That's a great point, and I think that Yugoslavia was one of the very few successful post WWII major military interventions. There's a common pattern where you have a multiethnic state that's held together by a brutal dictator. Often the boundaries of this state were drawn a long time ago in London. There's usually a lot of pent-up ethnic resentment. If you remove the brutal dictator, it spirals into civil war. The Yugoslavia solution of just breaking up the country into tiny ethnic states actually worked pretty well. So well, in fact, that now the constituent parts of Yugoslavia are even coming back together through the EU.
We've seen abject failure in Syria, Libya, and Afghanistan, and mixed results in Iraq with the strategy of keeping the country together and assuming democracy will solve everything.
I'd be interested in your take on the UK documentary The Death of Yugoslavia[0], available on YouTube. It gave me the distinct impression that the US didnt have a strategic vision so much as they got unwillingly dragged into it and felt that they had no option but to try and solve it.
As a lay person not from the Balkans, I was impressed that the filmmakers got all the major players to speak candidly, on camera, about their involvement. Mladic, Tudjman, Milosevic, all there for example. Reminded me of another great series, the World At War.[1]
I’ll check it out. We generally supported the independence claims of each breakaway state in turn. Some of that may have sort of been a default for the time given that the USSR had just broken up without too much violence, and shortly thereafter Czechoslovakia broke up fairly amicably. That probably made Clinton and his people more pro-breakup.
This was discussed a lot in Iraq as well, but I believe the worry was that the Shia state would basically be absorbed by Iran. It’s not clear that what’s happening there now is much better, but Iraq had been seen as a useful counterweight to Iran and the neocons wanted to preserve that. The only problem is that they also wanted democracy, and most of the voters are Shia, so democratic Iraq is always likely to be friendly to Iran.
I don't remember the US directly doing much of anything in ex-Yu, other than some sorties, though they did a lot indirectly by recognizing the new states and providing aid in various forms including armaments and other military supplies and training to make sure the stronger neighbors don't get too aggressive. (Which is way understating what happened in Bosnia, but still).
> I don't remember the US directly doing much of anything in ex-Yu, other than some sorties
Reducing the US/NATO involvement in the former Yugoslavia (both the intervention in the Bosnia War and subsequent deployment of IFOR/SFOR and later the NATO-Yugoslavia War and the subsequent deployment in KFOR) to “some sorties” seems to be missing a bit.
I mean, sure, the combat involvement prior to achieving agreements in both cases was application of air power, but...
That's fair enough. I should not come off as critical of their involvement; without it (especially the less visible non-active pieces) who knows how things would have turned out. And most people I know from there are grateful for the help and view them as heroes. But compared to a theater like Kuwait or Afghanistan they had a lot less active deployment. IIRC there were many air missions out of Aviano.
Just FYI, many of the early Greek city-states were democratic, and they fought like cats and dogs.
Tito kept Yugoslavia in check for decades, and he was Not A Nice Man. The Romans probably had the longest-lasting empire in history, and they were very "not nice."
I'm not sure that there's any "magical" system of government that works better than others.
Also, you have governments that work well for the governed, and ones that don't bother others. Whether or not it is a "good" government probably hinges upon which side of the border you're on.
I remember reading that the best system of government is an absolute monarchy, and the worst system of government is an absolute monarchy.
People are really complex, and "one size fits all," tends not to work for us.
I'm unconvinced that the lack of success in Afghanistan was not primarily driven by the shift of focus to the naked war of aggression in Iraq in 2003, and the subsequent mismanagement of the occupation of Iraq, starting with radical de-Baathification and other rejections of lessons learned in previous (e.g., post-WWII) occupations, both because of the message that war sent to peopke everywhere, including in Afghanistan, about the US and because of long diversion of resources and focus it produced. (And, obviously, the US involvement in Syria was largely a product of that.)
Afghanistan was never going to be easy to succeed at something more than a punitive mission against al-Qaeda, but I think that the fundamental root of much later failure including the ultimate failure in Afghanistan is the 2003 Iraq War.
Post 9/11, the USA had the moral authority to "do something" in Afghanistan. Iran, Russia, and nearly everyone else offered to help. Alas, whereas GHWB was an internationalist, the Cheney Admin's neocons were belligerently stubborn unilateralists. So instead of seizing the opportunity to reset troubled relations (and boost their internal reformers), we further spited them (and empowered their hardliners).
Further, Afghanistan was a failed state. Iran and Pakistan were struggling to manage the refugees. And could do nothing to address the flood of drugs plaguing their people. Afghanistan's neighbors wanted us, needed us, to help them restore stability.
Lastly, the Cheney Admin won in Iraq without firing a single shot. Hussein conceded to ALL of our demands. If Bush had simply declared victory and gone home, he'd've become an int'l hero and considered one of our greatest presidents. (Until Katrina.)
Such a stupid waste. So many dead, so much wrecked and wasted, the middle east further destabilized... Et cetera.
It's hard to say exactly what would have happened in Afghanistan without the distraction of Iraq, but my feeling is that making Afghanistan into a functional western style democracy with western style human rights is more like a 50-100 year project.
In Iraq though, it was always going to be messy simply because of the fact that there are three major ethno-religious groups, two of which had been long repressed. I don't know enough of the details about the 2003-2005 time period to really specifically address radical de-Baathification, but if you institute democracy in Iraq and keep the country together, you're naturally going to get de-Baathification because the Shia will vote the Sunni out. The Sunni will resent this, and as we've seen, this is how you wind up with ISIS.
It's too bad that the borders there are leftovers from colonial map-making. I wonder what "United States of Arabia" would look like if allowed to form on their own terms.
> but my feeling is that making Afghanistan into a functional western style democracy with western style human rights is more like a 50-100 year project.
Easily a 50+ year project, because progress effectively happens one death at a time. A large percentage of the old guard harboring outdated ideas will simply never change. The only hope is changing the minds of the new generations.
We've seen abject failure in Syria, Libya, and Afghanistan, and mixed results in Iraq with the strategy of keeping the country together and assuming democracy will solve everything.