Assignment 1
Case 8.1 Pros and Cons of Balkan Intervention59
“Must the agony of Bosnia-Herzegovina be regarded, with whatever regrets, as somebody else’s trouble? We don’t think so, but the arguments on behalf of that view deserve an answer. Among them are the following:
The Balkan conflict is a civil war and unlikely to spread beyond the borders of the former Yugoslavia. Wrong. Belgrade has missiles trained on Vienna. Tito’s Yugoslavia claimed, by way of Macedonia, that northern Greece as far south as Thessaloniki belonged under its sovereignty. Those claims may return. ‘Civil’ war pitting non-Slavic Albanians against Serbs could spread to Albania, Turkey, Bulgaria, and Greece. The United States has no strategic interest in the Balkans. Wrong. No peace, no peace dividend. Unless the West can impose the view that ethnic purity can no longer be the basis for national sovereignty, then endless national wars will replace the Cold War. This threat has appeared in genocidal form in Bosnia. If it cannot be contained here, it will erupt elsewhere, and the Clinton administration’s domestic agenda will be an early casualty. If the West intervenes on behalf of the Bosnians, the Russians will do so on behalf of the Serbs, and the Cold War will be reborn. Wrong. The Russians have more to fear from ‘ethnic cleansing’ than any people on Earth. Nothing would reassure them better than a new, post-Cold War Western policy of massive, early response against the persecution of national minorities, including the Russian minorities found in every post-Soviet republic. The Russian right may favor the Serbs, but Russian self-interest lies elsewhere. The Serbs also have their grievances. Wrong. They do, but their way of responding to these grievances, according to the State Department’s annual human rights report, issued this past week, ‘dwarfs anything seen in Europe since Nazi times.’ Via the Genocide Convention, armed intervention is legal as well as justified. The UN peace plan is the only alternative. Wrong. Incredibly, the plan proposes the reorganization of Bosnia-Herzegovina followed by a cease-fire. A better first step would be a UN declaration that any nation or ethnic group proceeding to statehood on the principle of ethnic purity is an outlaw state and will be treated as such. As now drafted, the UN peace plan, with a map of provinces that not one party to the conflict accepts, is really a plan for continued ‘ethnic cleansing.’”
Case 8.2 Images, Arguments, and the Second Persian Gulf Crisis, 1990– 1991
The analysis of policy arguments can be employed to investigate the ways that policymakers represent or structure problems (Chapter 3). We can thereby identify the images, or problem representations, that shape processes of making and justifying decisions. For example, during times of crisis, the images which United States policymakers have of another country affect deliberations about the use of peacekeeping and negotiation, the imposition of economic sanctions, or the use of deadly force. This case looks at the deliberations surrounding the U.S. decision to use military force to produce an Iraqi withdrawal from Kuwait during the Second Persian Gulf Crisis of 1990–1991.
It is important to recognize that there have been three Persian Gulf crises since 1980. The First Persian Gulf Crisis, which involved 8 years of war between Iraq and Iran, spanned the period September 1980– August 1988. The longest war in the twentieth-century, an estimated half-million civilians and military
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