America's War for the Greater Middle East: A Military History (30 page)

The operation, known as Joint Endeavor, began on an unpropitious note, a direct result of an overly bureaucratic planning process, with too many generals getting in each other’s way. Just deploying the troops to the starting line—the Sava River, which forms Bosnia’s northern border—involved a frustrating number of snafus. A botched crossing of the Sava, attributable partly to bad weather, partly to gross incompetence, delayed the actual entry of U.S. troops into Bosnia by ten days.
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Thankfully, the initiative and determination of ordinary soldiers saved the day. One American officer who was present attributed the eventual crossing of the Sava to “a triumph of the human spirit over an insane system, narrowly averting catastrophe.”
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Those wearing stars on their shoulders had not covered themselves with glory.

From that point, although the operation did not lack for anxious moments, problems proved manageable. U.S. commanders were adamant in defining the mission narrowly. Their remit did not include nation-building or even the pursuit of war criminals. Intimidation, not conciliation, defined the spirit of the enterprise. Encased in body armor and wearing Kevlar helmets while armed to the teeth, U.S. troops projected an image of warriors not to be trifled with.
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By and large, as a way to enforce order, this approach worked. For anyone nursing expectations of Bosnia becoming a model of multiethnic harmony with Christians and Muslims living together in peace, it proved a disappointment. In fact, the overall effect of armed intervention was “to cement wartime ethnic cleansing and maintain ethnic cleansers in power.” Four years after the peacekeepers arrived, Bosnia consisted of “three de facto mono-ethnic entities, three separate armies, three separate police forces, and a national government that exists mostly on paper and operates at the mercy of the entities.” Even so, the cessation of hostilities negotiated at Dayton had held. That was something.
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The U.S. military presence in Bosnia continued for nearly a decade. During that entire period, the total number of troops involved progressively dwindled, with no American lives lost due to hostile action.
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For a military consumed by the imperatives of “force protection,” such an outcome met and even exceeded expectations. For commanders at all levels, mission accomplishment meant “returning home with no casualties.” In sharp contrast to the more relaxed attitude of other allied contingents in Bosnia, risk aversion had emerged as a hallmark of the U.S. military’s posture. At the unit level, exit strategy meant, in effect, “don’t get anyone killed.”
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More broadly, Joint Endeavor eased concerns that any sustained encounter between American soldiers and non-American Muslims was likely to fuel antagonism. Instead, it appeared that quartering U.S. troops alongside a Muslim population could reassure or pacify. So although painful memories of Somalia lingered—derided by Holbrooke as a “Vietmalia Syndrome”—Bosnia now appeared to define the way forward.
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This alluring prospect soon proved chimerical, however. Rather than bringing peace to the Balkans, armed intervention in Bosnia merely set the stage for another intervention on behalf of beleaguered Muslims, this time within Serbia proper.

I had watched the Bosnia drama play itself out from a distant and, for me, unfamiliar vantage point. After twenty-three years of service, my own undistinguished military career had reached an unceremonious conclusion. Now out of the army, I was completing an academic apprenticeship of sorts at the School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS) in Washington. My duties as a minor staff functionary provided ample occasion to observe at close hand the various Washington insiders—current and former officials, prominent journalists, and policy-oriented academics—who passed through the SAIS campus just off of Dupont Circle.

For a middle-aged political naïf, the experience proved to both instructive and disheartening. People ostensibly in the know turned out to know not all that much. Even in small off-the-record discussions, the views expressed were predictable and pedestrian. On particular issues, opinions might differ. Yet such differences mattered less than allegiance to an underlying consensus. Rooted in a conviction that Washington itself defined the center of the universe, that consensus took it for granted that the fate of humankind hinged on decisions made there.

In the short run, all appeared uncertain. Crises abounded. To keep the world from cracking up, it was incumbent upon America to lead. In the long run, the outcome—freedom’s ultimate triumph—was foreordained. This prospect imparted to American leadership all the justification it required, regardless of past blunders or any obstacles that lay ahead.

A direct legacy of World War II, this consensus had emerged at the dawn of the Cold War. Now, in the 1990s, with the Cold War having ended on a gratifyingly happy note, it appeared incontrovertible. Indeed, the Cold War’s outcome affirmed its essential correctness. To question its claims was to commit an unpardonable sin, the punishment for which was excommunication.

As a candidate for the presidency, Bill Clinton had signaled his intention to conform, although his partisan critics were never going to credit him with actually doing so. Ideologues on the right were calling for the United States to exercise “benign global hegemony” as it guided humankind toward “the end of history.”
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The Clinton administration employed a different vocabulary to make the same point, describing the United States as the “indispensable nation” charged with ushering others to join it on “the right side of history.”
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Conservative columnists like Charles Krauthammer were warning that the United States must not shrink from its responsibility for “laying down the rules of world order and being prepared to enforce them.”
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As if in response, the liberal Anthony Lake, Clinton’s first national security adviser, insisted that the administration was intent on doing just that. On a visit to SAIS, Lake outlined a “strategy of enlargement” that was going to expand “the world’s free community of market democracies,” that is, countries willing to play by American rules.
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Ethnic and religious differences might survive as cultural curiosities, but in all matters relating to political economy, the imperatives of globalization were destined to win out. The assembled students responded with loud applause.

This neoliberal utopianism found a military counterpart in the Revolution in Military Affairs (RMA). During the 1990s, fostered by a very selective reading of recent events, the RMA became all the rage in national security circles, its influence on successive campaigns in America’s War for the Greater Middle East difficult to overstate.

RMA enthusiasts posited that information technology was transforming war’s very nature, rendering “existing methods of conducting war obsolete.”
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On future battlefields, the side able to establish and maintain “information dominance” was sure to win.
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To the clash of arms that had traditionally involved massive waste and confusion, the RMA would impart precision and control—accelerating the tempo of operations, improving weapons accuracy and lethality, and enabling commanders to “watch battles unfold on computer screens and issue moment-to-moment corrections.” Better still, America’s overall lead in information technology gave the United States a huge advantage in tapping the RMA’s potential. Doing so held out the prospect of victories gained by “disengaged combat,” U.S. forces operating “at a healthy distance from the enemy.” Remaining beyond the enemy’s reach meant fewer American casualties—perhaps none at all—a prospect allowing policymakers greater latitude in deciding when and where to fight.
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Reagan’s Tanker War had offered a rudimentary glimpse of this future. Bush’s Operation Desert Storm had tested it on a larger scale. Bill Clinton’s intervention in Bosnia ostensibly affirmed it. Radically enhanced U.S. military effectiveness was making the indispensable nation the unstoppable nation, thereby radically enhancing the overall effectiveness of American statecraft. This defined the promise of the RMA. So at least true believers were prepared to argue.

The U.S. Army’s General Wesley Clark was a true believer—or, at least, opportunistically posed as one. During the Cold War, Clark had gained a reputation of being a very ambitious officer with an aptitude for embracing novelty moments before it became accepted convention. He thus appeared to be not only eager but also a quick study.

During the climactic stages of the Bosnia crisis, as a bright-eyed lieutenant general, Clark had served as Richard Holbrooke’s chief military adviser, accompanying the American envoy throughout the difficult negotiations that culminated in the Dayton Accords. For Clark, the experience proved to be illuminating. Here, it appeared, was a demonstration of the role military power could play in the post–Cold War world—“a pattern that could be applied again.”
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Clark grasped what (in his view) most American army officers were too dim to understand. As an overarching rationale for maintaining a large U.S. military establishment, mere deterrence had become obsolete. Deterrence was passive, even timid, when activism was becoming the order of the day. With the Soviet threat gone and the RMA endowing the United States with unprecedented military capabilities, force could now serve as an instrument of “compellence” or “coercive diplomacy.”
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In mid-1997 President Clinton elevated Clark, now a four-star general, to the post of Supreme Allied Commander Europe (SACEUR), the military head of NATO. In the Balkans, unfinished business remained. Slobodan Milo
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still governed what remained of Yugoslavia. In the Serbian province of Kosovo, the next act of that nation’s ongoing implosion awaited. The unsettled situation there seemingly offered Clark an opportunity to outdo Holbrooke, while demonstrating his personal mastery of what he liked to call “modern war.” So Kosovo became the scene of the next campaign in America’s War for the Greater Middle East, one that found the United States and its allies delivering victory to a movement that the State Department classified as a terrorist organization, its membership consisting almost entirely of Muslims with blood in their eyes.

To appreciate Kosovo’s political sensitivity, imagine if after the Civil War droves of ex-Confederates had settled in Gettysburg. Imagine further that after achieving majority status, they proceeded to fly the Stars and Bars, teach schoolchildren history from textbooks glorifying the Lost Cause, and agitate for secession. Strongholds of Union sentiment like New York, Chicago, and Boston might take exception.

For Serbs, Kosovo possessed a significance akin to that which many Americans accord to Gettysburg. It was sacred ground, site of an epic, nation-defining battle against the Turks in 1389. Yet the Muslims who had made Kosovo their home since and who now greatly outnumbered the Serbs living there saw it as rightfully
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Indeed, these Kosovo Albanians, or Kosovars, aspired to follow the precedent of the Slovenes, Croats, Bosnians, and Macedonians in leaving Yugoslavia to go their own way. Serb alarm at this prospect, further enflamed by the nationalist demagoguery of Slobodan Milo
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, made the issue essentially non-negotiable.

As early as December 1992, George H. W. Bush had warned Milo
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against provoking unrest in Kosovo, threatening “military force against Serbians in Kosovo and in Serbia proper” if he defied that warning. Yet as long as the Bosnia crisis was playing itself out, Kosovo enjoyed “a type of sullen stability,” attracting only glancing attention from the outside world.
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By nominally (if not actually) preserving a multiethnic Bosnia-Herzegovina, the Dayton Accords changed all that. To Kosovars, this suggested that the international community was not going to support their own aspirations for independence based on ethnic identity. Indeed, U.S. policymakers in particular consistently expressed their opposition to any such outcome. Persuaded that patience would get them nothing and worried that the influx of Serb refugees from Croatia and Bosnia being resettled in Kosovo was changing the ethnic balance to their disadvantage, the Kosovars opted for violence.
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