The Role of the United States of America to End a War in Bosnia and Herzegovina: 1992-1995

Between 1991 and 1995, close to three hundred thousand people were killed in the former Yugoslavia. The international responses to this catastrophe was at best uncertain and at worst appalling. While both the United States and the European Union initially viewed the Balkan wars as a European problem, the Europeans chose not to take a strong stand, restricting themselves to dispatching U.N. †œpeacekeepers†� to a country where there was no peace keep, and withholding from them the means and the authority to stop the fighting. In Bosnia the Europe sought to avoid military involvement, citing every excuse she could think of not to intervene to prevent the genocide of 250.000 Bosnian Muslims, who ultimately died at the hands of their Serbian tormentors. The British and French, too, who had primarily responsibility for dealing with this European problem, had persuaded the United Nations to impose an arms embargo on both sides in the Bosnian war. As often happens, the embargo did little damage to Serbia's military capacities, since their army had inherited the extensive military hardware Yugoslavia had amassed under its former Communist regime. But the embargo did deny the means of self-defense to the poorly equipped majority Muslim population in Bosnia. Unarmed, they could do little to repel the invaders or to protect their villages. 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. However, from the beginning of Yugoslavia's collapse, Americans divided into two groups, broadly defined: those who thought that Americans should intervene for either moral or strategic reasons, and those who feared that if they did, they would become entangled in a Vietnam-like quagmire. As awareness of ethnic cleansing and genocide spread, the proportion of those who wanted the United States to †œdo something†� increased, but they probably never constituted a majority. Nevertheless, when the situation seemed most hopeless in July 1995 - the United States put its prestige on the line with a rapid and dramatic series of high-risk actions: an all-out diplomatic effort in August, heavy NATO bombing in September, a cease-fire in October, Dayton in November, and, in December, the deployment of twenty thousand American troops to Bosnia. Finally, in late 1995, in the face of growing atrocities and new Bosnian Serb threats, the United States decided to take part in Bosnia, the war was over and the America's role in post-Cold War Europe redefined. There is a lesson here to be learned by Europe that Bosnian Muslims are the best Christians in the world. The policy-makers cannot have a double heart, one for love and other for hate because some European leaders were not eager to have a Muslim state in the heart of Europe. They spoke of a painful but realistic restoration of Christian Europe. Of course Christianity, like any other religion has nothing to do with the barbarities and the greatest collective failure of Europe. The lesson that Western civilization thought it had drawn from the genocide of World War II †" †œNever again!†�- must now be qualified to read: †œexcept when politically inconvenient.†�