Military intervention in Bosnia - 25 February 1994

Two weeks ago, I believe I talked about the spell that every American president since Lyndon Johnson has fallen under, when there's an act of aggression somewhere in the world, that America might be expected to respond too.

I use the rather academic phrase "act if aggression" deliberately instead of a massacre, an invasion, a bloody war because it's the phrase in the United Nations Charter, which in fact is used as the reason why the UN exists, a voluntary association, a league of nations that swears to respond to acts of aggression that threaten any one member. A Utopian idea as we've seen from the fate of all the other leagues of nations that have been formed and abandoned since the 16th century.

The United Nations has lasted as long as any of them because to be fair and not cynical, it's accepted a lot of failures and still gone on and it's only been able twice to get the Security Council to vote unanimously for action. The first time was Korea when the Soviets were staying away from New York in a huff and didn't get there in time to veto the vote.

Desert Storm was something else, by then the Soviet Union was a dismembered giant and in no shape to veto or stop a UN force, mainly American, charging into Kuwait and Iraq with 100,000 men and all those frightening smart weapons.

President Reagan may seem to have contradicted my theory, no president loved the military so conspicuously, none spent more time saluting, not one warned everybody so often that America was going to click its heels and stand tall on, as we say, his watch. The strange fact that more than any Western leaders since the Second War, Reagan was responsible for winding down the Cold War and the threat of mutual nuclear destruction. Here's another story altogether, but as for sending American troops anywhere into action, President Reagan for all his parade ground flourishes didn't do it unless he had an almost ludicrously crushing superiority in numbers. What was it in Grenada, 10,000 brave Americans putting down 600 Cubans, what caused this trance or trauma was no secret as I said last time, it was the fear of a second Vietnam, which dogged Americans for two decades and still dogs them that once you send men into battle, there's no saying when it will end and how many thousands of casualties you'll have to suffer.

This fear was very strong in the summer when Saddam Hussein walked into Kuwait and even on that January night two years ago when the action began, an immense fearful calm fell on the people of this country. But I don't believe any president in recent memory has been so hobbled by the Vietnam trauma as Mr Clinton for, of course, the main personal reason that he had been a young man who, if he did not evade, avoided the Vietnam War, which made his relations with the military sticky in his first few months, especially since he committed the enormous tactical blunder of making the question of homosexuals in the forces his first big political issue.

But I think behind all this first with Somalia and then with Bosnia, there must have been always at the back of his mind ready to leap to the front of it the dread fear that he'd find himself commander-in-chief in a long and ruinous war and then what a howl would have deafened and immobilised his administration.

You'll remember that when he did decide to go into Somalia, he paid tribute to the old trauma by announcing a date for the withdrawal of American troops that must have been a giggly day for the guerrillas to be the beneficiaries of the first promise that the enemy would fight for only so long and then go home, so what's going to happen after that March deadline? Let's not think about it.

But now Bosnia, what suddenly stiffened the Clinton policy on Bosnia, what made him decide to lead the punishing air strikes if the Serbs didn't withdraw their heavy guns? What made him talk in his explanatory press conference as if the siege of Sarajevo was something that had been started a week ago; it's been going on for 18 months and that, what is it, 1,200,000 civilian casualties don't bear thinking about.

I believe the answer is simple, not terribly inspiring if you're looking for a new impulse, a new decisiveness in American policy, the answer is the television pictures of that Sunday mortar explosion in the square and the sights of so many grisly variations of human corpses among the 64 who were killed. Am I saying that a new turn in American foreign policy was triggered by the television pictures? Yes. Somehow, the 18 months of arguing and fighting and suffering and temporising and threatening and dithering, all were banished by the vivid image of those scattered dead. The UN commander himself more or less admitted it in the wake of the American agreement to deliver an ultimatum to the Serbs.

The present atmosphere, these things can change overnight like a weather system and I'm talking before the weekend, the present atmosphere in Washington is one of shall we say guilty relief, I was going to say a modest sense of triumph and there'll always be a senator and a congressman to wrap himself in the flag at the drop of the first enemy casualty, but in the nick of time to spoil any American feeling of a triumph as the Serbs started moving their heavy guns, a bogey man appeared in the shape of a bear. The Russian foreign office in the person of Mr Vitaly Churkin and a very personable person he is. He – on and I suppose the orders of Mr Yeltsin who interestingly enough could not be reached by Mr Clinton's hotline for two whole days – just as we were about to proclaim that the evil Serbs had caved in before our NATO-UN-US threat, Mr Churkin repeated on the telly the very alarming warning of the Russian foreign minister before the UN 10 days before, a speech not picked up in many places.

I think I mentioned his warning the Security Council of all instant warmongers that not only would air strikes cast a very dark shadow on American-Russian relations, but in a speech which I have no doubt will be recorded for all time in the Russian, the new Russian history books, he first suggested that he took the Serbian view of that Sunday mortar outrage, namely that it had been done secretly by the Bosnians – Hitler's tactic before the invasion of Poland. Then he went on, once before in Sarajevo, in 1914, a similar provocation led a global tragedy. I thought this was a most extraordinary line to take, we've known for ever of course that the Russians are the Serb's allies but not in any blood-brother sense and they weren't going to interfere in anyway with the air strikes or the UN were they? Well, we discovered they were and in a twinkling they performed a little master stroke of diplomacy, which left the new braced Clinton backbone looking wobbly indeed.

What the handsome Mr Churkin said just before the deadline approached was that the strikes, the bombing would mean all-out war, continuing the same rhetorical flourish as his boss at the UN, but then came the moment of wonderful deception. In effect, he was saying, "Mother Russia couldn't bear the thought of the Third War, which confidentially the UN-American initiative was about to provoke, so we have gone to the Serbs and offered to send in from Croatia our very own troops, paratroopers 400 of them in United Nations uniform. To do what? To keep the peace.

This must feel like a very backhanded compliment to General Rose who has been there for months in the thick of it running the large peacekeeping force under awful conditions and with no sure protection as we saw only the other day in Tuzia where the general's forces were refused air cover and saw five Swedish soldiers wounded, so to keep the peace, which really I think means to the Russians and the Serbs to protect the Serbian forces from the murderous possibility of infantry contact with Bosnians, who would be more than their equals without the looming of the Serbian's heavy weapons. To keep the peace also, I'm afraid, means keeping or freezing the Serbians' territorial gains in cruder words to say, "Well men, I see the war's over, so let's not be so tasteless as to say the Serbians won it, but the new borders surely must be the ones they fought for and reached". The coming bout of peacekeeping could be quite as long as it was in Korea.

At the least we should notice the Russians have come out from behind their recent role of playing Oliver Twist, they're back in the diplomatic game as an independent superpower. The arrest of that American counterspy the other day showed also that the KGB has not turned into a detachment of unemployed Keystone Cops, it is just as wiley and widespread a secret service as ever it was.

And talking of Korea, another glaring example came up of seeing is believing or the effect of television on foreign policy: an American colonel there said that the South Koreans were not so much afraid of a nuclear attack from the North as of the 700,000 North Korean conventional forces assembled shall we say not quite mobilised within 60 miles of the demilitarised zone, why so? A former American ambassador to South Korea said it in seven words, "they saw the Gulf War on television".

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