in 1991 because they needed Iraq to balance Ayatollah Khomeini’s fundamentalist Iran
in the Gulf.
The first Gulf War proved to be the source of much American overconfidence. It
appeared to vindicate the efficacy of America’s somewhat new way of war, favouring
airborne bombardment, and the strategic promise in what was widely judged to be an
emerging revolution in military affairs, keyed to the ability to deliver firepower with
extraordinary precision. From being ‘the gang that could not shoot straight’ in the 1970s
and 1980s, at least as viewed from abroad, rather abruptly American soldiers assumed
the mantle of winners. However, the diplomatic and military triumph of 1991 against Iraq
was contextually conditioned. The several contexts of war were all in America’s favour
in 1991. That unusually benign reality would not be repeated in the remainder of the
decade.
The Wars of Yugoslavian Succession
One could argue that the Yugoslavian Federation created in 1919 as thin cover for
the reality of a Greater Serbia was always a domestic disaster waiting to happen.
The country originally called the Kingdom of the Serbs, Croats and Slovenes, then
officially Yugoslavia from 1929, was culturally and geopolitically artificial. It was created
by the post-World War I peace settlement, specifically by the settlement with Austria-
Hungary, which was dismembered by the Treaty of Saint-Germain of 10 September
- Serbia’s ambitions were rewarded as some recompense for its heavy sacrifices
in the war. Also, the idea of a great southern Slav polity was a notion that had strong
appeal to some influential academic advisers to the British government, in particular.
The history of Yugoslavia was ‘nasty, brutish, and short’, to quote Thomas Hobbes.
Violence was endemic in the country’s dynamic ethnic mix, as well as in the cultures of
those ethnicities. The interwar decades were only moderately bloody, but the German
conquest in 1941 released passions and created opportunities which no one seemed
inclined to resist. From 1941 until 1945 there were half a dozen armies of domestic origin
contending for power in German- and Italian-occupied Yugoslavia. The only period of
effective central governance the country enjoyed was when the Croat Joseph Broz Tito
and his largely Serbian communist forces shot their way to national control in 1944–5.
From then until Tito’s death on 4 May 1980, the country was stable and largely untroubled
by internal disorder.
Tito may have ruled with an iron fist, but he did so skilfully. Following his death, it
was only a matter of time before chance events, or unscrupulous politicians with ethni-
cally exclusive ideologies, triggered a process of national disintegration. In 1989 a person
who virtually defines the meaning of ‘unscrupulous politician’, Slobodan Milosevic,
succeeded in securing the presidency of Serbia. His political platform was the promise
to be the saviour of the Serbian nation; to be its protector from the threats posed by the
country’s other ethnicities. Since the Croats were blessed with their own version of the
Milosevic phenomenon in the person of the decidedly fascistic Franjo Tudjman, the stage
was set for serious bloodletting in the 1990s. The principal belligerents were the Serbs
in Serbia, ruled by Milosevic; the Croats in traditional Croatia; the Serbs and Croats in
Bosnia-Herzegovina; the largely Muslim Bosnians (or Bosniacs); and the Albanian
Kosovars, who were numerically dominant in the historically iconic (for Serbians)
After the Cold War: an interwar decade 229