Bosnia and the power of NATO - 2 December 1994

I am in a city, which a former president of France said is remarkable for its beauty and of all the cities in the United States is the one whose name the world over conjures up the most visions and incites one to dream. Well, as they used to say in the 1920s, is that so?

Last Sunday a sinkhole closed off one main street and the week before, a different one closed off a main avenue of the city through collapsing water pipes. Last time I was here in the summer, there was an underground explosion in the tenderloin and for the first time that anyone had ever noticed, the firemen couldn't get enough pressure for their hoses. When the matter was looked into, which meant burrowing way underground, the feeder water pipes clogged with sediment, a process that is known, though it doesn't help any, as tuberculation.

It was not news to anybody least of all to the local officials who dread such revelations that the water lines under the streets of San Francisco are tubercular because their day is done. There are 1,200 miles of line that are more than 100 years old, sewage lines 850 miles same age. The average rate of replacement is six miles a year for water, two a year for sewage.

When such figures are brought to the attention of the average citizen of any old city, he maybe scandalised for a moment but then he forgets it, he had better, what can he do? We're talking about a condition of decay that afflicts not only San Francisco, after all it's only been a city for about 150 years, before that it was a military fort on a peninsula with one or two small villages scattered to the valleys of the seven great hills that the gold rush city was built on. We're talking about the rotting of the city's grid or underpinnings or maybe I'll make myself clearer to a generation that has lost or never knew Anglo Saxon English when I say "the problem is the disintegration of the city's infrastructure". It's a disaster impending in every big city San Francisco, New York, Frankfurt, London whose underpinnings were laid down in the late 19th century.

A local paper here put it in the lead sentence very pithily: "San Francisco's vast maze of pipes, cables, wires and tiles that carry the lifeblood and the heartbeat of the city is antiquated worn out and on the verge of collapse". Of course, if you're here with me today, the brilliant confetti pile of white houses tumbling over the hills under a blue umbrella sky or if you'd gone out to picnic in a neighbouring mountain valley or even if you'd driven around town just shopping and looking at this and that, you wouldn't see decay, lagging heartbeat, the signs of imminent collapse, you'd see or not see and curse potholes just as you do in New York or London.

And potholes are the nuisance that most arouse the citizens' ire and hot letters to the papers. That's the problem socially, politically, economically, says a man who is a link between the nations utilities contractors and the government, whether it's federal, state or city government. City fathers, he says focus on potholes, because there up there where the taxpayers can see them. In the meantime, the infrastructure is falling to pieces out of sight, out of mind.

I don't know how the European problem differs in scale or in ways of treating it, the fact that it's taken a century or more for the pipes and lines and cables to wear out, years if you stop to think about it an immense tribute to the Victorians and to the quality of their basic building materials starting with iron, then copper, brass, steel. And according to an old underground New York inspector you're not going to be able to replace this old stuff with plywood and plastic. As it is, he says, we patch 60, 75 water main breaks a year and hope.

The utilities expert who travels around his underground circuit from a base in Virginia says that improving waste water facilities alone across the United States would cost about $140 billion. In this city, the annual budget calls for $9 million a year just to replace old water pipes put down in the 1870s and the 1880s. The solution is so stratospherically expensive, has to be beyond our calculation, certainly beyond those dreams that the French president like to have when he came here.

In a hundred cities, the means to transmit water, gas, electricity, telephone service, sewage must soon be replaced but the costs of what amounts to really to building the shell of our civilisation all over again runs into more billion dollars than the combined national debts of the four or five great industrial nations of the world.

Now it would be nice, it would be a great relief from the guns of Bosnia to be able to stay with some interesting or cute local story, but I have to say that wherever you go in America this week, there is no honest escape from the dull wounding blow of last week's headlines, which even in the most serious papers could not avoid the blunt awful truth. No diplomatic fancy talk obscured the New York Times headline "United States give us a talk of tough action against the Serbs, UN and NATO unable to act". And even the responses of the top Clinton men, the secretary of defence and the White House chief of staff were limp with an air of defeat.

The 31-month-old war, the secretary of defence said, is more or less over. Said Mr Panetta, Mr Clinton's right-hand man, "Our only hope is that at some point the parties recognise there's no use continuing this kind of carnage". Apply that remark to any other war you had an interest in and it becomes limper still, like saying to Hitler at the height of the fire of London, "our hope is that you'll recognise there's no use continuing this kind of carnage". So far as the Serbs are concerned, this kind of carnage has had its uses, it has gained them 70% of the country they mean to have and to hold.

For people who take hope from desk men, civil servants, there were soothing words the other night from an undersecretary of state, a smooth intelligent-looking un-flapped man he was, he urged us to be patient, he blamed no one. As for Britain and Senator Dole's judgement, he said there is, and has been all along, a high degree of understanding with the British and why should we be patient, because he said without defining the range, we have a range of options. The interested parties – whoever they maybe – could depend on our good offices. The solution, he said, lay in negotiation and in bringing pressure to bear on the warring Serbs.

I haven't heard talk like that since the foreign office briefings in the weeks before and after the negotiating triumph of Munich, but outside the good discussion on which this undersecretary mouthed his masterly double talk the criticism of Britain, France, the United States, NATO, the United Nations, the lot went unabated. For the first time that I can remember, the most liberal columnist on the New York Times and their most conservative columnist who usually enliven our Monday mornings by obliquely slashing away at each other from opposite sides of the op-ed page. Last Monday, they sang in their separate ways the same sad and bitter song.

Mr Anthony Lewis, the liberal voice headed his piece The End of NATO. His main point is that for four decades, the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation performed the extraordinary feat of keeping the peace in Europe because it was ready not merely to commit itself to action against any Soviet aggression but was willing to do it. Whereas in Bosnia, he believes key members of NATO, Britain and France, did not want to take vigorous action, but promised to do so only if neither the UN nor the UN so-called peacekeeping force vetoed it. The UN accordingly vetoed forceful action.

Mr William Safire, the conservative side of the page is as is his wont more downright. A ragtag splinter group of Serbians with no power but the weaponry and the willingness to kill civilians has rendered the poseurs and pontificators of the United Nations helpless and condemnable. He takes up the general European criticism that a country, which did not put a single man on the ground in Bosnia, has no right to criticise the actions or inaction of the countries that did. His response: the choice between doing nothing and sending in an overwhelming force of hundreds of thousands of Americans is a false choice. The real choice is between doing nothing and putting into action a NATO strategy to change the course of a war that will be long and bloody, no matter what we do and that strategy is to give serious bombing a chance, which would raise the level of ferocity for a while but unrelenting punishment would force the Serbs to end the war, it would save hundreds of thousands of lives, it would save NATO too.

Senator Dole, by the way, who wants NATO to act without United Nations permission had a pungent reply to the criticism that the United States has no ground troops there. We've had troops on the ground in Europe for 50 years, what are they doing there now?

To me the fairest, the most just, comment came from former Undersecretary of State Sandy Berger. The mistake started, he thinks, with the Bush administration, was compounded by the Clinton administration. There is no single culprit, Britain, France, the United States, NATO and the United Nations – together we all messed it up.

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