Split up Iraq on the Bosnia model?
TWELVE summers ago, Bosnian Serb fighters rounded up 8,000 Muslim men in the village of Srebrenica, herded them into nearby woods and slaughtered them.
The massacre was one of the final acts of ethnic cleansing in the Bosnian conflict, a three-year war of siege, expulsion, rape and execution. And it so jolted the United States and allies in Europe that they threatened bombing to compel the warring factions to meet peaceably at an Air Force base in Dayton, Ohio.
They met. There in Ohio, they signed an armistice that created separate lives and separate leadership to assure a semblance of peace among the Catholic Croats, the Eastern Orthodox Serbs and the Bosnian Muslims. The solution — partition — was history’s familiar first choice among last resorts.
Perhaps predictably, it could be said that a kind of Bosnia nostalgia is taking hold in Washington these days over the quandary of Iraq, at least among those who look to its lessons for a way to end the violence.
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The massacre was one of the final acts of ethnic cleansing in the Bosnian conflict, a three-year war of siege, expulsion, rape and execution. And it so jolted the United States and allies in Europe that they threatened bombing to compel the warring factions to meet peaceably at an Air Force base in Dayton, Ohio.
They met. There in Ohio, they signed an armistice that created separate lives and separate leadership to assure a semblance of peace among the Catholic Croats, the Eastern Orthodox Serbs and the Bosnian Muslims. The solution — partition — was history’s familiar first choice among last resorts.
Perhaps predictably, it could be said that a kind of Bosnia nostalgia is taking hold in Washington these days over the quandary of Iraq, at least among those who look to its lessons for a way to end the violence.