Word: balkanized
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There is a rising chorus for intervention in the Balkan wars. It is a call to folly. There is an understandable desire to "do something" -- but without any calculation of cost or effectiveness. Worse, without any consideration of the objective...
This, say the hardheaded interventionists: Unless the Serbs are stopped in Bosnia, they will next turn on Kosovo and Macedonia and deeply injure our interests by precipitating a larger Balkan war involving Albania, Greece, Turkey, Bulgaria and possibly Russia...
That, at least, is an argument. One would still counter that: 1) the connection between the fate of Bosnia and a larger Balkan war is speculative; 2) interventionists have not shown how they propose to drive Serbia out of Bosnia; and 3) the better way to prevent a general Balkan war is a partition of Bosnia coupled with a "red line" drawn at Kosovo and Macedonia, a strong warning to Serbia that aggression there, which would indeed engage vital American interests, would elicit a massive, Baghdad-like military response against Belgrade...
...blue helmets not only have expanded operations geographically but also have broadened their scope. Prior to the Balkan crisis, the U.N. had never set out on a humanitarian mission to a war-torn country before a cease-fire was declared, but it is doing so in Bosnia. In Somalia the Security Council took the unprecedented step of approving the current U.S. military intervention to provide protection for food distribution, even though the U.N. had received no official invitation. When the two sides in El Salvador's civil war could not agree on a land-distribution plan that was crucial...
...Last July at the U.N. he accused Europe and the U.S. of being more concerned with "the rich man's war" in Bosnia than with the fate of the starving in Somalia. He picked a fight with both Lord Carrington, then the European Community's chief negotiator in the Balkan crisis, and Sir David Hannay, Britain's U.N. ambassador, over the same issue, commenting that it was "maybe because I am a wog" that he had been criticized in the British press...