The art of the deal

Richard Holbrooke basks in the glory of his role in Bosnia's fragile peace

Author: By Dusko Doder

Date: SUNDAY, June 14, 1998

Page: C1

Section: Books

``To End a War'' is Holbrooke's blow-by-blow account of his crowning achievement, and, like most memoirs, it presents the author's case in the best possible light.

A natural writer, Holbrooke uses poetic license to dramatize events into an absorbing read with the author's own personality in the middle of things. We have him bluffing, shouting at, or cursing Balkan politicians, negotiating deals of great consequence on the fly, stitching things together as he goes along. In retrospect, however, the result seems more a stopgap measure than a comprehensive settlement, as the current warfare in Kosovo shows.

The book's most interesting passages deal with Washington bureaucratic infighting. Holbrooke, a protege of the politician and diplomat Averell Harriman, navigates past various reefs and shoals to press his agenda. When excluded from deliberations by his superiors, he turns to presidential friend Vernon Jordan to seek redress. But until the massacre of more than 6,000 Muslims in the small Bosnian town of Srebrenica, Holbrooke's superiors showed ``little enthusiasm for any proposal of action.''

Srebrenica galvanized the American government into action. Shortly afterward, Holbrooke was given the mandate to bring the fighting to an end. He was in full control of the single dominant foreign policy initiative of the day, and given his hyperactive ambition, he was determined to succeed. Dayton stopped the fighting and brought US (and other North Atlantic Treaty Organization) troops to Bosnia to keep the peace. On paper, the accord called for a single, multi-ethnic country with a central government; in practice, so far, it has by and large confirmed the existing divisions.

Holbrooke's coarse hunger for public triumph frequently creeps into this memoir. We are left with the feeling of an author stretching things to seduce us into believing the legend he is creating for himself. Holbrooke is invariably right; President Clinton and Warren Christopher, his first secretary of state and Madeleine K. Albright's predecessor, are sometimes portrayed as weak and vacillating, lacking even a basic understanding of their responsibilities and commitments.

Consider Holbrooke's account of Clinton's impromptu meeting with four advisers -- Christopher, Albright, who was then ambassador to the United Nations, Sandy Berger, deputy national security adviser, and Holbrooke -- in the hall of the White House portico at a dinner for Jacques Chirac, the newly elected president of France. It is June 1995. Chirac had earlier warned that he intended to withdraw French troops from the UN peacekeeping force in Bosnia before the end of the year. Under an earlier agreement, the United States had publicly committed itself to sending 20,000 troops to help extricate allied forces.

Clinton raises the Bosnia question and responds ``with surprise'' after Holbrooke notes that the United States has little flexibility left on the deployment of US troops. ``What do you mean?'' Clinton says. ``I'll decide the troop issue if and when the time comes.''

Holbrooke's reply is that ``NATO has already approved the withdrawal plan. . . . It has a high degree of automaticity built into it.'' Clinton, looking at Christopher, asks, ``Is this true?''

``I suggest that we talk about it tomorrow,'' Christopher replies. ``We have a problem.''

``Without another word,'' Holbrooke writes, ``the president walked off, holding his wife's hand.''

Now, the author has published a modified account of that scene in the May 18 New Yorker. In it, Christopher is cast in a slightly better light as he ``tersely'' responds to the president's question: ``Yes, it appears to be.'' It is now Clinton who says, ``I suggest we talk about it again tomorrow.''

Holbrooke also wants us to believe he had nothing to do with the troop-deployment decision and was ``stunned'' after receiving a Pentagon briefing on the NATO plan for supporting a UN withdrawal. Christopher was ``equally amazed.'' Yet it requires a huge leap of imagination to believe that Holbrooke had not seen a number of ``front channel cables of instructions'' which had to pass his desk before being sent to the US ambassador to NATO. These instructions, which formally approved the political decision, had to be cleared not only by the National Security Council and an interagency group that included top State and Defense officials but also by a military committee including the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

If there are serious problems with this book, they lie in Holbrooke's understanding of the former Yugoslavia. The brief history is presented in a Disneyfied fashion. Although the Serbs nursed an ancient enmity stemming from their defeat by the Turks in 1389, Holbrooke says, ``the three groups had lived together for centuries. Serbs, Croats and Muslims worked together in every walk of life.'' Failing to put the Bosnian struggle in historical context may actually help perpetuate it, since a conflict that seems to have no point of origin or describable causes will appear to have no possible end.

Holbrooke does not even address the fundamental questions facing US policy. Should the United States encourage the breakup of multi-ethnic states when each group claims the right of self-determination? Or should it seek to prevent the dissolution of those states? A galaxy of complex ethnic problems is ignored by this self-described ``intuitive and impatient'' diplomat. Holbrooke refers to the Muslims, who make up about 43 percent of Bosnia's population, as ``Bosnians''; the remaining Christian majority is described as Bosnian Serbs and Bosnian Croats.

Perhaps the most disturbing aspect of Holbrooke's diplomatic triumph, as revealed in the book, is that it was made possible to a large extent by Serbian dictator Slobodan Milosevic, the very man Lawrence Eagleburger, secretary of state late in the Bush administration, publicly accused of war crimes. Milosevic emerges from these pages as a reasonable, charming man who, in different circumstances, ``would have been a successful politician in a democratic system.''

However, there is substantial evidence that Milosevic initiated the war, that his secret police and paramilitaries started campaigns of ethnic cleansing in Bosnia, that he financed the Bosnian Serb army. Holbrooke erroneously suggests that the unraveling of Yugoslavia began in Slovenia in 1989 and that Milosevic ``saw his opportunity'' and ``took up the cause of Serb nationalism.'' But it was Milosevic's speech in Kosovo in 1987, and not the one in 1989, that inflamed Serb nationalism.

One can almost see the Serbian dictator trying to reinvent himself, with Holbrooke's help, as a guarantor of the Dayton peace. Holbrooke is sucked into a relationship as Milosevic professes contempt for his own proxies among the Bosnian Serbs (``those idiots from Pale'') and expresses his distrust of his own chief of staff (he confides he cannot speak openly in front of the general). Moreover, whenever the process gets stalled, Milosevic makes key concessions to move it forward (ultimately giving Sarajevo to the Muslims as a ``gift'').

Holbrooke fails to see the ultimate failure. If there was a chance to rebuild a multi-ethnic Bosnia, that chance was a multi-ethnic Sarajevo. Most of the city's 220,000 Serbs have left the city instead. But Holbrooke's easy explanation is to blame the Bosnian Serbs.

The disturbing Holbrooke-Milosevic relationship is perhaps best demonstrated in Holbrooke's brief reference to one of Milosevic's most notorious proxies, known as Arkan, as a ``freelance murderer'' and a ``racist fanatic run amok.'' The fact is that Arkan and his ``private army'' of thugs was directly in the Yugoslav chain of command from the very beginning. One does not have to be exceptionally astute to reach the conclusion that in a police state the existence of a military formation armed with heavy weapons could exist only with the approval of the dictator.

This is not to suggest that Holbrooke did not make a real contribution to the Dayton process with his brilliant scheming, prodigious dissimulation, and other tactical maneuvers. But the real question remains whether such intuitive diplomacy can produce effective strategic achievements. So far, Dayton hinges on an almost open-ended US military commitment to keep the peace in the former Yugoslavia.