The Cold World They Made by Robin Ron

Author:Robin, Ron
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780674973022
Publisher: Harvard University Press
Published: 2016-09-19T00:00:00+00:00

Bosnia, the Cold War All Over Again

The unfolding of the Bosnian tragedy had incensed Albert, driving him to write a flurry of angry articles published in mainstream journals. He reserved particular scorn for Bill Clinton, a man who, in his eyes, was morally incapable of rising to the occasion. Lashing out at Clinton’s 1992 campaign theme—“It’s the Economy, Stupid”—Albert chastised both Clinton and his Republican rivals for privileging domestic issues while ignoring the opportunity to consolidate America’s new and unrivaled international status.

“Clinton’s final sell-out of Bosnia” reminded Albert of George Orwell’s definition of political rhetoric as “designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.”12 Beneath a patina barely concealing the corrupt concept of multinational peacekeeping in Bosnia, he wrote, lurked a willfully self-deceptive approach to global challenges. To “explain away their failure to address Serbian aggression,” the Clinton administration had accepted Serbia’s “sham” that its vicious campaigns were merely responses to Muslim atrocities against Serbs.13 Genocide appeared a tolerable price for avoiding any forceful American policy in the region.

The absurdity of this position, Albert thundered, was exacerbated by “an even more basic absurd assumption: that one can stop an aggression without taking sides, and that one can stop an ongoing genocidal war and enforce a peace by sending in a force sized and equipped only to keep a peace agreed to by all sides.” The United States had followed the lead of the European Community and the UN by recognizing in practice “no enemy in this war of aggression.”14

Such positions of neutrality simply did not exist in the Wohlstetters’ Hobbesian world. Enemies and rivals were discrete components in any meaningful equation in international relations. Only the conceptually blind could be lured into thinking that Russia and its Serbian proxies were not inimical to American interests. “A U.S.-led coalition like that in the Gulf War, including some NATO members and some other interested countries, would clearly identify Serbia as the source of the aggression,” he added.15 When faced with obvious enemies, such as Saddam Hussein and Slobodan Milošević, the scourge “of genocidal terror can be discouraged or dealt with only by coalitions that exclude the perpetrators of genocide and their supporters and are equipped and willing to back coalition diplomacy with precise and discriminate force.”16 Avoiding this challenge would spell disaster.

Rather than assessing the Bosnian war for what it was, Albert charged, the Clinton administration forced the conflict into grotesquely irrelevant frameworks. The Bosnian tragedy was not “a spontaneous eruption of ‘ancient hatreds,’ ” but rather a deliberate, Russian-backed campaign to establish a greater Serbia, which, in turn, would be beholden to a resurgent greater Russia.17 Clinton allegedly explained away his inertia by clinging to the belief that any type of unilateral action would undermine the world order. Albert responded that strife-ridden multilateral bodies, driven by the logic of corrupt compromise rather than principle, inevitably produced Clinton’s effete gestures of inaction.

Clinton’s most egregious sin in Bosnia was squandering the Cold

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