STOP NATO: �NO PASARAN! - HTTP://WWW.STOPNATO.ORG.UK --------------------------- ListBot Sponsor -------------------------- Start Your Own FREE Email List at http://www.listbot.com/links/joinlb ---------------------------------------------------------------------- BOSNIA AND VIETNAM Sean Gervasi Another Quagmire? Robert McNamara, who was Secretary of Defense from 1961 to 1968, has written a remarkable memoir which should be read by those who believe there are no dangers for the United States in Bosnia. One of the principal architects of the war in Indochina, McNamara has now declared that he and his colleagues were wrong, "terribly wrong", in pusuing a military victory there. [1] This is an astonishing admission, to say the least. But, whatever the criticisms which may be made of McNamara or of the book itself, we should be grateful that he has finally admitted the errors which carried the U.S. into war. McNamara sheds new light on how the United States became involved in Indochina. He makes it clear that U.S. policy-makers made decisions in the early 1960s which can only be described as reckless. These decisions were based on a determination to ensure U.S. domination of Southeast Asia, on poor and distorted information, on heavily biased analysis, on bureaucratic and personal ambitions and on the systematic deception of the public and the Congress. For anyone interested in the lessons of the past, and of Indochina in particular, the publication of McNamara's memoir has come at a crucial moment. For it is increasingly clear that the United States is now involved in another civil war thousands of miles away from our own shores. The media carry daily reports about U.S. concern for the future of the Bosnian government, about visiting military missions to Bosnia, about U.S. complicity in the breakdown of the U.N. arms embargo, and about U.S.-inspired efforts to persuade the United Nations and NATO to put pressure of all kinds on the adversaries of that government, the Bosnian Serbs. Are these expressions of concern and these actions reminiscent of the slide into the war in Indochina? There would certainly seem to be some grounds for wondering whether the U.S. is not now on the edge of the same kind of commitment which eventually led us into the disaster that we call "Vietnam". The Clinton administration has made Bosnia a foreign policy priority since it assumed office in early 1993. It seems determined to keep the Muslim-led government there in power, whatever, the cost. And over the last eighteen months it has substantially increased U.S. commitments in Bosnia. Some of these have been hidden from the American public, and even from the Congress. Yet there is a bloody civil war going on in Bosnia. This civil war has been under way since 1992, when a government dominated by a Muslim minority seceded from Yugoslavia. The large Serb minority in Bosnia rebelled against the idea of Muslim rule and established its own independent republic. It was the insistence of the Muslim-led government on ruling over all of Bosnia that precipitated the civil war there. What does it mean that the U.S. is taking sides in a civil war on the edge of Europe? Indeed, in a civil war which could easily become a wider Balkan war? The U.S. government is aware that the situation in the Balkans is dangerous. As Richard Holbrooke, the Assistant Secretary of State for Europe, put it in a recent Congressional hearing: "I think Southeastern Europe has replaced Northeast Asia as the really most explosive part of the world". [2] Secretary Holbrooke did not reveal in his testimony that, on assuming office, he had hoped to get the U.S. "out of the Balkan mess". President Clinton and his advisers do not appear to understand the implications of their own analysis. The Administration apparently believes that the U.S. can support the Bosnian Muslim government, and support its war against the Bosnian Serbs, without running any serious risks. There are, however, strong grounds for thinking is an illusion. One important reason is that the Bosnian state is very weak, and in control of little more than 20 per cent of "its" own territory. If it were not for the support of a few countries and of the United Nations -- and behind it, NATO - it is doubtful that Bosnia could maintain its claim to sovereignty over Serb and Croat territories. Even the recognition of Bosnia, which had never before existed as a state, was forced on a reluctant international community by Germany and the United States. [3] Thus the U.S. has placed itself in the position, not of supporting an established state with established boundaries, but of forcing the international community to recognize and support a state whose very existence is contested by a large minority of "its" population. Present U.S. policy is thus bound to lead to a dilemma, to a situation where the U.S. will have to choose between fighting to impose the Izetbegovic government on the rest of Bosnia-Herzegovina, that is, on Bosnian Serbs and Bosnian Croats [4], or abandoning that government to its fate. Bosnia is therefore like South Vietnam, a state which the United States created almost singlehandedly in the mid-1950s in a misguided effort to"contain communism" in Asia. And our policy in Bosnia today is similar to our policy in Indochina in the mid-1960s, the period McNamara writes about, when the Johnson administration began the escalation of the war in order to protect its South Vietnamese client. More than one observer has written about the parallels between Vietnam and Bosnia recently. Writing in the INTERNATIONAL HERALD TRIBUNE last spring, Gregory Clark argued that the U.S. was making some of the same mistakes in Bosnia that it had made in Indochina. In seeking to impose its own solution in Bosnia, he said "the West felt it could ignore a history of racial hatreds, in particular the bitter Serbian memories of massacres at the hands of wartime Croatian and Muslim Nazi collaborators, and blithely establish an artificial state of Bosnia-Herzegovina to be run by a Muslim minority". [5] The recognition of Bosnia, Clark wrote, was a "regrettable mistake", and those responsible should admit that it was. He thought, at the time he was writing, that there was still time to achieve a negotiated peace, as the United States had agreed to support "West European efforts to force the Bosnians to compromise". [6] In February of this year a decorated veteran of the Vietnam war, Col. David Hackworth, now a military analyst for NEWSWEEK magazine, described the U.S. as "sinking slowly in the Bosnian swamp". [7] He implicitly raised a key issue which is reminiscent of the U.S. experience in Indochina. Hackworth indicated that the U.S. is covertly arming and assisting the Bosnian army. [8] He pointed out that U.S. Air Force air controllers were deployed in Bosnia, officially under the U.N. but in fact "ready to direct NATO airstrikes against the Serbs". He also pointed out that the "concealed U.S. taxpayer cost of the war", apart from a contribution to the U.N. for Bosnian operations, "has already reached almost another $1 billion a year". These and similar actions, he concluded, "could drag us much deeper into the muck". In Hackworth's view the solution today is to learn the lessons of Vietnam and to force our politicians to act on them -- or, presumably, to force them from office. More recently, A.M.Rosenthal, a columnist for THE NEW YORK TIMES, pointed out that Senator Robert Dole's proposal to lift the arms embargo on Bosnia was similar to moves which had led the U.S. into the Indochina war. [9] Senator Dole, Rosenthal said, had recently been talking about both Vietnam and Bosnia. But, Rosenthal observed, "He did not make plain the connection between what he condemns in Vietnam and proposes in Bosnia." The Bosnian Muslim army needed tanks and other sophisticated arms. If the U.S. military provided them, would it not also have to train Bosnian Muslims? How many Americans, Rosenthal asked, would have to go to Bosnia? And if significant numbers went, "Will America leave them prey for Serbian guerrillas and snipers?" "What power would Mr.Dole, [as] Senator or President, commit to the protection of U.S. forces?" The failure to ask and probe such questions, Rosenthal said, was "dereliction of duty". For American allies were warning that arming the Bosnian Muslims "would prolong the war and spread it deeper and wider". And Rosenthal warned that "Between now and May, Senator Dole, really should face the Bosnian questions that compare to the unconfronted Vietnam questions." Mr. Rosenthal has made the dangers about as clear as they can be made in a few words, although some of the things which he appears to believe might happen in the future are already happening. It should be added that McNamara is quite aware of the parallels between Bosnia and Vietnam. McNamara says that the United States is on the wrong track in the Balkans. Asked by a reporter a short time ago whether the mistakes made in Vietnam could be repeated today, he replied, "Absolutely, not only can but are being repeated." According to THE NEW YORK TIMES, McNamara said that "American difficulties in Bosnia and Somalia involved similar errors." [10] Errors. U.S. Strategy in the Balkans U.S. policy in Vietnam was based on far-reaching strategic aims, and essentially on the idea of "containing communism" in Asia. In practice, this meant asserting American power and influence in the region, creating organizations like the Southeast Asia Treaty Organization (SEATO), and suppressing revolutions -- linked to communism or not -- which would limit or end U.S. power and influence in a particular country. Thus our policy towards Vietnam, the policy of supporting the Diems and the Khanhs and the Kys, was always part of a much wider strategy. The fact that the strategy was itself over-reaching, contradictory or wrong was something which was rarely discussed. Even now Mr. McNamara's own discussion of our strategy at that time is inadequate. U.S. policy toward Bosnia is also one part of a wider strategy. It is, in fact, part of a strategy which aims at re-ordering the whole of the Balkans and establishing U.S. power and influence in a large part of the region, especially the Southern Balkans. This is not at all obvious if one is looking only at events in Bosnia themselves. The actions taken in Bosnia have, in fact, less to do with Bosnia than they do with larger strategic concerns. That is one reason why, on the face things, the U.S. commitment to the Bosnian government is so difficult to fathom. Our policy in the Balkans has two main components. The first is a set of policies aimed at re-ordering the Balkans and tying it to Western Europe and the U.S. The second component consists of policies aimed at using the Balkans as a base for projecting U.S. power and influence into other areas of Europe, the Middle East, Central Asia, etc. The U.S. policies aimed at forging a new Balkan order are complex. For the U.S. and its allies have been attempting to do two things at once. They have, first of all, attempted to create a number of diverse client states from the wreckage which attended the dissolution of communism in Eastern Europe. And, beyond that, they have been attempting to balance the interests of the various Western powers in the region. [11] The U.S., however, is a world power. And it could not rest content simply with re-organizing the Balkans. For the Balkan region has always been a region of enormous strategic importance for Europe, for the Mediterrenean and for the Middle East. Events in the Balkans reverberate well beyond its confines. Thus, just as powerful empires had vied for the control of Indochina in the past, the United States felt compelled to try to assert its control over the Balkans after the end of the cold war. The Balkans has long been the crossroads of East and West, of North and South and of Islam and Christianity. It has been a crossroads of trade and migration and a place where cultures mingled. That is, it has long been a region where, over the centuries, powerful, competing societies, Islam, the Hapsburg Empire, the British Empire, Russia and the Third Reich, struggled for mastery, and often for political and military access to neighboring regions. That is why the first world war began there. That is why the Balkans played such an important role in the Nazi strategy of conquest three decades later. During the cold war, the Balkans, and Yugoslavia in particular, were more or less neutralized. There was a strategic stalemate between the West and the communist bloc. Competition between the blocs in the Balkans could easily have ignited world war III. Both the Western powers and the communist powers understood that. So the Balkans remained relatively quiet. [12] In the post-cold war world, however, the Balkans have again become the focus of political, economic and military competition. The region has therefore once more assumed a key strategic importance, not only for the United States, but for all the Western powers, as well as for Turkey, other Islamic countries and Russia. Today actions by the major powers in the Balkans affect many regions surrounding the Balkans: Western Europe, Central Europe, the Eastern Mediterrenean, the Middle East and, of course, Russia and other new states in the former Soviet Union. This means that U.S. policy in Bosnia and in the Balkans has been and is being fashioned with a view to its effects across a vast area of Europe, the Middle East and possibly even parts of Africa. Our policy toward Bosnia, the policy of supporting a Muslim minority government locked in a civil war with the Bosnian Serbs, is much more than a policy aimed at shapng the future of Bosnia. The stakes are much greater than that. U.S. policy in Bosnia is part of a broad strategy serving U.S. strategic interests in an area stretching from the English Channel to Siberia and from Egypt and Lebanon to the Baltic. The following appear to be the main U.S. goals in the Balkans today: 1 - to support a Muslim-led unitary state in Bosnia-Herzegovina 2 - to install a Western-style regime in Yugoslavia and to reduce the geographic area, power and influence of Serbia to a mini- mum 3 - to assist in the creation of a Greater Albania incorporating parts Kosovo, the Sandjak, Macedonia and possibly Bulgaria and closely linked to Bosnia, the U.S. and Turkey 4 - to support Croatia and Slovenia, and possibly the formation of a Greater Croatia incorporating the Croat areas of Bosnia 5 - to prevent the formation of a state or federation uniting the Serbs of Bosnia, Croatia and Yugoslavia 6 - to prevent the formation of any alliance between Greece and Yugoslavia or among the Eastern Orthodox countries of the Balkans (Yugoslavia, Greece, Bulgaria and Rumania) 7 - to install American power in Southern Europe and the Mediterrenean in order to block the access of the European Union or Germany to Islamic markets or natural resources in the Orient 8 - to block the development of Russian influence in the Balkans This outline of U.S. policy is not speculative, although its existence cannot yet be verified by consulting the relevant National Security Council documents. However, such a picture of U.S. strategy is confirmed by interviews, some published materials and acknowledged elements of U.S. policy in the Balkans. [13] ______________________________________________________________________ To unsubscribe, write to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
