America Abroad

By Strobe Talbott

History has doubly cursed the Balkans. it not only energizes the combatants in the most perverse way imaginable, it also paralyzes the would-be peacemakers. While the crisis deepens, well-intentioned outsiders ponder their options and fret about the risks in terms borrowed from other wars in other eras.

Vietnam is the name not just of a country but also of a syndrome from which the U.S. still suffers -- notwithstanding Dr. Bush's self-congratulatory claim to the contrary a little more than a year ago. Senior officials of his Administration have repeatedly defined the danger awaiting the U.S. if it leads a large-scale military intervention in the Balkans as "another Vietnam."

It was partly in his overeagerness to avoid "a Vietnam-like quagmire" that Bush so abruptly suspended Desert Storm. As a result, Saddam Hussein remained in power to slaughter his citizens and rebuild his military. Thus the continuing fixation on the V word has figured decisively in the two great foreign policy failures of the Bush Administration: it was too quick to end the Gulf War, and it has been too slow to mobilize a multinational intervention that might end the Balkan war.

As Bush and everyone else keep saying, Iraq and Yugoslavia are challenges to the post-cold war order. That realization in itself should exclude, or at least mute, references to Vietnam in the debate over how to meet those challenges.

Southeast Asia was the hot front of the cold war. Hanoi had the Kremlin's backing. Serbia is not North Vietnam. It has virtually no friends and certainly no superpower godfather. The U.S. and the international community, notably including Russia, are united against what Serbia is doing. Slobodan Milosevic's regime can be isolated politically and, if necessary, defeated militarily in a way that Ho Chi Minh's could not.

The North Vietnamese and the Viet Cong were fighting to reunify a country that had been artificially divided. While they were doing so under a now discredited political banner, they still had the powerful force of nationalism on their side. The Bosnian Serbs, by contrast, are fighting to perpetuate their domination over large parts of a country that had been artificially unified.

Nor should the Bosnian Serbs be seen as the moral equivalents of their fathers and grandfathers, who tied down 30 Axis divisions a half-century ago. That analogy -- another of the cliches that help rationalize Western dithering -- could hardly be more misleading. It disgraces the heroism and patriotism of the Yugoslav partisans in World War II. It exaggerates the number and prowess of the Serb forces in Bosnia today, as well as their local support. For them patria is a Greater Serbia in which Croats, Albanians, Hungarians, Macedonians and Slavic Muslims are subject to second-class citizenship, if not "ethnic cleansing."

Finally, all the talk about the Serb forces controlling the hilltops like latter-day Chetniks implies an invidious comparison between what the Nazis were trying to do in the 1940s and what the United Nations ought to be doing today. Hitler was bent on conquering Yugoslavia, while the West should be saving the remnants of that country from the consequences of the end of communism.

That is the essence of what has happened in southeastern Europe as well as in many parts of the former Soviet Union. For decades the state was an extension of a centralized, hierarchical, repressive, conspiratorial ideology. The system collapsed, therefore so did the state. Human nature abhors a civic vacuum. That is why Serbs and Croats, as well as Azeris and Armenians, Georgians and Abkhasians, have gone back to slitting each other's throats and gouging out each other's eyes.

There is another cliche that haunts Western commentary and policymaking on the Balkans: "These people have been killing each other for a thousand years; therefore we can't possibly do anything to stop them." It is tempting for Westerners to regard the barbarisms they see on the front pages as something all too natural in faraway countries of which they know little. The breakdown of the state can happen in the West too. Remember those five days in California three months ago, when the structure of America cracked and Los Angeles momentarily became Sarajevo?

In the Balkans, more important than the legacy of ancient quarrels is recent experience: 45 years of intercommunal harmony in Bosnia, where Serbs, Croats and Slavic Muslims lived together in close to a model of tolerance and pluralism. What ruined it all was the arrival on the scene of an essentially external force: Greater Serbian imperialism, sponsored and armed by Belgrade. That is why there must now be a decisively more powerful external force, one that goes far beyond the U.N.'s current peacekeeping mission. What is needed is an all-out peacemaking effort, also authorized by the U.N. but armed and manned largely by NATO and led by a U.S. that can thereby truly cure itself of the Vietnam syndrome.