Sarajevo Daily: A City and its Newspaper Under Siege.

• Author: Kenney, George

Tom Gjelten, HarperCollins, $24

We struggle to learn from the Holocaust, the measure of modern state terror, because we desperately wish to avoid repeating its evil. There's a risk, however, of overlearning. As the saying goes, a man with a hammer sees everything as a nail, even if it's a screw. Full-throated advocates of intervention in Bosnia often dwell on the question of genocide in the hope that the high moral imperative of "never again" may influence policy. As one of the original interventionists, I must confess here, I'm guilty myself of having used the term genocide (rarely, with qualifications) in reference to Bosnia, yet I've never been comfortable with insisting it was taking place--mostly because it distracts from the more urgent policy debate.

David Rieff, the author of Slaughterhouse, unconditionally believes the Serbs perpetrated genocide, and that most of the outside world watched indifferently, the same way it ignored the Holocaust. His book sums up what he saw in more than two years of frequent travel into the Bosnian war. In his first pages, he makes a comparison to Auschwitz, setting the tone for the rest of the book--an extended political tract against Serb efforts to exterminate the Bosnians.

The hollowness of the vague, unsubstantiated accounts of mass murder that appear every few pages dilutes Rieff's outrage to the point where it merely raises faint curiosity in the reader: The narrative does not communicate; Rieff paints no great and terrible picture of genocide. To the contrary, he awkwardly daydreams through a jumbled series of anecdotes, throwing in occasional half-baked theories about policy formation. Unless one subscribes to "the Bosnian cause," Rieff offers thin gruel with few new insights. Slaughterhouse can't live up to its title, because it isn't based on facts.

Where, one might ask, are the bodies? Genocide, of course, can't be merely a question of numbers, but one may use numbers as a rough--a very rough--way to figure out a threshold for declaring that genocide happened. Looking back after three years of war in Bosnia, a review of what we know about the numbers is sobering. How many people died? Rieff says more than 250,000. He never supports that claim, or explains its origins, but 250,000 is a number the press has used for some time. The United Nations High Commission for Refugees has no numbers for dead Bosnians, nor does the UN's peacekeeping office in New York. Sources at the International Committee of the Red Cross in Washington and Geneva tell me their estimates range from 20,000 to 30,000 dead. (They say that the war against the Turkish Kurds has been much deadlier, and in Chechnya the death toll may soon surpass Bosnia's.) Friends in the U.S. intelligence community tell me their best guess for confirmed dead runs to tens of thousands. (It's worth noting that Secretary of State Warren Christopher's office has sometimes demanded the numbers, only to discover they don't exist.) Intelligence sources add...