Jordan Michael Smith: From Srebrenica to Baghdad
[Jordan Michael Smith is a writer in Washington, D.C. His writing has appeared in The Atlantic, The Boston Globe, and The New Republic.]
The genocide in Srebrenica, Bosnia, 15 years ago this week continues to haunt European consciences. The massacre is frequently in the news, most recently because relatives of the victims are now asking prosecutors in the Netherlands to charge Dutch peacekeepers with war crimes. For Americans, the anniversary of the massacre will mostly go unnoticed. But it shouldn’t—the horrible events of July 1995 in Srebrenica have a lot to do with why Americans are now in Iraq.
Of course, Iraq was on few minds at the time in Srebrenica, a small town in the east of Bosnia and Herzegovina. There Dutch troops stood by at the U.N.-declared “safe zone” while Serbs overran it, killing 8,000 Muslim men and boys with firing squads. It was the worst crime in Europe since World War II, and it happened while the world watched....
If liberals were disillusioned with the U.N., conservatives were unsurprised. For Republicans, Srebrenica confirmed what they already know: multilateralism was worse than useless, it was counterproductive. So when Iraq came onto the U.S. radar screen in 2002 and 2003, the U.N. had already been discredited in American eyes. “Having proved itself impotent in the Balkan crisis and now again in the Iraq crisis, the United Nations will sink once again into irrelevance,” wrote Charles Krauthammer. And since Saddam Hussein was even worse than Milosevic, making an invasion against Iraq also seemed like a humanitarian imperative.
Many Democrats supported President George W. Bush in Iraq after their Srebrenica failure. As the British columnist David Aaronovitch wrote, there was a “road from Srebrenica to Iraq ... If Bosnia was the betrayal through inaction and appeasement, Srebrenica the consequence and Kosovo the determination not to let it happen again, then the line runs clear.” Americans across the political spectrum supported Iraq after seeing success in the Balkans and concluding that U.S. power was indispensable, says Tony Smith, whose book A Pact With the Devil chronicles the Iraq War. “The animus against Milosevic was such that it was easy for many to put Saddam in the same crosshairs once Milosevic had been successfully defeated,” he says. “In this sense, I see a path from the Balkans straight into Iraq.”...
Read entire article at Newsweek
The genocide in Srebrenica, Bosnia, 15 years ago this week continues to haunt European consciences. The massacre is frequently in the news, most recently because relatives of the victims are now asking prosecutors in the Netherlands to charge Dutch peacekeepers with war crimes. For Americans, the anniversary of the massacre will mostly go unnoticed. But it shouldn’t—the horrible events of July 1995 in Srebrenica have a lot to do with why Americans are now in Iraq.
Of course, Iraq was on few minds at the time in Srebrenica, a small town in the east of Bosnia and Herzegovina. There Dutch troops stood by at the U.N.-declared “safe zone” while Serbs overran it, killing 8,000 Muslim men and boys with firing squads. It was the worst crime in Europe since World War II, and it happened while the world watched....
If liberals were disillusioned with the U.N., conservatives were unsurprised. For Republicans, Srebrenica confirmed what they already know: multilateralism was worse than useless, it was counterproductive. So when Iraq came onto the U.S. radar screen in 2002 and 2003, the U.N. had already been discredited in American eyes. “Having proved itself impotent in the Balkan crisis and now again in the Iraq crisis, the United Nations will sink once again into irrelevance,” wrote Charles Krauthammer. And since Saddam Hussein was even worse than Milosevic, making an invasion against Iraq also seemed like a humanitarian imperative.
Many Democrats supported President George W. Bush in Iraq after their Srebrenica failure. As the British columnist David Aaronovitch wrote, there was a “road from Srebrenica to Iraq ... If Bosnia was the betrayal through inaction and appeasement, Srebrenica the consequence and Kosovo the determination not to let it happen again, then the line runs clear.” Americans across the political spectrum supported Iraq after seeing success in the Balkans and concluding that U.S. power was indispensable, says Tony Smith, whose book A Pact With the Devil chronicles the Iraq War. “The animus against Milosevic was such that it was easy for many to put Saddam in the same crosshairs once Milosevic had been successfully defeated,” he says. “In this sense, I see a path from the Balkans straight into Iraq.”...