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I. The Mission
A. U.S. Interests in the Balkans
President Bush and Geopolitics. When Serbs expelled Croatians from Krajina in 1990 and Muslims from Bosnia in 1991, President Bush's Secretary of State James Baker declared: "We don't have a dog in that fight." Baker's successor Lawrence Eagleburger, agreed: "This tragedy is not something that can be settled from outside and it's about damn well time that everybody understood that. Until the Bosnians, Serbs and Croats decide to stop killing each other, there is nothing the outside world can do about it."2 The situation was viewed as a European problem that would ultimately burn itself out. U.S. geopolitical interests centered on major powers--Russia and China.
The United States did join France, Germany, Italy, the U.K. and Russia in a Balkans "Contact Group" and supported a U.N. Security Council arms embargo and economic sanctions. In response to public outrage, the U.S. also enabled a U.N. ad hoc tribunal at The Hague to prosecute individuals for war crimes in the former Yugoslavia. None of those efforts reduced the carnage. In the 1992 Presidential election campaign, Clinton attacked Bush, the "foreign policy president," for ignoring ethnic cleansing.
Only when Milosevic ordered the killing and expulsion of Muslims in Kosovo did President Bush threaten unilateral U.S. military action. If Muslims now fled to Albania, Macedonia, and Bulgaria, those refugees would inflame ethnic rivalries in fragile states and might also exacerbate differences between NATO members Greece and Turkey.
In Bush's final days, . . . Eagleburger, sent a classified cable to Belgrade with instructions that the acting U.S. ambassador read it to Milosevic -- verbatim, without elaboration, and face to face. The Dec. 24, 1992, text, . . . read in its entirety: "In the event of conflict in Kosovo caused by Serbian action, the U.S. will be prepared to employ military force against Serbians in Kosovo and in Serbia proper."3
