AFTER ‘BALKAN GHOSTS’

This is disconcerting, for two reasons. First, there is exceedingly little about Bosnia in Balkan Ghosts. It is a subjective, broad-brush travel book about the whole peninsula, not a policy work. Four of its nineteen chapters are specifically devoted to the former Yugoslavia. Of those, one is about Croatia, one about Serbia and Kosovo, one about Macedonia, and one about the late dissident Milovan Djilas.

That policy makers, indeed a president, might rely on such a book in reachirg a momentous military decision would be frightening if true. More likely, I suspect, Balkan Ghosts supplies handy ammunition whenever inaction is the policy. Back in 1993, Clinton had so little resolve that he was casting around for any excuse not to act.

But that only highlights the second reason why it is frustrating to find Balkan Ghosts cast as an antiintervention tract: I myself have been an outspoken hawk. Since the first half of 1993, I have publicly advocated “lift- and-strike,” even raising the possibility of involving U. S. ground troops, on CNN and C-SPAN, in the Washington Post Outlook section, and in other forums. For several years at Fort Leavenworth and Carlisle Barracks, I have made the case for intervention to the U. S. Army.

And I insist that there is no contradiction between my writing a book that paints an exceptionally grim portrait of group relations in the Balkan peninsula as a whole — and my urging intervention to stabilize a part of that peninsula. Here’s why.

A background of ethnic strife, no matter how awful, does not by itself cause hundreds of thousands of deaths, in conditions that resemble the Holocaust, a few hours from Vienna. For that, one needs an additional factor: a power vacuum created by Western confusion and inaction.

In particular, the argument over whether the Bosnians are historically a peaceful people is a false one. Distinguished writers make a strong case for a tradition of good intergroup relations, especially in cities like Sarajevo. But this ethnic harmony has often been balanced on a knife’s edge. In the short story “A Letter from 1920,” Yugoslav Nobel laureate Ivo Andric writes about an invisible border between love and hate in Bosnia, and how beneath ” so much tenderness and loving passion” sometimes lie “entire hurricanes of tethered and compressed hatreds maturing and awaiting their hour.” Moreover, one must acknowledge not only the peaceful intercommunal tradition present through much of Bosnian history but also the strife there since 1992 (and between 1941 and 1945). Neither Martians nor President Clinton nor even Lord Owen killed Bosnian Muslims. Other Bosnians did.

But then, so what? So what if the Balkans are a confused, often violent ethnic cauldron? Welcome to much of the world. This doesn’t mean you crawl into an isolationist cocoon. You insert troops where overwhelming moral considerations crosshatch with strategic ones, regardless of the character of the local people. What happens in Bosnia will directly influence what happens in Kosovo, Macedonia, Albania, Greece, and Turkey: places that in some cases have tottering governments and high unemployment, not to mention heavy alcoholism, and in other cases have defense agreements with the United States and are bristling with sophisticated weaponry. Further afield, what happens in Bosnia will significantly, albeit indirectly, affect politics in the rest of Europe, in Russia, and even in Syria, whose president, an aging Don Corleone, has always tended to be more accommodating when the United States successfully projects power in contiguous regions.

Finally, even if you accept the notion that the Bosnians are not as angelic as some of their defenders claim, they still have more. going for them than most people in the Third World. Bosnia has high literacy rates, low birthrates, and a memory of bourgeois existence before Tito. There is a bedrock social stability to return to in Bosnia that dces not obtain in, say, Somalia or Haiti. The real success story would be to bring Haiti up to the level of Bosnia in a few decades (as I argued 20 months ago in the Washington Post).

Ethnic hatred or no, the key to Yugoslavia’s colapse is economic. I was in Yugoslavia every year from 1981 though 1989. Each time I went back, the country was poorer. The economy was in a non-stop deceleration, partly due to the crackpot protectionism of Tito’s communism-lite: If one elhnic republic had a certain type of factory, the other republics had to have one, even if it was not necessary. Without this economic malaise, the entire atmosphere in the country would have been different.

The president’s new policy, of course, has problems. The agreement it iraplements is less like peace than divorce. While we push a rhetoric of multiethnic tolerance around the world, our troops in our most high-profile overseas operation will be apartheid cops. The Pentagon keeps sayin; that the troops will merely enforce the lines of separation.

Well, those lines are based on brutally established ethnic divisions. Moreover; our success will depend on Serbian leader Slobodan Milosevic’s ability further to consolidate his autocratic control over Greater Serbia, so that Bosnian Serbs don’t make trouble and renegade Serb militia units don’t go crazy in Kosovo and Macedonia, leading to Albanian uprisings. Clinton now needs Milosevic, who is the century’s most successful war criminal because he has gotten away with his crimes.

To lead, though, is to choose. Any alternative to sending troops at this point is worse, for reasons publicly established. The president, for me, has emerged as a real president. Not to support him on Bosnia is to cower in isolationism and watch NATO disintegrate.

Robert D. Kaplan, a contributing editor of the Atlantic Monthly, is the author of The Ends of the Earth: A Journey at the Dawn of the 21st Century (forthcoming, Random House).