The effects of this interpretation of the war on Serbia are also
deserving of note. The reaction of Milosevic to the full court press
he confronted from the United States and the international community
was to abandon formally the claim of a Greater Serbia, while keeping
it up in fact. In the hope, apparently, of avoiding UN sanctions,
Serbia and Montenegro accordingly established a new state of
Yugoslavia and simultaneouslyrecognized the independence of Croatia
and Bosnia. The JNA was formally withdrawn from Bosnian territory
while at the same time its weapons, stores of ammunition, and most of
its men passed to the control of the Republika Srpska. These
maneuvers had about them a farcical character. It was easily
documented that Serbia continued to give support to the Bosnian
Serbs; denials of this fact by Milosevic only confirmed his
reputation as a liar. He was forced into this absurd position by the
attitude taken by the international community, which stood foursquare
behind the claim that Bosnia's secession was legal and that
Yugoslavia had no right to prevent it by force. The effect, however,
on the conduct of the war was pernicious. However bad the JNA's
record had been in the Croatian war and in the beginning stages of
the war in Bosnia, it had a better record than that of the Serbian
irregular forces; to disband it was to invite an increase in the
number of vile atrocities that have distinguished the war's conduct.
This decision also weakened the link between Belgrade and the Bosnian
Serbs, and made it more difficult for Milosevic to apply the kind of
pressure on them necessary to reach a settlement.

Perhaps the most paradoxical effect that this understanding of the
origins of the war had was on the prospect that the United States or
the international community might use force to limit Serb territorial
claims. For one thing, it made it much more difficult to reach a
consensus either at the United Nations or within the Western alliance
on the possible limited use of force. Given the objectives that
flowed directly from the definition of the conflict as unadulterated
Serbian aggression, it was evident that any limited use of force
would leave unsatisfied the larger objective of "restoring" Bosnian
territorial integrity, and that after the first drink, to paraphrase
John F. Kennedy, it would be necessary to take another. If the
objective were the disarmament of Serbian militias throughout Bosnia,
it was a moral certainty that the Serbs would resist this through
force, and that the objective could only be achieved through a major
war. Just as the Americans were capable of vetoing diplomatic
measures that pointed toward partition, the Europeans (and Russia)
were capable of vetoing steps that pointed toward such a war. The end
result, of course, was a stalemate at the UN and within the Alliance
in which fervid denunciations of the war were paired with measures
that held out no prospect of ending it on terms conformable to those
laid out in UN resolutions.

The skepticism of the U.S. military toward any intervention in Bosnia
was reinforced by the same considerations. By virtue of the overly
ambitious objectives that the American understanding of the conflict
entailed, every proposal to use limited force was highly vulnerable
to the objection that it would not satisfy the aims American
diplomacy had laid down. For the limited use of force, when paired
with these highly ambitious goals, would have succeeded in ensuring
precisely the kind of objective that the diplomatists had deemed
totally unacceptable. There was no plausible end game in this
scenario. Escalation was written all over it. Even had the JCS been
willing to swallow its understandable reservations toward any kind of
military involvement in the Balkans, it would not and could not
digest the proposition that U.S. military forces be committed in a
way that left a huge gap between the military means proposed and the
political ends embraced.

"Lift and Strike"

In the debate over intervention, the principal alternative to the
course followed by western policy in the past year has come to be
known as "lift and strike"--lifting the arms embargo against the
Sarajevo government and striking Serbian forces with American
airpower. There have been variations in the views of the numerous
adherents to this approach, with some suggesting that Serbia proper
be bombed immediately and others insisting that the first step ought
to be targeting gun emplacements surrounding Sarajevo, while the
threat of escalation to Serbia is held in reserve. Whatever their
overall merits, the various options recommended for the use of
airpower have been relatively clear; this is not true, however, of
the "lift" portion of the strategy. How and where the training of
Bosnian Muslims would take place, who would supply the arms, their
method of delivery into Bosnia--these and other questions, however
critical, have remained generally obscure. This is true not only of
most commentaries in the media but also of the Clinton administration
itself. The Clinton plan called for air strikes in Bosnia proper and
neither disavowed nor threatened further aerial escalation. What it
intended to do beyond lifting the legal prohibition at the UN on
shipments of arms to the Muslims, however, remained unclear.

Whether this initiative, the culmination of months of indecision on
the part of the incoming administration, was seriously meant cannot
be known with assurance. The deliberate manner in which the decision
was reached, the pallid message that Warren Christopher delivered on
his "consultations" with European allies, did not bespeak great
conviction. It had the air of a proposition uttered in an academic
seminar, an opinion among conversationalists in the liberal arts,
that was to be weighed, sifted, analyzed, amended, and indeed perhaps
rejected if sufficiently serious flaws (admitted, of course, to
exist) might be found in it. Clinton's tactics resembled more than a
little those employed by Eisenhower during the Dien Bien Phu crisis
of 1954, when the president used the search for a consensus in
Congress and among the allies as the means of killing a plan of
military intervention. Clinton appears to have followed a similar
tack in the Bosnian crisis, and may indeed (as a careful student of
Vietnam) have had the Eisenhower precedent in mind.

The mysteries associated with this initiative are not exhausted by
whether it was seriously meant by Mr. Clinton. The most peculiar
feature of "lift and strike" was the disparity between the limited
means that were proposed and the stakes presumed to exist. This
disparity has characterized most American commentary on the crisis.
Advocates of intervention have nearly always combined a description
of the crisis that recalled the 1930s with a fastidious aversion to
the use of American ground forces that recalled the 1970s. If this
aggression of the Serbs approached, in sheer evil, the worst crime of
the century, a rather more robust conclusion than "lift and strike"
would seem inexorably to follow. Yet, for nearly all commentators,
and for the Clinton administration itself, it did not follow.

In assessing the plausibility of "lift and strike," it is necessary
to recur again to the objectives to which this two-pronged strategy
would have been married. The plan, or something like it, had been
promised to the Muslims in exchange for their grudging support of the
Vance-Owen plan; the attempt to change the balance of forces on the
ground in Bosnia might therefore plausibly be read as an attempt to
provide the Sarajevo government with sufficient military leverage to
obtain an approximation of the territorial lines that had been
contemplated in that settlement. But since the Clinton administration
had itself made clear on coming into office that it considered Vance
Owen seriously defective, on the grounds that it rewarded aggression,
and since the Izetbegovic government clearly adhered to the same
opinion, it seems fair to infer that the plan of intervention, if
such it can be called, anticipated a change in military possession
well beyond that contemplated in the Vance-Owen plan. The larger
political objective of "restoring" Bosnia's territorial integrity had
not been formally abandoned, and there was strong U.S. support for
arraigning Serb leaders in war crimes trials. As the main precedents
for such action were the war crimes trials after World War II, which
were only made possible because of the complete defeat and occupation
of Germany and Japan, it was not implausible to give a rather
expansive reading to the war aims the United States might pursue.

How far these objectives would have reached is unclear; what is clear
is that the Serbs would have seen this intervention as being highly
injurious to their vital interests and would have fought it
tenaciously. This may appear a less than surprising conclusion, but
it had several important implications. That many of the arms would
have to pass through Croatia (which had by this time repudiated its
former uneasy alliance with the Muslims) was perhaps the least of the
difficulties. Of greater importance was that whatever areas chosen
for the receipt of arms and for training would have become highly
significant military targets. The plan would have ensured that enemy
forces (probably the Croats as well as the Serbs) had a vital
interest in attacking, and no interest in respecting, any safe haven
in central Bosnia. Given their military dominance, a race would
likely have set in between the ability of the Serbs to render these
areas militarily untenable and the ability of the U.S. to prevent
this result. It was almost wholly implausible to believe that this
result might be achieved with airpower alone. Yet the use of U.S.
ground forces to prevent this result, not only in the Clinton plan
but in most such plans, was precluded.