[Mb-civic] The Bosnian Example for Iraq - Jackson Diehl - Washington Post Op-Ed

[William Swiggard]

The Bosnian Example for Iraq

By Jackson Diehl
Monday, November 21, 2005; Page A15

Ten years ago today the leaders of three hostile ethnic and religious 
communities in a war-ravaged land reluctantly agreed -- thanks to 
overwhelming U.S. military and political pressure -- to stop fighting 
and live together under their country's first-ever democratic 
government. The Dayton accords, which created a fragile confederation 
and ended Bosnia's civil war, have been successful enough to earn two 
days of high-level ceremonies in Washington, including a gala luncheon 
tomorrow at the State Department hosted by Secretary of State 
Condoleezza Rice. It's hard to avoid the comparison between the country 
deemed a quagmire in the 1990s and the one where the United States is 
bogged down today.

Start with the U.S. and other NATO troops who began arriving in Bosnia 
shortly before Christmas 1995. There were 60,000 of them at first in a 
country of 4 million, or more than twice as many per capita as now are 
deployed in Iraq. Ten years later they are still there -- the American 
contingent left only a year ago. All sides agree they will have to stay 
on for years to come, since Bosnia's police and army forces are still 
not ready to take over full responsibility for security. Billions have 
meanwhile been spent on reconstruction, under the supervision of a 
Western proconsul with the power to overrule the Bosnian government.

Despite all those years of heavy-handed occupation, the Western forces 
have never captured Bosnia's foremost insurgents. Radovan Karadzic and 
Ratko Mladic, who together oversaw the deliberate murder of thousands of 
civilians, are still at large. Serb leaders in Bosnia only now are 
beginning to show some willingness to renounce the poisonous nationalism 
that caused the war. The current Bosnian Serb president, Dragan Cavic, 
reportedly has promised to call for Karadzic to surrender during this 
week's events in Washington.

Like Iraq's Sunnis, the Bosnian Serbs were forced to abandon a regime of 
genocide and domination by a punishing U.S. military campaign. Unlike 
Iraqis, however, the Bosnians were subjected to an equally forceful 
American diplomatic offensive. Their leaders, along with those of 
neighboring Serbia and Croatia, were sequestered at a military base in 
Dayton, Ohio, and browbeaten for 21 days by an international tag team 
led by one of the toughest and most capable U.S. diplomats, Richard 
Holbrooke.

Even then, the best that could be achieved was a deeply flawed plan for 
federalism that allowed the creation of Serb and Muslim-Croat ministates 
united by the weakest of national governments. There was a three-member 
rotating presidency, 14 ministries of education and 15 police agencies. 
The Serb statelet, at first, was little more than an appendage of its 
neighbor Serbia, then still an adversary of the West.

This week's events are in part an effort to fix Bosnia's constitution, 
after a decade-long timeout. The Serbs, who have resisted most, have 
been energetically worked over by both the Bush administration and the 
European Union; Undersecretary of State Nicholas Burns, the department's 
third-highest official, has devoted a large slice of his time to it 
since the beginning of this year. Burns hopes the Serbs and other 
Bosnians arriving in Washington today will announce their acceptance in 
principle of constitutional reforms, including abolition of the 
tripartite presidency. By April, it is hoped, the Bosnian parliament 
will ratify amendments that could finally open the way to an effective 
national government, foreign investment and the prospect of eventual 
integration into the European Union.

So, in summary: Bosnia has had proportionately more Western troops than 
Iraq and more money for reconstruction. It has had aggressive high-level 
diplomacy by a unified transatlantic coalition, backed by both 
Democratic and Republican administrations in Washington. It has been 
given 10 years by those governments, which have repeatedly resisted the 
temptation to pull their troops out. Even so, it is only now that a new 
generation of Bosnian leaders is willing to consider the political 
compromises necessary to stabilize their country without foreign forces 
or high commissioners.

They will arrive in a Washington where, one month after the ratification 
of a similarly imperfect constitution in Iraq, Democrats are calling for 
a timetable to withdraw U.S. troops, and where even the Republican 
chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, John Warner, is hinting 
that Iraqis have 180 days to pull their country together. They will 
lunch at a State Department that has delegated the daunting work of 
forging an Iraqi compromise to its ambassador in Baghdad, with next to 
no help from the president or U.S. allies and no power to sequester 
anyone on a military base. The Bosnians will have a chance to hear both 
Democrats and Republicans talk, not about how to succeed in the latest 
American intervention but about how the other party is lying about it.

Perhaps they will conclude that their tiny Balkan country is far more 
important to the United States and its security than Iraq. That, anyway, 
is what the record shows.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/11/20/AR2005112000863.html
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