"The Machine that Fails," Foreign Policy 1970-1971
"As a member of the bureaucracy myself, I feel its shortcomings with a special keenness. It is hard to decide whether to play the drama as tragedy, comedy, or simply theater of the absurd."
Above, Amb. Richard Holbrooke testifies regarding Afghanistan and Pakistan before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in July, 2010.
Forward to the book Paris 1919: Six Months that Changed the World
"In diplomacy, as in life itself, one often learns more from failures than from successes. Triumphs will seem, in retrospect, to be foreordained, a series of brilliant actions and decisions that may in fact have been lucky or inadvertent, whereas failures illuminate paths and pitfalls to be avoided -- in the parlance of modern bureaucrats, lessons learned."
Above, Holbrooke speaks on the phone with Secretary of State Hillary Clinton prior to her first official visit to Afghanistan in Nov. 2009.
"Washington Dateline: The New Battles," Foreign Policy, Winter 1973-74
"The fall of 1973 saw surprising new friendships and alliances within the foreign policy community. Battlelines formed during the Vietnam war, which looked for a long time like they might be fairly permanent alignments, have been breached and reformed in strange ways. Until the end of this summer, Washington and the nation had been divided essentially along hawk-versus-dove lines. Vietnam had hung over the city like an oppressive cloud since the mid-1960's. One's position on that issue seemed to define where one stood on most other issues. Prior to that, there were other periods in which a fundamental division in foreign policy occasioned a great debate. Now we may be seeing the early outlines of another. It is too early to tell for certain, and the extraordinary political crisis that grips Washington obscures the question, but things look different today than a few months ago.
It was the rush of events that forced the rapid shifting of positions in Washington. Questions about the detente with the Soviet Union would not go away. Andrei Sakharov became an effective spokesman against it. The Russians' treatment of Jews gained attention. And evidence that the Russians knew about the Mideast war in advance, and did nothing to prevent it, raised more doubts.
As the new battlelines began to form, they became a special problem for the new Secretary of State. Would he be a beneficiary or a victim of them? Some old supporters were now turning against him, and help was coming from strange quarters. It was clear that Kissinger would be in his usual position in the middle, though sometimes jumping from one side to another, trying to blur issues and embrace opponents, trying to keep himself and his policies from being wrecked in the debate."
Above, Holbrooke, sits with former U.S. President George H.W Bush and former Secretary of State and National Security Adviser Dr. Henry Kissinger at the 2008 Kissinger prize ceremony.
"A Generation Conditioned by the Impact of Vietnam," Washington Post, Dec. 20, 1969
"[Young] Americans have grown up with Vietnam. The war has been with them at the dinner table, flickering on the TV, as they grew up. Vietnam is to a large extent all they know about their country in the outside world.
If a student was born in 1950, he was 12 when the advisory build-up began; 15 when the bombing of North Vietnam and our troop buildup started. Ask him about McCarthy, Hungary, Berlin, Cuba, and his answers are vague and incomplete. If it happened before 1965, it is ancient history.
Ultimately a country's self-image, its self-respect, are crucial to how it faces the future and how it conceives of its own role. The young -- especially the privileged young -- are growing up with a grim picture of their country, not at all like the picture that nurtured their parents, or even their older siblings."
Above, young people protest in front of the White House in Nov. 1965.
"Pushing Sand," The New Republic, May 3, 1975
"Our behavior in Vietnam can be judged on many levels. In historic and global terms, it stands under examination as a part of a worldwide policy, and will be judged on that basis. In domestic terms it will be judged for what it did to our national soul, to our self-image, which will not be the same again. In Vietnam itself, which is what concerns me here, it was the most curious mixture of high idealism and stupidity, of deceit and self-deceit, of moving heroism and inexcusable cruelty. For a long time I tried to separate out these contradictory strains, to understand why some things seemed right and some others seemed wrong, to see also if there was any way that some good could come out of the whole mess. But then finally it all seemed to come down to one simple, horrible truth: we didn't belong there, we had no business doing what we were doing, even the good parts of it."
Holbrooke, as the U.S undersecretary of state for East Asian and Pacific affairs, meets with the Vietnamese vice minister of foreign affairs in Dec. 1977. Holbrooke visited Vietnam as part of a post-war effort to normalize relations with the Communist government.
"Bosnia: The 'Cleansing' Goes On," Washington Post, Aug. 16, 1992
"Three conclusions leap from a brief visit [to Bosnia]. First, the prison camps and the siege of Sarajevo that have so shocked the world are only the tip of the disaster unfolding here. The real outrage is the totality of the ethnic cleansing, which has been going on for many months with little international attention and is now close to completion.
Second, what the Serbs do not do with guns, winter will do: Ethnic cleansing will become ethnic freezing. Relief efforts will be unable to protect an enormous number of people -- perhaps close to 2 million -- who now lack heat, shelter and even blankets for the bitter weather ahead.
Finally, the humanitarian effort that has been the focus of the outside world's concern deals with the consequences -- not the cause -- of this catastrophe. Obscured in the debate over whether the U.N. should authorize force to deliver relief to existing victims is the fact that there is no debate and no plan to prevent more victims from being created.
Every international relief worker here knows this awful truth and grapples with the dilemma it presents. Are they, by helping the victims of ethnic cleansing, inadvertently implementing and sanctioning it?
Beyond that lies the question of whether the world, having increased its humanitarian efforts in the former Yugoslavia, will now begin to turn away? There are so many other desperate problems elsewhere, and this one seems insoluble. Or will the leaders of the great democracies, at this moment of post-Cold War promise, recognize that Yugoslavia -- along with Cambodia -- poses the first and most critical test of whether the new U.N. system will work?"
Holbrooke stands with former U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations and Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, former National Security Advisor Tony Lake, and former Vice President Al Gore, prior to a press conference to the announcements of the Dayton Talks to end the conflict in Bosnia.
"The Face of Evil," Washington Post, July 23, 2008
"Standing with Slobodan Milosevic on the veranda of a government hunting lodge outside Belgrade, I saw two men in the distance. They got out of their twin Mercedeses and, in the fading light, started toward us. I felt a jolt go through my body; they were unmistakable. Ratko Mladic in combat fatigues, stocky, walking as though through a muddy field; and Radovan Karadzic, taller, wearing a suit, with his wild, but carefully coiffed, shock of white hair.
The capture of Karadzic on Monday took me back to a long night of confrontation, drama and negotiations almost 13 years ago -- the only time I ever met him. It was 5 p.m. on Sept. 13, 1995, the height of the war in Bosnia. Finally, after years of weak Western and U.N. response to Serb aggression and ethnic cleansing of Muslims and Croats in Bosnia, U.S.-led NATO bombing had put the Serbs on the defensive. Our small diplomatic negotiating team -- which included then-Lt. Gen. Wesley K. Clark and Christopher Hill (now the senior U.S. envoy to North Korea) -- was in Belgrade for the fifth time, trying to end a war that had already taken the lives of nearly 300,000 people.
These three men -- Milosevic, Mladic and Karadzic -- were the primary reason for that war. Mladic and Karadzic had already been indicted as war criminals by the International Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia. (Milosevic was not to be indicted until 1999.) As leaders of the breakaway Bosnian Serb movement, they had met with many Western luminaries, including Jimmy Carter.
But, in a change of strategy, the negotiating team had decided to marginalize Karadzic and Mladic and to force Milosevic, as the senior Serb in the region, to take responsibility for the war and the negotiations we hoped would end it. Now Milosevic wanted to bring the two men back into the discussions, probably to take some of the pressure off himself. We had anticipated this moment and agreed in advance that, while we would never ask to meet with Karadzic and Mladic, if Milosevic offered such a meeting, we would accept -- but only once, and only under strict guidelines that would require Milosevic to be responsible for their behavior.
I had told each member of our negotiating team to decide for himself or herself whether to shake hands with the mass murderers. I hated these men for what they had done. Their crimes included, indirectly, the deaths of three of our colleagues -- Bob Frasure, Joe Kruzel and Nelson Drew, who had died when the armored personnel carrier they were in plunged down a ravine as we attempted to reach Sarajevo by the only route available, a dangerous dirt road that went through sniper-filled, Serbian-controlled territory. I did not shake hands, although both Karadzic and Mladic tried to."
Former Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic walks with Ambassador Holbrooke after touch down at Wright Air Force base prior to the Dayton Peace Talks.
"Rebuilding Nations," Washington Post, April 1, 2002
"[As] Washington confronts the challenge in Afghanistan, the question must be asked: What's wrong with nation building anyway? Somewhere along the road from Vietnam -- where it was once the proudly proclaimed mission of the United States, including its military -- to Somalia, this once important part of our national security policy became a dirty word. By the mid-1990s everyone in Washington was proclaiming that we were not nation building, and this trend only accelerated after the argument about it during the second presidential debate in 2000.
Euphemisms were substituted; I'm on a nongovernmental task force studying 'post-conflict reconstruction.' But whatever we call it, nation building is an essential part of our policies in the Balkans and Afghanistan -- and when we move against Saddam Hussein, it will be essential in Iraq as well."
Holbrooke sits with Afghanistan's President Hamid Karzai at a press conference in Feb. 2009.
"A Sense of Drift, a Time for Calm," , Summer 1976
"As America enters its third century, we find an odd conjunction in American political life -- a convergence of two different critiques of America: the Vietnam-based, guilt-ridden anguish of the left, and the striking emergence, in the last year, of a new pessimism within what is often called the neoconservatives. Each group inadvertently reinforces the other, and adds to our national sense of drift and uncertainty.
Vast differences, of course, exist between the two groups here described, and it is for this reason that one must assume, and hope, that their present conjunction is inadvertent and temporary. Increasingly, the left has looked on the state as an enemy, a force that must be weakened since it cannot be captured. The conservatives on the other hand now see strong state power as their potential ally, and view what they regard as its erosion as a grave threat. These are not straw men; they are the focus of the debate. Both approaches are equally misguided. Liberals, predictably, will find themselves in the middle of this overly simplified spectrum. Their present anguish is by now well documented. It stems primarily from Vietnam, but many other issues merged over recent years to reinforce the lessons of that ugly war. The roll call of policies which liberals advocated and which turned out to be corrupt is almost too long to list.
A few key elements of this view of America as a corrupting influence in the world should be mentioned, however, if only to remind us of just how sad our recent string of revelations has been. Beyond Vietnam they include: Cambodia, Chile, Bangladesh, Burundi, Angola, Cyprus, FBI and CIA abuses and excesses, Watergate, Lockheed and other improper business practices overseas, ITT, and assassination attempts. Each revelation was an essential part of the process of redefining our past and rethinking our future; those who argue that the revelations themselves are wrong are missing the deeper significance of what they call an 'orgy of self-destruction.' It is essential to understand our past in order to reshape our future.
But the left's critique of America's role in the world has taken on some ominous overtones. There are those who now accept the proposition that because America has done some evil things, America itself is an evil force in the world. The theological overtones are disturbing, of course, but so is the ease with which some people can now embrace extreme extrapolations.
But even more fundamental is the abuse of reason which is involved in such black-and-white views of foreign policy. At its best, foreign policy is often a choice between the lesser of two evils. And many policy issues come down to a choice between conflicting positive principles -- when, for example, the principle of nonintervention in the internal affairs of another country conflicts with a concern for human rights.
These conflicts must be resolved in ways that do not seem immoral or unreasonable to most people. That this so often has not always been the case does not mean that our nation is itself evil or incapable of finding a better foreign policy. It does mean that we have been badly led. Thus, in their sweeping horror at the consequences of the use of power, in their willingness to assume the worst about their own country, in their disillusionment with the bright, liberal rhetoric of the Kennedy years, the left critique -- at least at its anguished worst -- is a cul-de-sac, a dead end, which could lead to isolation from the rest of the nation."
Holbrooke, as the CEO of Global Business Coalition, speaks at a news conference at the European CEO Summit on Business and AIDS in Oct. 2006.
