Another Connelly Fisking

Floyd McKay hasn't written much of interest lately, so I have turned to Fisking Joel Connelly. In his most recent column he has taken on Iraq, by comparing a proposed John Kerry solution with the Dayton Accords which ended the Civil War in Bosnia-Herzegovina.

The model would be the Dayton Accords, the peace agreement for Bosnia and Herzegovina worked out in 1995 at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Ohio. Participants in and enablers of Yugoslavia's civil war were isolated and made to deal. The accord ended 3 1/2 years of war in Bosnia.

Mr. Connelly hasn't been paying much attention to his history though. That isn't how it worked. The participants were "isolated" for 3 ½ years. We just sat back and asked them to work things out while the UN watched and 100,000 people died. It wasn't until we ended this isolation and got involved militarily and bombed the Serbs that anything started to happen. Milosevic was worried that the Bosnian Serbs would lose and the problems might spill over to affect him. The Bosnian Serbs never did "deal" and refused to participate in the Dayton Accords. Many of them feel to this day that Milosevic sold them out to save his own skin. Only the threat of military force kept them in line. US troops are still in Bosnia 10 years later, albeit in limited numbers.

So basically if he wants to "model" this on the Dayton Accords, that would require leaving, letting a civil war break out and waiting for the parties to tire of it. If an equivalent number of Iraqis died relative to their population as Bosnians, that would be over 600,000 deaths and 6-7 million refugees. Then the US would find whoever was winning the war (losers tend to be more willing to negotiate to begin with) and then bomb them to force a negotiation. Only then could we lock the factions up on an Air Force Base and expect them to reach a compromise.

Not really the type of model I want to follow.