See no evil, make no policy: a former State Department insider reveals how his bosses ignored atrocities in Yugoslavia and stayed a step behind the journalists.

• Author: Kenney, George

The Bush administration pronouncements on the Yugoslav crisis between February and August exhibited the worst sort of hypocrisy. I know; I wrote them. For seven months, in addition to other duties, I was responsible for drafting most public statements on the crisis in Bosnia from the State Department's Yugoslavia desk in Washington. My job was to make it appear as though the U.S. was active and concerned about the situation and, at the same time, give no one the impression that the U.S. was actually going to do something significant about it.

The goal from the beginning was not good public policy, but good public relations, and from that perspective, the administration's approach was a smashing success. It managed to downplay the gravity of the crisis and obscure the real issues. Of course, it did so at the expense of civilian casualties in numbers that are not yet known. Unable to abide this policy, I resigned on August 25. Before I left, however, I got a first-hand, behind-the-curtain look at how the State Department bureaucracy, taking its cues from Bush and Baker, created policy that could not be squared with reality, let alone defended. The trick in this instance was to ignore any facts--whether they pertained to atrocities, rumors of concentration camps, or starvation--that would complicate the policy goal of not getting involved.

There is plenty of blame to go around. Bosnia was an instance in which good policy did not necessarily make for good politics, and Bush was committed to staying aloof for reasons that, as far as I could tell, had everything to do with cowardice, apparently fearing an election-year backlash in the polls for intervening abroad. (Democrats were already pounding Bush for caring more about foreign affairs than America's domestic woes.) Bush refused to take even the most timid of steps--like demanding a full accounting of the rumors of atrocities.

Making matters worse, officials at State made virtually no effort to spark Bush to action. Guided by the notion that higher-ups at the White House were concerned more with winning in November than righting any wrongs abroad, department brass simply lacked the guts to confront Bush's senior cabinet officers with arguments that American policy was off course. So timid were State bureaucrats--both senior foreign service officers and appointed officials--that they refused even to probe into reports of Serbian concentration camps. As a result, their policy recommendations, when they did turn them out, were illconceived. The...