrading Bosnian Serb capabilities rather than pursuing a “cut it off and kill it” approach. So despite its large ambitions, the U.S.-led air campaign, directed by U.S. Air Force Lieutenant General Michael Short, a fighter pilot and Vietnam veteran, was limited in scope. Some 220 combat aircraft participated, operating primarily from the U.S. base in Aviano, Italy, and from the USS
Theodore Roosevelt,
afloat in the Adriatic. By the time it ended on September 14, pilots had flown slightly more than thirty-five hundred sorties—two-thirds of them completed by U.S. forces.
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NATO had expended 1,026 weapons against forty-eight targets, all chosen with an eye toward minimizing the risk of collateral damage. Only a single allied aircraft—a French Mirage fighter jet—was lost to enemy action.
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All told, the bombing amounted to about one day’s effort during Operation Desert Storm.
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In terms of careful planning and controlled execution, Determined Force offered much to admire. As a practical matter, however, it was largely superfluous. Even before NATO aircraft struck their first target, developments on the ground had effectively decided the war’s outcome. At most, the U.S.-led air campaign drove home the point with Bosnian Serbs that they were facing imminent defeat.

During the first week of August, a Croat offensive called Operation Oluja (“Storm”) had recaptured the Krajina, the strip of territory running along the Croat-Bosnian border that Serbs had seized back in 1991 and occupied ever since. In liberating this region, an area almost as large as Connecticut, the Croats had done more than win a decisive victory. They had demonstrated clear-cut superiority over their enemy. A second Croat push called Maestral (“Breeze”) exploited the success of the first. The Bosnians also got in the act, launching their own anti-Serb offensive.
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A dramatic shift in the overall military balance had occurred. According to the CIA’s history of the conflict, Bosnian Serb leaders and Milo
š
evi
ć
himself were quick to recognize the implications. The loss of the Krajina “crystalized their belief that a political-military settlement had to be negotiated as soon as possible.”
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In the face of this Croat-Bosnian onslaught, Serb civilians fled for their lives. Croat forces occupying the Krajina ousted as many as two hundred thousand Serbs, their plight attracting about as much international sympathy as the Germans expelled from Central and Eastern Europe at the end of World War II. The results met with Washington’s quiet approval. “We ‘hired’ these guys to be our junkyard dogs,” one U.S. diplomat wrote of the Croats. Sure, the results were ugly, but now was no time to get “squeamish.”
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Somewhat more delicately, Secretary of State Christopher detected the glimmerings of “a new strategic situation that may turn out to be to our advantage.”
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For that situation to mature, the war that Washington was seeking to end needed to last a bit longer, as indeed it did. So although NATO had suspended Determined Force two weeks after it began in return for a Bosnian Serb commitment to lift the siege of Sarajevo, fierce fighting persisted for another month. Croat and Bosnian troops “continued to battle for chunks and scraps of disputed territory,” further weakening the Bosnian Serb forces.
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During what proved to be the war’s climactic phase, NATO was a bystander. Only after weeks of wrangling did the hostilities finally end on October 12, each of the belligerents now concluding that the costs of continuing outweighed any potential benefits. This ceasefire stuck.

On its heels came a three-week-long peace conference at Dayton, Ohio, convened under U.S. auspices. The resulting agreement did not restore secular multiculturalism to Bosnia-Herzegovina. Indeed, by and large it accepted the reality of ethnic separation there and throughout the former Yugoslavia. Yet the Dayton Accords did cement an end to violence among Serbs, Croats, and Bosnian Muslims, an outcome widely hailed as a triumph of American statecraft. Here, it appeared, was a textbook demonstration of how the deft employment of military might combined with vigorous diplomacy could solve even the most intractable problem.

Seen in this light, the implications extended well beyond the matter immediately at hand. The role that the United States had played in bringing peace to Bosnia affirmed its unique standing in a post–Cold War world. No less importantly, the outcome showed that the American public remained ready to shoulder the responsibilities of global leadership. As Richard Holbrooke, the principal architect of that settlement, wrote, “After Dayton, American foreign policy seemed more assertive, more muscular.” Put simply, “America was back.”
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This at least was the interpretation that the Clinton administration promoted and to which activist American elites readily subscribed. “Our leadership made this peace agreement possible,” the president told reporters in announcing the Dayton Accords.
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Admirers credited Holbrooke with “taming the Balkan bullies.” Profiling Holbrooke in
The New York Times,
the journalist Roger Cohen wrote, “Without his outrageousness, without his swagger, America could not have imposed its peace.”
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Behind Holbrooke’s swagger, of course, was American military might. “Deliberate Force infused NATO with a new sense of strength and vibrancy,”
The Washington Post
’s Pentagon correspondent observed
.
It had “also validated force as an effective handmaiden to diplomacy.”
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Here was a template for future action—force employed with great precision in measured doses, allies allotted supporting roles to impart a multilateral gloss, no-nonsense American diplomats thereby empowered to crack heads and get things done.

The view found favor in at least some American military circles. Although the CIA might conclude that it was the junkyard dogs who had finally driven the Serbs “to sit down and negotiate a peace settlement,” members of the officer corps thought otherwise.
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In their view, Operation Determined Force had turned the tide. “Almost at the instant of its application,” U.S. Air Force analysts concluded, NATO’s abbreviated bombing campaign had accomplished “what three years of factional ground fighting, peacekeeping, and international diplomacy had yet to achieve.” In that regard, airpower had “delivered what it promised,” bringing peace to Bosnia “quickly, clearly and at minimal cost of blood and treasure.”
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There was more here than the usual display of American narcissism, and more too than the latest updating of a decades-old claim that airpower offers the most expeditious and humane way to end wars. Rather, with overall U.S. military supremacy a given, traditional notions of what it meant to “win” required some tweaking. The proper role of armed force was not to supplant diplomacy but to make it work. Bosnia supposedly demonstrated that the United States possessed the capacity to do just that. Here was the means to police the “new world order” that George H. W. Bush had glimpsed and Bill Clinton had inherited. Crucially, the Bosnia intervention suggested that Islam as such did not pose an insuperable obstacle to the further application of this template. So, at least, the subsequent implementation of the Dayton Accords seemed to show.

Beginning on December 31, 1995, a robust contingent of some twenty thousand U.S. troops began entering Bosnia to form the core of an even larger NATO peace enforcement mission.
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The army’s 1st Armored Division, commanded by Major General William Nash, provided most of the troops. Fearing a repeat of Mogadishu, the Pentagon had acceded to this assignment with trepidation. The cigar-smoking Nash, an officer who shared more than a little of Richard Holbrooke’s swagger, understood that he was to ensure that Bosnia not become a replay of Somalia. His purpose was not to perform good works but simply to maintain a separation between antagonists—to project strength without being excessively intrusive. “We will not be provocative,” Nash instructed his troops.
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