US foreign policy in Bosnia - 2 July 1993

Do you remember two summers ago, the brief flare-up of passion and misunderstanding over the name and the patriotism of a tennis player. He'd always been listed in his short career as a Yugoslav but now suddenly Yugoslavia was yet another exploded Communist country that was disintegrating into its forgotten little nations.

Forgotten by us, that is, by us big boys who'd been more or less running the world for a couple of hundred years. But never forgotten by the nationals themselves, who resented being incorporated, first into a so-called kingdom, when the Austro-Hungarian empire was dissolved.

By the way, a vivid reminder of how easily we ran the old world is a scene that thrilled me as a boy and one I've never forgotten. That morning in, was it 1919, I'm an ocean away from the books, when a Welshman, name of David Lloyd George, born in poverty in a two-room cottage, woke up and went to work in a French palace and simply announced, the Austro-Hungarian empire no longer exists. It was the end and it was the end of all the pomp and the grandeur and the luxury and the vast, extended political power over many small nations of the emperors and the grand dukes and the people with names like Ferdinand and Josef, one of whom started the whole decline and fall by getting himself assassinated in the gorgeous summer of 1914 by a Serb.

Now there, if you feel a little dizzy, let me say we've come full circle back to the tennis player, who raised a little dust two summers ago by refusing to be listed on the tennis tour as I said, first as a Yugoslav, but then most certainly he was not a Serb. To him the Serbs were the new villains. As one of them, a frantic nationalist named Gavrilo Princip had been the original villain who shot the Archduke Franz Ferdinand in his carriage as he was riding and receiving the applause of the people of one of his vassal states, Bosnia, as he rode through the capital, Sarajevo. I recall the hackneyed incident now because I doubt there's anyone listening who is in the least disturbed by names like Bosnia, Sarajevo and Serbia. Yet I swear to you that two, three years ago, you'd have wondered where and what I was talking about. I had not heard of Bosnia and Herzegovina, Serbia, Croatia, since as a toddler I heard the grown-ups bantering these weird names about in the early, boisterous days of the First World War.

Well, I've just mentioned the word that gave us and the tennis player such trouble two years ago – Croatia. When his nationality was to be listed for the spring tournaments of 1991, he exploded first on the Yugoslav mistake and then exploded again, he's a high-strung type, at the worse insult of being listed as a Serb. At that moment the Serbs were launching their assault on the ancient enemy, the Croats. Goran Ivaniševíc declared heatedly and for all to hear, that he was a Croat and must be so designated from now on. Poor old young Ivaniševíc, he came to Wimbledon this year as a threat to everybody. He was the runner-up last year to the Las Vegas lollipop, Agassi. But after fighting his way on three separate days through 14 sets of slamming tennis, he more or less threw in the towel in the last set and shook his head and went off to his grievous homeland.

One of the two American commentators on the men's matches is John McEnroe. It's very odd seeing him up there in a blazer, a shirt and club tie, like a prodigal son of George Bush. It was odder still, after we'd seen pictures of Ivaniševíc at the funeral of his closest friend, who had been killed and then watched him leaving the court, wringing his head like a dog emerging from a breaking wave. It was McEnroe, of all unlikely sympathisers, who said, it was too much to expect Goran to have tennis on his mind and how broken up he'd been by the slaughter in his own country and how, mused the Reverend McEnroe, it was a lesson to us all. Tennis, he was daring to say, was not the whole of life, a thought which leaves the genuine tennis buff deeply puzzled. I once urged a dinner of famous young golfers, amateur champions, to resist the appeal of a million dollars, not to turn pro, to stay amateurs; golf, I said, is not the whole of life. They hadn't the remotest idea what else I could possibly have in mind.

Well, you'll see that my own rapt pleasure in sitting there in front of the magical green turf at Wimbledon was enrapt this year by the fact that the Westerners in and out of the United Nations will frankly confess in private, our policy in Bosnia has been, as Churchill said of the greatly-praised Munich Agreement, an unmitigated disaster. I think the American people are not alone in feeling rather guilty, ashamed, as we used to say, of our waffling impotence over Bosnia. I think the guilt stems from one of the unnoticed legacies of the Reagan era, which is the Hollywood view of American intervention anywhere. Namely that for legitimate propaganda purposes, for the purpose of giving the world due warning, the United States must be seen to be standing tall, at the ready, uniforms crisp, medals shining, hand on the sword's hilt. We shall go in on the understanding that nobody gets killed. This deep general fear has lately been melded or confused with a recalled saying of General Eisenhower that you don't go into a war without seeing the possibility of a way out. He couldn't, in the beginning, see the end of the Vietnam tunnel and neither could General MacArthur, which is why both of them went quietly to the White House and urged President Johnson not to get into a land war, any land war in Asia. And I wonder how they would have felt about Bosnia. No question about Saddam and Desert Storm.

Well, just as we were squabbling in an increasingly sordid and useless way, in the media, about Bosnia, came the rousing word about the missile attack on Baghdad. I myself was, for once, out of touch with any goings on beyond a school graduation ceremony, deep in the green mountains and rolling valleys of Vermont, which is surely the most beautiful of all the eastern states. Not least of all having something unique in the 50 states, something very easy to overlook because it's a virtue that consists in being free from a vice. As the man said, you can't see what isn't there. Billboards – no other state in the union prohibits billboards, so it's like an enormous mountain garden in the jungle of advertising.

My family was too busy plucking and arranging and transporting huge pots of flowers for the outdoor stage, too busy with working and cooking and living to bother with such trivialities as taking in the New York Times or watching that gadget again, what's it called, television. So it was far off, under a mountainside, in the total stillness of a blazing noonday and somebody came out and said, by the way, we've made a missile attack on Baghdad. That was a shocker and I have to confess that my immediate response was one of, if not joy, then of relief. About time, was my first thought. Only about an hour later did my son-in-law arrive to say that the attack was in retaliation for the Iraqi plot to assassinate former President Bush, when he visited Kuwait a month or two ago. To me that was a puzzle, a disappointment at least.

I'd assumed that the United States had acted on United Nations authority, to punish Saddam for his steady and intolerable resistance to the UN nuclear inspection teams. For two years now they've been trying to make him fulfil the armistice terms by destroying all nuclear fuel and the facilities that can turn it into weapons. In the beginning, in the euphoria of the Desert Storm triumph, we were told, among other certainties, that all of Saddam's capacity to make a nuclear weapon had been destroyed. A few months later the Pentagon was ready to admit that Iraq is a large country and that much of it is blank desert, which does not give out magnetic or ultrasound signals of the presence, in underground caves, of plutonium or assembly rods.

The UN inspection teams have been unflagging in their skill and patience but the fact has been rather shamefacedly admitted in United Nations memos to the Security Council, that Saddam has been maddeningly effective in preserving much of his nuclear capacity and is building more and by now is openly defiant of the UN teams and their mission to identify and destroy all fissionable material.

Sooner or later, I believe, he is going to have to be stopped and I thought the other weekend the time had come. But the pretext of punishing a tyrant for a proved plot to assassinate a former head of state is surely a bizarre precedent. On the secret testimony of the CIA, MI6, many other intelligence services, we could start letting off a whole firework display of missiles around the world, as retrospective punishment for plots that were spotted and failed. As Americans think again about the Baghdad missile attack, I know that European politicians immediately asked, did he do it to boost his prestige at home. I don't know, If he did, it didn't work.

The latest national polls showed a mild rise in his popularity and then a swift dip back to normal or rather sub-normal. General approval of Mr Clinton is now below 50%, particular approval for the Baghdad attack has slumped and turned around. I may be wrong but I can't help feeling that, in the battle for worldwide sympathy, Saddam got the better of the exchange of hype. His television scenes of ruined buildings, broken old women, dead children, may be quite irrelevant to the superior ends that Mr Clinton had in mind, but the cruel means left their mark.

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