y5d5exxzo's Journal

On February 23, UN Secretary-General...
On February 23, UN Secretary-General Boutros-Ghali agreed with me on an emergency plan to airdrop humanitarian supplies to the BosniansThe next day, in my first meeting with John Major, he too supported the airdropsThe airdrops would help a lot of people stay alive, but would do nothing to address the causes of the crisis

By March, we seemed to be making some progressEconomic sanctions had been strengthened and seemed to be hurting the Serbs, who were also concerned about the possibility of military action by NATOBut we were a long way from a unified policyOn the ninth, in my first meeting with French president Franois Mitterrand, he made clear to me that, although he had sent five thousand French troops to Bosnia as part of a UN humanitarian force to deliver aid and contain the violence, he was more sympathetic to the Serbs than I was, and less willing to see a Muslim-led unified Bosnia

On the twenty-sixth, I met with Helmut Kohl, who deplored what was happening and who, like me, had favored lifting the arms embargoBut we couldnt budge the British and French, who felt lifting the embargo would only prolong the war and endanger the UN forces on the ground that included their troops but not oursIzetbegovic was also in the White House on the twenty-sixth to meet with Al Gore, whose national security aide, Leon Fuerth, was responsible for our success in making the embargo more effectiveBoth Kohl and I told Izetbegovic we were doing our best to get the Europeans to take a stronger stand to support himFive days later, we succeeded in getting the United Nations to extend a no fly zone over all of Bosnia, to at least deprive the Serbs of the benefit of their monopoly on airpowerIt was a good thing to do, but it didnt slow the killing much

In omega pocket watches April, a team of Umilitary, diplomatic, and humanitarian aid personnel returned from Bosnia urging that we intervene militarily to stop the sufferingOn the sixteenth, the United Nations accepted our recommendation for declaring a safe area around Srebrenica, a town in eastern Bosnia where Serb killing and ethnic cleansing had been especially outrageousOn the twenty-second, at the dedication of the UHolocaust Memorial Museum, Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel publicly pleaded with me to do more to stop the violenceBy the end of the month, my foreign policy team recommended that if we could not secure a Serbian cease-fire, we should lift the arms embargo against the Muslims and launch air strikes against Serb military targetsAs Warren Christopher left for Europe to seek support for this policy, the Bosnian Serb leader, Radovan Karadzic, hoping to avoid the air strikes, finally signed the UN peace plan, even though his assembly had rejected it just six days earlierI didnt believe for a minute that his signature signaled a change in his long-term objectives

At the end of our first one hundred days, we were nowhere near a satisfactory solution to the Bosnian crisisThe British and French rebuffed Warren Christophers overtures and reaffirmed their right to take the lead in dealing with the situationThe problem with their position, of course, was that if the Serbs could take the economic hit of the tough sanctions, they could continue their aggressive ethnic cleansing without fear of further punishmentThe Bosnian tragedy would drag on for more than two years, leaving more than 250,000 dead and 2 million driven from their homes, until NATO air attacks, aided by Serb military losses on the ground, led to an American diplomatic initiative that would bring the chanel jumbo flap bag war to an end

I had stepped into what Dick Holbrooke called the greatest collective security failure of the West since the 1930sIn his book To End a War, Holbrooke ascribes the failure to five factors: (1) a misreading of Balkan history, holding that the ethnic strife was too ancient and ingrained to be prevented by outsiders; (2) the apparent loss of Yugoslavias strategic importance after the end of the Cold War; (3) the triumph of nationalism over democracy as the dominant ideology of post-Communist Yugoslavia; (4) the reluctance of the Bush administration to undertake another military commitment so soon after the 1991 Iraq war; and (5) the decision of the United States to turn the issue over to Europe instead of NATO, and the confused and passive European responseTo Holbrookes list I would add a sixth factor: some European leaders were not eager to have a Muslim state in the heart of the Balkans, fearing it might become a base for exporting extremism, a result that their neglect made more, not less, likely

My own options were constrained by the dug-in positions I found when I took officeFor example, I was reluctant to go along with Senator Dole in unilaterally lifting the arms embargo, for fear of weakening the United Nations (though we later did so in effect, by declining to enforce it)I also didnt want to divide the NATO alliance by unilaterally bombing Serb military positions, especially since there were European, but no American, soldiers on the ground with the UN missionAnd I didnt want to send American troops there, putting them in harms way under a UN mandate I thought was bound to failIn May 1993, we were still a long way from a solution

At the end of the first one hundred days of a new presidency, the press always does an balenciaga blue assessment of how well the new administration is doing in keeping its campaign promises and dealing with the other challenges that have arisenThe consensus of the reviews was that my initial performance was mixedOn the positive side of the ledger, I had created a National Economic Council in the White House and put together an ambitious economic program to reverse twelve years of trickle-down economics, and it was making progress in the CongressI had signed the family leave law, and the motor voter law to make voter registration easier, and had reversed the Reagan-Bush abortion policies, including the ban on fetal-tissue research and the gag ruleI had reduced the size of the White House staff, despite its increasing workload; for example, we received more mail in the first three and a half months than had come to the White House in all of 1992I had also ordered a reduction of 100,000 in total federal employment, and put Vice President Gore in charge of finding new savings and better ways to serve the public with a reinventing government initiative whose considerable results would eventually prove the skeptics wrongI had sent legislation to Congress to create my national service program, to double the Earned Income Tax Credit and create empowerment zones in poor communities, and to dramatically cut the cost of college loans, saving billions of dollars for both students and taxpayersI had put health-care reform on a fast track and had taken strong action to strengthen democracy and reform in RussiaAnd I was blessed with a hardworking and able staff and cabinet who, apart from the leaks, worked well together, without the backbiting and infighting that had characterized many previous administrationsAfter a slow start, I had filled more required presidential c c purse appointments in the first hundred days than President Reagan or President Bush had in the same period of time, not bad considering how cumbersome and overly intrusive the whole appointments process had becomeAt one point, Senator Alan Simpson, the witty Republican whip from Wyoming, joked to me that the process was so overdone that he wouldnt even want to have dinner with someone who could be confirmed by the U

On the negative side, I had temporarily dropped the middle-class tax cut in the face of the growing deficit; lost the stimulus program to a Republican filibuster; maintained the Bush policy of forcibly returning Haitian refugees, though we were taking in more Haitians by other means; lost the gays-in-the-military fight; delayed presenting the health-care plan beyond my hundred-day goal; mishandled at least the public part of the Waco raid; and failed to convince Europe to join with the United States in taking a stronger stand in Bosnia, although we had increased humanitarian aid, strengthened sanctions against Serbia, and created an enforceable no-fly zone

One reason my scorecard was mixed was that I was trying to do so much in the face of determined Republican opposition and mixed feelings among the American people about how much government could or should doAfter all, the people had been told for twelve years that government was the source of all our problems, and was so incompetent it couldnt organize a two-car paradeClearly, I had overestimated how much I could do in a hurryThe country had been going in one direction for more than a decade, living with wedge politics, reassuring bromides about how great we were, and the illusory, though fleeting, comforts of spending more and taxing less today and ignoring the consequences for chloe black tomorro