To End a War by Richard Holbrooke

Author:Richard Holbrooke [Holbrooke, Richard]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-307-76543-7
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2011-01-25T16:00:00+00:00

The October 2 Cable. It was after 1:00 A.M. when I settled into my room, a huge, ill-designed suite, to call Strobe Talbott. I told him that with the Bosnian Serb military in the west stiffening, the front lines seemed to be less fluid. If the offensive ran out of gas, it would be time for a cease-fire. But, I told Strobe, we could not announce a cease-fire without announcing the location of the peace conference at the same time.

This linkage was not self-evident, Strobe said. Could we separate the three issues—cease-fire, peace conference, and location? I told him that we would then find ourselves in contentious and time-wasting negotiations within the Contact Group. We had to bypass this step with a package announcement. Strobe said that Washington was still opposed to holding the talks in the United States. If they failed, the costs would be too high for the Administration. “It’s about nine to one against you,” Strobe said dryly, “and I’m afraid right now I’m one of the nine.” He said that Lake was still the only person in the senior team supporting an American venue. A White House meeting was scheduled for the next day to make a recommendation to the President. “Strobe,” I said, “let me make our case by phone.”

“Look,” he replied, “I don’t think it makes sense for you to participate by phone; as a practical matter, it won’t work well, and you won’t be at your best in that format. But I have a suggestion: send us a careful, reasoned telegram stating your case. I will ensure it gets a fair hearing at the meeting.” The suggestion was characteristic of Strobe: generous and fair-minded. He believed in settling tough issues openly, and he was willing to encourage a message whose content he did not support—in contrast to many officials who made deviousness, even with close colleagues, a way of life and rationalized such behavior as “necessary to get the job done.”

So I sat down in the high-ceilinged sitting room to draft the cable. For the rest of the night, I wrote and rewrote, calling Donilon at 4:15 A.M. and Kornblum thirty minutes later to get a better understanding of the arguments against our position. When we boarded the plane early in the morning, I asked my colleagues to review my draft and took a much-needed nap.

By the time we landed in Sarajevo on the morning of October 2, we had distilled a sharp, focused, and unanimous message from my draft. This message would be our best shot at an issue we felt was absolutely critical. Unfortunately, because of concern about protecting the President’s deliberative process, the White House would not permit direct quotation in this book from the message we sent that morning—a message that Strobe later called “the most effective cable sent so far in this Administration in terms of changing people’s minds.”

In our message we argued that we had already invested so much national prestige in the effort that our priority had to be to maximize success, rather than to reduce the cost of failure.

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