Peace in Bosnia and Kosovo, such as it is, has rested these past several years on an uneasy conspiracy to prop up, but never openly discuss, a set of irreconcilable contradictions. Inhabitants and intervenors have conspired to live with political practices that contradict constitutional principles, and to prolong foreign occupation while genuflecting to the aims of democracy and self-determination. The American foreign policy elite on both sides of the political spectrum has been complicit. Clintonites promoted the conspiracy in order to do something like the right thing without overstepping the seeming bounds of domestic support. The new Bush team disapproves of entanglement in peacekeeping, but it wants to maintain American primacy on the world stage--a contradiction of its own that blocks a graceful exit. And now, Albanian guerrillas subverting southern Serbia and northern Macedonia, and Croat rioters in Bosnia, are disturbing the calm that had preserved inertial peacekeeping as the path of least resistance.
In 1995 President Clinton justified sending American troops to Bosnia with the assurance that they would be out within a year. He mistook an exit date for an exit strategy. As a result, for six years in Bosnia and two years in Kosovo, the United States has continued to collaborate with other occupying powers without an exit strategy, far beyond the passing of the exit date. Unlike the occupations of Germany and Japan after 1945, NATO and the UN have settled into operations in the Balkans that are best understood as institutionalized temporizing. There have been noteworthy efforts at economic reconstruction, but attempts at political reconstruction have been limited and confused.
