HOW A POTEMKIN FORCE COWED THE MIGHTY WEST

By Georgie Anne Geyer, Universal Press Syndicate.

The Herald Tribune, Tuesday, July 23, 1996

PALE, Bosnia-Herzegovina - Driving up to the top of the winding mountain roads above Sarajevo, you can scarcely make out the ruins of the devastated Bosnian city below you. But you can see with utter clarity the Serbs' Potemkin "War machine" that the West so gullibly swallowed for four full years. There it stands, all the "ter-ror"that American and Euro-peanmilitary men trembled be-fore:old tanks, their sides packed with sand; antique mortars nearly falling off the mountainsides; artillery pieces out in the open, without even trees to hide them. The good news is that there is much private head-hanging among American and European military men about the analyses of this war. One of the European officers who made the drive with me said with disgust, "Six helicopter gunships would have taken all of this out." Another said, "When I saw those primitive artillery emplacements, I was physically sick." One of the major American military planners in Bosnia reviewed with me the strange and pervasive passivity that affl

icted the Western militaries over the Bosnian war since 1991, thus handing the Serbs a free hand to wreak havoc across the Balkans. "It was the military thought process," he said. "There was the idea that you can't solve problems with air power alone. What we didn't realize was the [lack of] fighting will of the people on the other side. We didn't realize that they were thugs who would be horrified by bombing." Once one gets up to Pale. the "capital" of the so-called Republika Srpska, the mood becomes one of political surrealism. Pale is a small red-roofed ski lodge town, nestled in high pine forests. Yet it was from here that the Bosnian Serbs relentlessly slayed tens of thousands of people while the West dithered. Meanwhile, in the ruins of Sarajevo below, there is no question that, in military terms, the situation has improved enormously since the arrival of the NATO force last winter. There is a hushed peace, and many of the provisions of the Dayton accords are finally being carried out. The United State

s has confirmed that Iranian fighters have left Bosnia, while $300 million in cash and equipment has been raised for aiming the Bosnian Army, and the long-awaited Defense law designed to merge the armies of Croatia and Bosnia has been passed by both governments. "We have made more progress in the military field than we dreamed of," Admiral Leighton Smith, overall commander of troops in Bosnia, told me in his offices in Sarajevo. "Every single day, 52,000 men and women are doing a hell of a lot to make this country achieve peace." Then he added thoughtfully, "I'm not sure I'd describe the current conditions in Bosnia as peace but perhaps as the absence of war leading to peace." Yet even while the military's fine technical work here should be commanded, "Bosnia" with all that word symbolizes to the world - represents for the U.S. military as well as for others serious questions that are as yet only being posed privately. For four years, for instance, the top military brass in Washington essentially lied about

Serbian capacities. Theybuilt a bunch of thugs and rustic "mountain Serbs," dependent on pitiful weaponry, into "super-Serbs" whom the West dared not confront. They insisted that bombing would not hurt these Serbs and seemed amazed when bombing eventually ended the whole thing with expectable swiftness. If the U.S. military could so misanalyze this rather simple and primitive war, how can it be trusted to analyze other wars? To inspire future generations with courage and conviction? Or to protect Americans when new conflicts occur? After the Dayton accords of last November, the message was that now we Americans were going to get tough, to use power, to show this time we really mean it. No more would the Serbs " string along" the West! But as a matter of fact, this hasn't happened. Indeed, the entire mission is characterized by technocratic excellence overlaid by bureaucratized passivity, deriving from the utter horror of taking any casualties. It doesn't take the other side very long to get onto that, and th

e Bosnian Serbs have done so again. How long will it take other potential mass murderers to figure out how to operate with impunity by manipulating this hesitant power?