To End a War by Richard Holbrooke Random House US, 408pp, $27.95
If New York is the Big Apple, Washington is certainly the Curate's Egg. If you have ever worked with Americans in diplomacy, you will know that there are magnificent, highly talented and superbly trained negotiators among them; but there are others, alas, who will cause you to despair that the Lord chose to place the destinies of our world in such hands.
Ireland was extraordinarily fortunate - all of Ireland, both Ulster and the rest of us - when we ran into George Mitchell. For one thing, he already knew us better than we perhaps realised. Those Irish parliamentarians - and there were quite a few of them - who went to see him when he was active in the US Senate, recall a polite, serious man - unlike many a man on that famous Hill - who received them warmly and reacted with well-informed comments and questions to what they had to say. Whatever the result of the interview, he had a way of sending you out with the feeling that you had learned something there, that you had got a point or two across to him, and that the visit was worth it.
It is truism, of course, that the perceived interests of a great power are often the reverse of its real interest, and that a measured investment of partnership and co-operation will achieve more in a short time than will years of pressure and bullying. Be that as it may, Mitchell quickly earned respect and popularity in a part of our island not known for a surfeit of either. "The United States sent one of its most able, skilled, talented, humble, politicians", marvelled Lord Alderdice of the Alliance Party, "and frankly we didn't deserve him." And David Irvine of the PUP told Mitchell in characteristically honest terms: "I don't know how you stood us all that time."
But after all, historically the outstanding act of American generosity was George Catlett Marshall's European Recovery Programme, which we remember as the Marshall Plan. It led to the revival (perhaps, indeed, survival) of the war-ravaged West and the emergence of the Europe we know today. If one can say that about Europe, then, looking at our own small corner of it, one can say without blushing that George Mitchell is the George Marshall of Northern Ireland.
With the best will in the world, you could never say it about the author of this book, even had we been afforded the honour of having him as a negotiator in any part of Ireland. To be fair, he is not totally ignorant about this country and its problems - though they are certainly not his subject - and he even finds space in this intensely egotistical book for little Irish touches, from banal observations about the silly shamrock shape of the "Dial Your Relatives in America" pay phone near the ladies' toilet at Shannon, to the information that he himself worked on the Irish problem, among others, when he was appointed Assistant Secretary of State, and to rather more relevant details about what President Clinton said to the three Balkan Presidents in the Elysee Palace in Paris: "Two weeks earlier he had made a spectacularly successful trip to both Ireland and Northern Ireland (sic)," writes Holbrooke. "Now he made an eloquent comparison between Bosnia and Ireland. After fifteen months of ceasefire in Ireland, he said, `it is unthinkable for the people to go backward. The whole situation has changed. You need to do the same.' (Mr Holbrooke does not, to be sure, make the President carry the analogy as far as Canary Wharf, which looms in the near distance.)
This "Architect of the Dayton Agreement", as American journalists call him, is considered a Clinton loyalist, but rarely can a diplomatic memoir have appeared in which the author describes in such unblushing detail his own achievement. This has the interesting effect of bringing out into the open much that has the ring of truth in it, and that in more traditional forms of "quiet diplomacy" might have been glossed over. The description of the utter messing that went on in the Situation Room in the bowels of the White House as the Americans struggled to stay out of the Bosnian war is merciless, and no more mercy is shown to the President and to Vice-President Gore than to anyone else, including even the flat statement that these two gentlemen - the so-called Principals - rarely attended what were supposed to be their own meetings. There are equally frank accounts of the endless power-struggles of Washington bureaucrats (not, of course, confined to that place or that group) including some of the ways in which the author himself outflanked his rivals, most notably National Security Adviser Tony Lake.
Thus, you might call this an inadvertently honest book. If it is nevertheless misleading, it is because of the author's stubborn refusal to recognise ethnic hatred as a source of war. We Irish could perhaps teach him a thing or two about that one. But it is Holbrooke who teaches the world, all through this book. The idea of ancient hatreds, he informs us, is "a vague but useful term for history too complicated (or trivial) for outsiders to master". I'll bet that put you in your box, along with outsiders like Rebecca West, who wrote what is arguably the best travel book of the century, Black Lamb and Grey Falcon, in which she exercised a soothsayer's gift to see into the strange soul of the South Slav. Holbrooke eliminates her under his first heading: "Bad history, or the Rebecca West Factor".
Sent packing too by our pedagogue is that other outsider, Larry Eagleburger, a hard-nosed professional who was US Ambassador to Yugoslavia and became Secretary of State under Bush. It takes a lot to convince Larry that any external adventure can serve American interests. That was why he opposed involvement in Northern Ireland, and on the present subject he declared forcefully that "Until the Bosnians, Serbs and Croats decide to stop killing each other, there is nothing the outside world can do about it".
It takes just a footnote for the author to dispose of the Yugoslav diplomat and Nobel laureate Ivo Andric, but Holbrooke shows no wider acquaintance with his great historical novel, The Bridge on the Drina, published in 1945. Andric, himself a Bosnian Serb - though, significantly, there are Croats who claim him as one of theirs - attributes the perpetual calamity of Balkan history to "that dark background of consciousness where live and ferment the basic feelings of individual races, faiths and castes, which, to all appearances dead and buried, are preparing for later far-off times unsuspected changes and catastrophes without which, it seems, peoples cannot exist and above all the peoples of this land".
Never mind about that, says Mr Holbrooke, who rejects the possibility of such atavisms and is convinced that he has invented a new form of Pax Americana which he proceeds, with characteristic modesty, to explain in simple terms for us: "Since November 21, 1995, `Dayton' has entered the language as shorthand for a certain type of diplomacy - the Big Bang approach to negotiations: lock everyone up until they reach agreement. A `Dayton' has been seriously suggested for Northern Ireland, Cyprus, Kashmir, the Mideast, and other festering problems."
So spake Zarathustra: and I confess it made my hair stand on end. This fundamentalist, convinced of the certainty of the triumph of US interest through the exercise of absolute power, has for his royal protector President Clinton - or perhaps Mr Gore - hence his new job as US Representative to the United Nations. The New York Times, in an editorial so well-balanced that it says nothing at all, describes him as the most undiplomatic of diplomats but nevertheless persuasive enough to be a good choice for the UN post. The abject failure of his latest Kosovo talks hardly supports that view. Many UN officials who worked with him on the Bosnian negotiations were put off, says the NYT, by what they and numerous others perceived as his arrogance. "But head-cracking has served him, and American interests, well in the past."
Head-cracking? I thought they called it kicking butt. Meanwhile, in Kosovo Polja, the Plain of the Blackbirds, that sacred soil soaked with Serbian blood and Serbian mythology, history awaits its turn to repeat itself.
Tadgh F. O'Sullivan worked for six years as Counsellor at the Irish Mission to the UN in New York and later was Ambassador to Yugoslavia, the US, the Soviet Union and France