Imagined Snipers, Real Challenges

By ROGER COHEN
New York Times

Here’s some news for Hillary Clinton: the Bosnian war was over in 1996.

Those of us, like myself, who first went to Bosnia at the start of the war in 1992 and then, in 1994 and 1995, endured President Bill Clinton’s circumlocutions as we sat in an encircled Sarajevo watching pregnant women getting blown away by shelling from Serbian gunners, know that.

We know that as President Clinton mumbled about “enmities that go back 500 years, some would say almost a thousand years,” Bosnia burned. We know what that talk of intractable grievances dating back to 995 was meant to communicate: no western intervention could achieve anything in the Balkan pit.

Only after the mass murder of Bosnian Muslims at Srebrenica, three years after the initial Serbian genocide of 1992 against that population (and one year after a genocide on his watch in Rwanda), did the gelatinous Clinton develop some backbone. NATO bombed, Richard Holbrooke did his brilliant work at Dayton in November 1995, and the guns fell silent in Bosnia.

So, yes, the war was well and truly over when Hillary Clinton arrived in the northeastern Bosnian town of Tuzla on March 25, 1996. It was over, although she recently recalled “landing under sniper fire.” It was over when “we just ran with our heads down to get into the vehicles to get to our base.”

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