 "A good book with several drawbacks" | 2009-07-27 |
| - Reviewed By Vitaly Rugalev from Moscow, Russia |
Virtues:
- detailed, day-to-day description of activites in preparation for Dayton and its implementation;
- thorough analysis of the US posture on Bosnia, inter-governmental debates and military-civil cooperation (or - quite often - disagreements);
Drawbacks:
- the book lacks overall analysis of resolution of the conflict in Bosnia in the wider context of international politics; the description of the European position seems to be rather biased;
- R.Holbrooke's posture on the Bosnian issue is obviously (though sometimes on reasonable grounds)anti-Serb;
- "To end a war" understandably lags behind the post-1998 ground-breaking developments on the Balkans;
- while reading the book one may feel that the author's principal aim was to promote his own achievements, but not to present clear description of the situation.
For whom is this book best suited: excellent guide for Bosnia's (and in general - former Yugoslavia's) recent history researchers, biographers of the key decision-makers of that time.
For those "ordinary readers", interested in the Bosnia conflict, it may seem rather boring. Look for better - i.e. more analytical and not descriptive - works.
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 "One-Sided garbage" | 2009-01-21 |
| - Reviewed By Kristina from CT, USA |
For anyone to pick up a book by Holbrooke and call it "unbiased" is utter nonsense.
All I saw in this book was a pathetic man trying to make himself relevant when people have forgotten about him. He is patting himself on the back for resolving the Yugoslav crisis yet has it even been resolved?? Here he is being prejudiced against all Serbs, calling them hard-headed, cold, brutal, etc and that's ok! Had he been talking about Muslims instead of Serbs, he would be in hiding right now or dead.
Let's see him come out with another book explaining why the situation in Bosnia isn't better, why Croats and Serbs are moving out, why they are giving passports to Muslims that we later found trying to plan terrorist attacks on OUR soil here in the US (and not to forget to mention the Fort Dix brothers from kosovo). There is even talk of war in Bosnia AGAIN (see article in TIME magazine called "Will Bosnia Test the Obama Administration?").
The above mentioned article even talks about Holbrooke being worried that Bosnia is regressing, and "that the Western powers should swiftly and strongly engage to prevent a renewed conflict and ensure Bosnia's evolution into a 'functional and EU compatible state'". Gee sir, you were so sure of yourself and your accomplishments in your book, who would have thought you could be wrong?!?!? Apparently the fools reading this book and lapping up every last word as if they were at the Last Supper with Jesus himself.
This book is garbage, sorry folks. I just started my research on this conflict, and unfortunately I'm not liking what I find. Our country messed up big time. I feel we've made demons of a whole group of people (Serbs) while making martyrs - wrongfully - (Muslims of Bosnia) out of another.
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 "Negotiating the End of the Bosnian Civil War - Dayton Accords" | 2008-06-19 |
| - Reviewed By Bill Romanos, III from Palm Beach Gardens, Florida, USA |
This book is all about negotiation. It's about Richard Holbrooke's work to end Bosnian War. He goes into details about the entire process of negotiation. How the site was selected and why, the size of the tables, the issues, the preparations before and during the negotiations, the threat of and actual military actions taken by NATO (bombing), negotiation strategies and tactics, everything.
Anyone interested in the break-up of the former Yugoslavia, the Bosnian civil war, Serbia, etc. or anyone interested in complex negotiation, will thoroughly enjoy this book and learn a great deal. |
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| "Post-Cold War diplomacy in action" | 2006-10-24 |
| - Reviewed By J. Mosher from Ohio, USA |
In November, 2005, I attended a conference examining the implementation of the 1995 Dayton Peace Accords, which ended the war in Bosnia-Herzegovina. The event was held in the same Wright-Patterson Air Force Base facilities used a decade earlier, and was attended by numerous individuals that took part in the negotiations. One of the primary lessons I took away from this conference is the incredible amount of hard work that goes into effective diplomacy. It's daunting and fraught with risk. Accordingly, I believe Richard Holbrooke's To End a War is an excellent recap of the events leading up to Dayton, the hard work that went into the peace effort, and the initial obstacles to the agreement's implementation.
The book is written entirely from Holbrooke's point of view as lead negotiator of the American team charged with brokering peace in Bosnia. After covering some obligatory history, it picks up with Holbrooke's small "shuttle diplomacy" team constantly moving between Washington, Belgrade, Zagreb, Sarajevo, and numerous other European capitals. This portion of the book is extremely interesting and reads like a who's who of international political figures in Europe during the mid-1990s. After an incredible amount of diplomatic effort, an international peace conference is agreed upon and held in Dayton in late 1995. Holbrooke compellingly describes the edgy, contentious atmosphere and the painstaking evolution of the final agreement. Finally, he reviews some of the initial challenges implementing the accords, including convincing the military Implementation Force to exercise an assertive role in executing its mandate.
Throughout these events, meetings and interplay among Serb president Slobodan Miloseviæ, Bosnian president Alija Izetbegoviæ, Croat president Franjo Tuðman, and their subordinates are described in detail. (Interaction with Miloseviæ is particularly interesting.) In addition to balancing the hostility between these warring parties, Holbrooke and his team must tend to the concerns of European countries striving for prominence after the collapse of the Soviet Union, a fragile, image-conscious Russian Federation, and disagreement among diplomats and policy makers back in the U.S. Again, diplomacy is hard work.
Ultimately, the reader should take the book for what it is: an account written from the perspective of one person (acting in a politically appointed capacity, no less). Certainly some of Holbrooke's points and appraisals will be challenged by others involved in the events. That being said, To End a War gives the appearance of being factually accurate. While his interpretation is certainly subject to criticism, Holbrooke's description of events looks solid. Readers familiar in the war in Bosnia and the Dayton Accords will find this a must read. In addition, the writing is compelling enough to draw in anyone more generally interested in diplomacy, international relations, and statecraft.
Reasons to read this book:
>>An excellent account of post-Cold War U.S. diplomacy under Clinton.
>>Interesting description of political and personal interplay between Miloseviæ, Izetbegoviæ, and Tuðman.
>>A fascinating portrait of Miloseviæ, in particular.
>>Detailed personal account of Dayton Peace Accords negotiation. |
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| "Milosevic's Favorite Bar in Dayton, Ohio" | 2006-01-15 |
| - Reviewed By Etienne ROLLAND-PIEGUE from Tokyo, Japan |
Imagine you are a regional or a global power dealing with a country torn by a civil war. Warring parties won't talk to each other and prefer to let guns speak, but they know that nothing short of a political solution will allow them to break the stalemate. They turn to you to solve this mess, but they are at the same time deeply resentful of your intervention and more than ready to denounce your interference if peace negotiations turn awry. Your allies, as well as the so-called international community, are not very supportive either: you know they will claim paternity to the victory in case of success but that you will the only one to bear the blame if things fail. To complicate matters, you know that you have a very short window of opportunity to exploit before the country plunges back into internal warfare. What do you do?
Well, a good way to start would be to read Richard Holbrooke's book, To End A War, published in 1998. Holbrooke was President Clinton's chief negotiator to the Balkans and the architect of the Dayton agreements which brought the Bosnian war to a close and put Bosnia on the map. His narrative of the twenty days of negotiations that took place on a remote army base in Dayton, Ohio, has since then become a classic among apprentice mediators and would-be peacemakers. As the author himself acknowledges, "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..." The list could be extended since the book was published.
Attention to details matters. The author describes the care attached to the shape and size of the negotiating table (a major stumbling block to the Paris peace talks with the North Vietnamese in 1968, to which Holbrooke participated as a junior diplomat), the setting of the compound, the choice of audio channels for translation, the eating arrangements, etc. The rules of the game were set at the beginning: no talking to the press or walking out of the venue; most discussions to be conducted as "proximity talks", whereby the mediator moves between the different parties, who rarely meet one another face-to-face. Some elements were left to chance: the proximity of Packy's All-Sports Bar, the main source of recreation at the base, provided a neutral ground where the Croats gathered to cheer their hero, Toni Kukoc of the Chicago Bulls, while the Serbs waited to cheer Vlade Divac of the Los Angeles Lakers, and all parties united fleetingly to watch America's Favorite Home Videos. Milosevic grew especially fond of "Waitress Wicky", with whom he exchanged quips and hummed favorite songs.
The key to the success was the cohesiveness of the negotiating team, bound together by the tragic loss of three senior officials in a mission to Sarajevo early in the process. Interestingly, Holbrooke pays tribute to the role played by the Treasury Department, represented at Dayton by one of its most brilliant young economists and which, along with the World Bank, devised the framework for a common currency and assembled an economic package that provided a strong incentive for Izetbegovic to sign the deal. The importance of the economic aspects of a peace treaty is another lesson that is as valid today as it was at the start of John Maynard Keynes' public career. |
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| "A first-class temperament and a first-class intellect" | 2005-11-24 |
| - Reviewed By Author, 'Build Your Own .Net Language and Compiler' (Apress May 2004), father of from Hong Kong, China |
Holbrooke is sorely missed. He was one of the most competent and intelligent diplomats representing the US since General George Marshall's era.
This book is a fair assessment of the conflict and America's role in ending it, which Clinton and Holbrooke were able to undertake after Clinton found his footing in office by 1995.
The reader below strangely rates the book highly while completely trashing Holbrooke and this is telling, for Serbians and their sympathizers have, like Irishmen in Yeats' time, "with hearts grown brutal" fed themselves on fantasies.
Ultimately, believing the lie results in a more global confusion.
In actuality, Holbrooke, far from being "taken in" by the late Alija Izetbegovic, was quite clear about Izetbegovic's character and motives. Holbrooke retails an amusing story about Alija's showing up at Pamela Harriman's Paris mansion dressed like Che Guevara. Holbrooke was well aware that like Milosevic, Izetbegovic cared only about his country and his career, and the only difference that emerges in To End a War is that Izetbegovic put Bosnia before his career.
Therefore Holbrooke reserves his highly diplomatic scorn for the Serbian side. While not engaging in any tirades, Holbrooke sticks to the facts which are as I write being confirmed in the Hague and finally being made available to the Serbian public, in a collective "who knew?"
We think of diplomats as Hollow Men without strong convictions or moral seriousness on their own: we think of lawyers in the same way. We don't reflect that in modern society, alienation for even the elite MEANS that diplomats might have to deal with unpleasant thugs politely, or that in an adversary system, a lawyer might have to represent a John Gotti or Ken Lay.
Legal and political regression is a reality however, and causes more and more people to clamor for simple, "black and white" causes that, in alienated (which is to say dysfunctional in psychobabble) lives, people can vicariously identify with.
Holbrooke shows how to resolve the alienation. Not for a second did he change his personal opinion about the relative morality of the Bosnians versus that of the Serbians, nor should he have had to; just as President Clinton deserved even as President a personal life which right was violated by Starr, Holbrooke was entitled to infer, especially from his access to secret reports, that the Serbians were by far the worst.
But in childish regression, people in America (forced, they think, in low-level symbolic jobs to be Empty Suits) actually believe that one is either an ideologue or an Empty Suit, and that there are no other choices.
A diffuse sanctimony, equally diffused on the Right (with absolutist Fundamentalism being common) as on the Left (with a sort of nonsense-Heidegger committment to humility and authenticity systematically disempowering progressives), informs American life. The result is that Americans, like little old ladies with a savings account, are uniquely prey to bunkum steerage and the long con, with 2003's "weapons of mass destruction" being only the largest and smelliest pigeon drop.
Holbrooke has that urbanity and sense of humor, shared with his boss the great Bubba, which is immune to the long con.
General Marshall was different, a man of his era whose immunity to bunkum was that of the New England sort, long out of date.
In the late 1940s, there was simply nothing sexy in George Marshall's essentially pitching in with the women of Berlin at the bottom level, who cleaned up the town, for what Marshall was doing with his Plan was the same thing at the top.
Nor was there anything sexy about seeing to it that a somewhat questionable Virginia company specializing in advising foreign governments on military matters armed the Croatians with modern weapons, and pointing them west, saying, go get em, boys. In fact, the whole affair was reprehensible on a humanitarian basis because it caused mass flight of Serbians in Krajina.
Even if part of this relocation was voluntary and a symptom of the fears of poorly-informed Serbian rural folk, this was still an injustice, and to have a hand in it made Holbrooke poor copy and an undesirable guest on Larry King.
But the tasks addressed were the staple of traditional diplomacy, basically a matter of drawing lines on map so that men don't get killed, and then seeing them get killed anyway in all too many instances.
Not being sexy, taking responsibility, and staying cool: this being, in other words, a traditional grown-up of the sort that in America, is only seen for the most part in the armed services. And the tragic daily loss of real grown-ups in Iraq as a result of the chickenhawks' incompetence may encode a more global war, in America, on the very idea of being a grown up even in the reified and military way.
Even Bill Clinton, far more unable to be tarred with a Yugoslavian brush, had to delegate adult tasks to others lest a childish and regressed public start screaming bloody murder in front of TeeVee, and today, this delegation of adult tasks has reached the level of a murderous farce, with Cheney loose about the shop.
It took a grown up, a *mensch* to force Slobodan Milosevic to sit down in Dayton and negotiate an end to the war. It took a first-class individual to manage the conference by objectives.
Holbrooke, it appears, selected Wright-Paterson in one of the more boring areas of the USA so that Milosevic would not be able to party hearty while stonewalling.
There's an especially funny section about the only place where Slobo could go for a drink during the conference, a sports bar where the Butcher of the Balkans was a favorite of the waitresses. Being Middle Americans, the waitstaff didn't know anything about the Balkans and cared less, and the waitresses just thought Milosevic a charming old rogue from Cleveland, it appears.
Thanks, however, to Milosevic and the still at-large Karadzic, Bosnia is indeed more Moslem-confessional than it should be, and Holbrooke foresaw this happening; the brutalized turn brutal, with hearts grown brutal; any dog trainer knows this. As Holbrooke shows, the Serbian insistence on destroying cosmopolitanism CREATED today's Bosnia which in a limited way enforces Moslem rules: for example, today, Sarajevo's bars close at 11.
However, there is little indication today that Bosnia is a danger to its neighbors and even Serbia's record is improving.
I look forward to Secretary of State Holbrooke under President Hilary Clinton, in part because only a first class intellect and a first class temperament will rescue the US from the mess it's in, created by childish, regressed and emotionally manipulative half-truths slicker than the Serbian version of history, but able, in the same way, to galvanize TV brains into a doomed cause.
President Bush seems to think that diplomacy is public relations. As Holbrooke shows, it is hard work. I hope reading this book inspires people to enter the Foreign Service.
Of course, this would be AFTER Bush leaves office. There is no place in America's diplomatic corps today, it seems, for intelligence, just for people to lecture other countries on what they should be doing, with a signal futility even under its own value-system that was on display, this week, during Bush's trip to China.
Holbrooke shows that Americans can be cosmopolitans, and how a truly cosmopolitan foreign policy, able to suspend judgement of Milosevic at Wright-Paterson, gets results. George Marshall got the results Harry Truman wanted in Italy and France (non-communist governments) by accepting socialist parties in power, and a large Communist element in the general populace and in coalition governments.
This was because Marshall was able to "parse" international situations and subordinate ideology to specific and achievable goals. His era was an exception to the anti-intellectualism of American foreign policy in which we manage not by parsing a moral grammar but by reacting to ideological keywords.
This is hard work. Marshall and Holbrooke, as subordinate men, put in long hours and had no opportunity to grandstand as did Kissinger. Marshall was later driven out of public life by Senator McCarthy because, apparently, McCarthy wanted a 1948 war using atomic weapons between the US and Russia, on the brutalized terrain of Western Europe, and a return to the Stone Age, the favorite terrain of people like McCarthy, and Milosevic.
Holbrooke was also sidelined, of course, by the Bush coup d'etat of 2000.
I hope Mr. Holbrooke is willing like Cincinnatus to leave his plow again, and real soon. Although my own politics are to the left of Holbrooke's, I admire him for the same reason I admire John McCain.
Dick, if you're reading this: your country needs you. |
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