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Roger Cohen: Imaginary snipers, real challenges
By Roger Cohen Published: March 26, 2008
NEW YORK: Here's some news for Hillary Clinton: The Bosnian war was over in 1996.
Those of us, like myself, who first went to Bosnia at the start of the war in 1992 and then, in 1994 and 1995, endured Bill Clinton's circumlocutions as we sat in an encircled Sarajevo watching pregnant women getting blown away by shelling from Serbian gunners, know that.
We know that as President Clinton mumbled about "enmities that go back 500 years, some would say almost a thousand years," Bosnia burned. We know what that talk of intractable grievances dating back to 995 was meant to communicate: No Western intervention could achieve anything in the Balkan pit.
Only after the mass murder of Bosnian Muslims at Srebrenica, three years after the initial Serbian genocide of 1992 against that population (and one year after a genocide on his watch in Rwanda), did the gelatinous Clinton develop some backbone. NATO bombed, Richard Holbrooke did his brilliant work at Dayton in November 1995, and the guns fell silent in Bosnia.
So, yes, the war was well and truly over when Hillary Clinton arrived in the northeastern Bosnian town of Tuzla on March 25, 1996. It was over, although she recently recalled "landing under sniper fire." It was over when "we just ran with our heads down to get into the vehicles to get to our base."
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Oh, please. Researching a book, I also visited that base in 1996 to talk to Major General William Nash, then the commander of U.S. troops in Bosnia. If you'd lived the war, the base was a small miracle of American order and security.
Hillary Clinton's transference is intriguing: Suffering Sarajevans ran from snipers during the war her husband let fester. Invented danger, supposed to showcase bravery, may instead betray guilt.
But I'm not going to psychoanalyze the Clintons. I don't have the space to plumb such unquenchable ambition. Few do. Anyway, she now says she "misspoke" about Tuzla. End of story, you might say. But I'd say it's the beginning of another, more important one.
Clinton made up Bosnian sniper fire in an attempt to show that she's tougher than Barack Obama; that she's a hardened, seasoned, putative commander-in-chief ready to respond to crisis when the "red phone" of her fear-mongering ad rings.
John McCain's own recent "misspeaking" about Iran, placing (Sunni) Al Qaeda in (Shiite) Iran, also smacked of muscle-flexing: He wanted to signal toughness to the mullahs in Tehran, where Obama has suggested he'd seek dialogue.
But what the United States, and those that look to it, need now is not more braggadocio from the White House. We've had a seven-year dose. That's enough.
What's needed, rather, is some new, creative thinking about a changed world in which authoritarianism is enjoying a renaissance and America and its allies need to work together to spread peace, prosperity, freedom, equity, security and, yes, democracy.
U.S. hard power has not worked. The Iraq invasion was bungled. European soft power is insufficient.
As Constanze Stelzenmüller of the German Marshall Fund notes in an important recent essay called "Trans-Atlantic Power Failures," a "European Union with 27 member states and a total of 1.8 million men and women under arms" is incapable of pacifying little Kosovo ("one quarter the size of Switzerland") on its own.
The trans-Atlantic bond of Cold War years is gone forever. The alliance is going to be looser, more pragmatic. But it has to find "the right mix of idealism and realism," and a new cohesion, if one-pipeline Russia and one-party, Tibet-tormenting China are not to prosper with authoritarianism-for-export.
Foreign policy debate in this election campaign has been paltry. I'd like to hear something about GWOT - the "Global War on Terror" - the heart of U.S. national security strategy. It amounts to war without end because "terror" is a tactic and tactics don't surrender. GWOT should be abandoned: It's externally divisive and internally treacherous. Al Qaeda can be beaten sans GWOT.
I'd like some discussion of what NATO might do to help spread the Iraqi burden and ease a gradual extrication of most U.S. troops from Iraq.
On issues that cross borders - terrorism, financial market volatility, global warming - and on Iran, Israel-Palestine, Afghanistan, Pakistan and Iraq - three things are essential: a new moral authority in the White House, the capacity for original strategic thought, and a 21st-century understanding of the border-jumping networks that have knit humanity into new relationships.
Obama, in his speech on race, did important things. He confronted reality, thought big, probed division, sketched convergence. He took Americans and many people beyond U.S. shores to a different mental place. Imagine that capacity applied to GWOT, Iran, Russia, China and Israel-Palestine.
If you don't like the sound of that, there's always seasoned swagger of the kind that runs from imaginary snipers.
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