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CYRUS VANCE, R.I.P. http://www.rockfordinstitute.org/News/Trifkovic/News&Views.htm ------------------------------------------------------------------------ -------- January 16, 2002 The news of Cyrus Vance's death on January 12 brought back the memory of a golden autumn afternoon in 1992 we spent discussing the intricacies of the Balkans at the Palais des Nations in Geneva. Vance was at that time the U.N. Secretary-General Javier Perez de Cuellar's special representative charged with the impossible task of mediating the war in the former Yugoslavia. At that time I advised Crown Prince Alexander of Yugoslavia, who had made Vance's acquaintance some years before, and we were to meet again at the lovely lakeside villa of Daniel Boyer, a joint friend. Vance was an old-fashioned liberal of impeccable manners, dress, and speech. But for his accent he could have passed for an English squire of a Whiggish bend, tweeds and half-moon glasses and all; his implicit Anglophilia was evident from a few casual references to books, friends, and places. I had been warned that he did not have any original ideas or profound insights, but I was gratified by his quiet modesty. While his performance as Jimmy Carter's Secretary of State was on the whole lackluster (his contribution to the 1978 Camp David deal between Sadat and Begin notwithstanding), his 1980 resignation from that post-in protest at the ill-fated military operation to rescue the hostages from Tehran-befitted that old-fashioned integrity which had once been the hallmark of the East Coast establishment. When we met Vance was growing weary of the Balkans. A year earlier, in late 1991, he had helped reach a ceasefire in Croatia; but with Bosnia-Herzegovina he faced an impossible task. Unlike the ideologues in Washington and their media cronies, he understood that "Bosnia" was not a real country, much less a nation, but a mini-Yugoslavia devoid of inner cohesion that could not be kept together except by external force. At the same time he could not say so aloud as his brief was clear: square the circle the best you can, but only within the Bosnian framework. Partition would not be allowed. Vance did not have his heart in it. Having developed a healthy disdain for all parties to the conflict, and an understated awareness of the impossibility of the mission, he was glad to have the burden taken off his shoulders with the arrival of David Owen, a failed British politician full of ambition and adrenalin who was sent by the European Union as Vance's fellow negotiator. Owen did not have a problem with the fact that the settlement had to be based on the illogical and immoral recognition of administrative boundaries between Yugoslavia's former constituent republics as fully-fledged international frontiers. Unlike Vance, Owen joined with gusto in the effort to construe "Bosnia" as a test of Western resolve in the epic struggle of multi-ethnicity (the Muslims) versus atavistic, tribal nationalism (the Serbs). The resulting absurdity known as the "Vance-Owen Peace Plan" was Owen's doing, and his failure, not Vance's. Ever neurotically hyperactive, Owen hijacked what passed for the Bosnian peace process by hinting that "Cy's past it"-but he hardly stopped to reflect that Vance did not mind in the least having the limelight taken away. He quietly went along with the plan's key objective-to give the Muslims their chief war aim, a single, centralized Bosnian state-knowing that the Clinton Administration would duly torpedo the whole thing anyway, believing the territorial arrangement too generous to the Serbs. The subsequent fiasco was a personal tragedy to Owen, and a matter of no consequence to Vance. His career was over anyway, and his name beyond reproach. Vance's career had reached its zenith fifteen years earlier when he got the State. His previous career was solid, albeit not exactly distinguished. He was born in 1917 in Clarksburg, WV, got his honors from Yale Law School in 1942, and served as a naval gunnery officer in the Pacific for the rest of the war. After stint as a Wall Street lawyer Vance entered public life at 39 as general counsel to the Senate Space and Aeronautics Committee, where he drafted the legislation establishing the NASA. In 1960 he moved to the Pentagon, and two years later Kennedy appointed him Secretary of the Army. Shortly after Dallas LBJ made him deputy defense secretary under Robert McNamara. Within months Vance had to deal with the escalating Vietnam War, which he supported until the tide of public opinion turned in 1967. Some of Vance's former colleagues never forgave his abrupt change of heart and subsequent resignation from the government. Nevertheless, when Johnson withdrew from the impending presidential race in March 1968 and offered to discuss peace terms with Hanoi, he made Vance deputy to the chief American negotiator, Averell Harriman. The commentary in Washington, based on Vance's well-established reputation for endless nitpicking, was that Johnson was simply pursuing the war by other means. The job remained unfinished, however: it took five years, and another administration, before the inglorious terms were signed. During the Nixon years Vance returned to his law practice but was recalled to government by President Carter in 1977. From his earliest days as secretary of state there were clear tensions within the new team. Vance's position was made difficult by the President's lack of strategic objectives, his hesitant nature, and his frustrating proneness to micromanagement. Vance also had to contend with two people he came to detest, with ample reason. One was Andrew Young, the U.N. ambassador, enough said. The other was Carter's national security advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski, the clever demagogue who Vance eventually suspected of pursuing an agenda determined by his ethnic obsessions and atavistic hang-ups. The tone was set within a week of the new Administration's assuming office, when Washington issued an tactlessly worded declaration of support for the dissident physicist Andrei Sakharov, then involved in a row with the Kremlin, which brought an outraged protest from Moscow. Within hours it transpired that the declaration had been made without Vance's knowledge: Zbig had been flexing his muscles. Brzezinski's disruptive influence surfaced again over the complex negotiations that Vance conducted on the strategic arms limitation treaty (Salt II). Without mentioning anything to Vance Brzezinski persuaded Carter to present at the last minute a completely new set of proposals to the Russians-proposals he knew to be unacceptable, and which were duly dismissed by Moscow as "absurd." He also intervened destructively after the conclusion of the Camp David accords in 1978, in which Vance had played a major role. Brzezinski ignored State Department warnings that the Jordanians and Saudis would take a long time to accept the new situation, and-to upstage Vance-he enraged both nations with ill-disguised briefings in which he claimed they were simply putting up token opposition before joining enlarged talks. This proved to be wrong, and the damage to the peace process proved deep and durable. This pattern continued across the foreign policy spectrum, culminating in the showdown precipitated by the fall of the Shah. In a frantic bid to resolve the impasse with American hostages at the U.S. Embassy in Teheran, further complicated by Carter's inept response to the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, the White House planned a military rescue mission. The final decision to go ahead was taken at a meeting of the National Security Council held while Vance was on holiday. He strongly opposed the plan on his return but his objections were not heeded. Although the news was kept initially secret Vance resigned and went back to the law. Looking back at that unhappy period over two decades later, compared to his rivals Cyrus Vance comes across as the embodiment of integrity and trustworthiness. Just like with Owen over a decade later, the more they won publicity for their personalities (and their failures), the more respect grew for his quiet modesty. Zbig the Ideologue despised Vance because he did not hate Russia, in addition to abhorring Soviet communism, and because he was not an "intellectual." Indeed he was not, as we can see from of the concluding paragraphs of Vance's book of memoirs (Hard Choices, 1983): In the end, deciding whether and how to act in the cause of human rights requires informed and careful judgment. No mechanistic formula will produce an automatic answer. Predicting the course of future events is difficult. It is unlikely that we will find easy answers to major questions. Our wisdom, imagination, and leadership will be severely tested. We will find increasingly that we must work with other nations to achieve our goals and to coordinate, as never before, our foreign and domestic concerns. We are likely to find that in many areas of foreign policy, our basic frame of reference is shifting, sometimes subtly, sometimes with dramatic force. We must therefore prepare ourselves for what may come by constantly probing for new understanding, by educating ourselves and the coming generation in the realities of the world and our place in it, and by developing the national strength, skills, and relationships with others that can help us meet the future with confidence . . . We can see tomorrow as merely an extension of today and erode our ability to adapt to and influence new circumstances. Or we can see what lies ahead as another opportunity to use our immense strengths and talents to provide better lives both for our own people and for others. The choice is ours, but it must be made early in this decade if we are to play our necessary role in the next. This is pedestrian stuff, but on the whole honest and harmless, just like the man himself, and therefore totally unlike Brzezinski and his ilk. In the end the difference boils down to the fact that Cyrus Vance was a good American. ==^================================================================ This email was sent to: [email protected] EASY UNSUBSCRIBE click here: http://topica.com/u/?a84x2u.a9WB2D Or send an email to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] T O P I C A -- Register now to manage your mail! http://www.topica.com/partner/tag02/register ==^================================================================
