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Virtual Macedonia Bookstore - To End a War (Modern Library Paperbacks)
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List Price: $16.95
Our Price: $9.39
Your Save: $ 7.56 ( 45% )
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Manufacturer: Modern Library
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Average Customer Rating:  
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Binding: Paperback
Dewey Decimal Number: 949.703
EAN: 9780375753602
ISBN: 0375753605
Label: Modern Library
Manufacturer: Modern Library
Number Of Items: 1
Number Of Pages: 464
Publication Date: 1999-05-25
Publisher: Modern Library
Release Date: 1999-05-25
Studio: Modern Library
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Spotlight customer reviews:
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Customer Rating:
Summary: Negotiating the End of the Bosnian Civil War - Dayton Accords
Comment: This book is all about negotiation. It's about Richard Holbrooke's work to end Bosnian War. He goes into details about the entire process of negotiation. How the site was selected and why, the size of the tables, the issues, the preparations before and during the negotiations, the threat of and actual military actions taken by NATO (bombing), negotiation strategies and tactics, everything.
Anyone interested in the break-up of the former Yugoslavia, the Bosnian civil war, Serbia, etc. or anyone interested in complex negotiation, will thoroughly enjoy this book and learn a great deal.
Customer Rating:
Summary: A Brilliant Glimpse into the Art and Science of Diplomacy or: How to Play Chess while Mountain Climbing
Comment:
As an Arms Control negotiator for more than 25 years, and a member of Bill Clinton's transition team -- who not coincidentally turned down an offer to head up the NSC's "Bosnia Desk" -- this book leaves me speechless. It is so complex, so literate, so sophisticated, so theoretical, so detailed and yet so down to earth that it is hard to comprehend how the author pulled it all off. Thank god it won a prize as one of the New York Times "Best Books of the Year," and that there are still brilliant people like Richard Holbrooke willing to serve in difficult positions in our government.
As he notes in the foreword to the book, today public service has lost much of its luster. Too often it is a way to "punch ones ticket" on the way up, a political payoff for fund-raising, or just some other game played for personal advancement.
But some problems must be left for the elite of the diplomatic profession. I am unembarrassed that I had the good sense to know that Bosnia was just such a problem (and that I was not a member of that elite). Not even knowing where Bosnia was located -- and after receiving a detailed briefing of its problems -- I knew it was well above my experience level and pay grade.
Considering the current status of our international diplomacy and our status in the world community, we Americans must be eternally grateful to people of Holbrooke's intellect and stature for their willingness to serve our nation. He stepped in and led a team that solved one of the most daunting diplomatic problems of our times.
This book is as much a testament to his genius as to the hard work of his team.
Ten stars
Customer Rating:
Summary: Post-Cold War diplomacy in action
Comment: In November, 2005, I attended a conference examining the implementation of the 1995 Dayton Peace Accords, which ended the war in Bosnia-Herzegovina. The event was held in the same Wright-Patterson Air Force Base facilities used a decade earlier, and was attended by numerous individuals that took part in the negotiations. One of the primary lessons I took away from this conference is the incredible amount of hard work that goes into effective diplomacy. It's daunting and fraught with risk. Accordingly, I believe Richard Holbrooke's To End a War is an excellent recap of the events leading up to Dayton, the hard work that went into the peace effort, and the initial obstacles to the agreement's implementation.
The book is written entirely from Holbrooke's point of view as lead negotiator of the American team charged with brokering peace in Bosnia. After covering some obligatory history, it picks up with Holbrooke's small "shuttle diplomacy" team constantly moving between Washington, Belgrade, Zagreb, Sarajevo, and numerous other European capitals. This portion of the book is extremely interesting and reads like a who's who of international political figures in Europe during the mid-1990s. After an incredible amount of diplomatic effort, an international peace conference is agreed upon and held in Dayton in late 1995. Holbrooke compellingly describes the edgy, contentious atmosphere and the painstaking evolution of the final agreement. Finally, he reviews some of the initial challenges implementing the accords, including convincing the military Implementation Force to exercise an assertive role in executing its mandate.
Throughout these events, meetings and interplay among Serb president Slobodan Miloseviæ, Bosnian president Alija Izetbegoviæ, Croat president Franjo Tuðman, and their subordinates are described in detail. (Interaction with Miloseviæ is particularly interesting.) In addition to balancing the hostility between these warring parties, Holbrooke and his team must tend to the concerns of European countries striving for prominence after the collapse of the Soviet Union, a fragile, image-conscious Russian Federation, and disagreement among diplomats and policy makers back in the U.S. Again, diplomacy is hard work.
Ultimately, the reader should take the book for what it is: an account written from the perspective of one person (acting in a politically appointed capacity, no less). Certainly some of Holbrooke's points and appraisals will be challenged by others involved in the events. That being said, To End a War gives the appearance of being factually accurate. While his interpretation is certainly subject to criticism, Holbrooke's description of events looks solid. Readers familiar in the war in Bosnia and the Dayton Accords will find this a must read. In addition, the writing is compelling enough to draw in anyone more generally interested in diplomacy, international relations, and statecraft.
Reasons to read this book:
>>An excellent account of post-Cold War U.S. diplomacy under Clinton.
>>Interesting description of political and personal interplay between Miloseviæ, Izetbegoviæ, and Tuðman.
>>A fascinating portrait of Miloseviæ, in particular.
>>Detailed personal account of Dayton Peace Accords negotiation.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Milosevic's Favorite Bar in Dayton, Ohio
Comment: Imagine you are a regional or a global power dealing with a country torn by a civil war. Warring parties won't talk to each other and prefer to let guns speak, but they know that nothing short of a political solution will allow them to break the stalemate. They turn to you to solve this mess, but they are at the same time deeply resentful of your intervention and more than ready to denounce your interference if peace negotiations turn awry. Your allies, as well as the so-called international community, are not very supportive either: you know they will claim paternity to the victory in case of success but that you will the only one to bear the blame if things fail. To complicate matters, you know that you have a very short window of opportunity to exploit before the country plunges back into internal warfare. What do you do?
Well, a good way to start would be to read Richard Holbrooke's book, To End A War, published in 1998. Holbrooke was President Clinton's chief negotiator to the Balkans and the architect of the Dayton agreements which brought the Bosnian war to a close and put Bosnia on the map. His narrative of the twenty days of negotiations that took place on a remote army base in Dayton, Ohio, has since then become a classic among apprentice mediators and would-be peacemakers. As the author himself acknowledges, "since November 21, 1995, `Dayton' has entered the language as shorthand for a certain type of diplomacy - the Big Bang approach to negotiations: lock everyone up until they reach agreement. A `Dayton' has been seriously suggested for Northern Ireland, Cyprus, Kashmir, the Mideast..." The list could be extended since the book was published.
Attention to details matters. The author describes the care attached to the shape and size of the negotiating table (a major stumbling block to the Paris peace talks with the North Vietnamese in 1968, to which Holbrooke participated as a junior diplomat), the setting of the compound, the choice of audio channels for translation, the eating arrangements, etc. The rules of the game were set at the beginning: no talking to the press or walking out of the venue; most discussions to be conducted as "proximity talks", whereby the mediator moves between the different parties, who rarely meet one another face-to-face. Some elements were left to chance: the proximity of Packy's All-Sports Bar, the main source of recreation at the base, provided a neutral ground where the Croats gathered to cheer their hero, Toni Kukoc of the Chicago Bulls, while the Serbs waited to cheer Vlade Divac of the Los Angeles Lakers, and all parties united fleetingly to watch America's Favorite Home Videos. Milosevic grew especially fond of "Waitress Wicky", with whom he exchanged quips and hummed favorite songs.
The key to the success was the cohesiveness of the negotiating team, bound together by the tragic loss of three senior officials in a mission to Sarajevo early in the process. Interestingly, Holbrooke pays tribute to the role played by the Treasury Department, represented at Dayton by one of its most brilliant young economists and which, along with the World Bank, devised the framework for a common currency and assembled an economic package that provided a strong incentive for Izetbegovic to sign the deal. The importance of the economic aspects of a peace treaty is another lesson that is as valid today as it was at the start of John Maynard Keynes' public career.
Customer Rating:
Summary: A first-class temperament and a first-class intellect
Comment: Holbrooke is sorely missed. He was one of the most competent and intelligent diplomats representing the US since General George Marshall's era.
This book is a fair assessment of the conflict and America's role in ending it, which Clinton and Holbrooke were able to undertake after Clinton found his footing in office by 1995.
The reader below strangely rates the book highly while completely trashing Holbrooke and this is telling, for Serbians and their sympathizers have, like Irishmen in Yeats' time, "with hearts grown brutal" fed themselves on fantasies.
Ultimately, believing the lie results in a more global confusion.
In actuality, Holbrooke, far from being "taken in" by the late Alija Izetbegovic, was quite clear about Izetbegovic's character and motives. Holbrooke retails an amusing story about Alija's showing up at Pamela Harriman's Paris mansion dressed like Che Guevara. Holbrooke was well aware that like Milosevic, Izetbegovic cared only about his country and his career, and the only difference that emerges in To End a War is that Izetbegovic put Bosnia before his career.
Therefore Holbrooke reserves his highly diplomatic scorn for the Serbian side. While not engaging in any tirades, Holbrooke sticks to the facts which are as I write being confirmed in the Hague and finally being made available to the Serbian public, in a collective "who knew?"
We think of diplomats as Hollow Men without strong convictions or moral seriousness on their own: we think of lawyers in the same way. We don't reflect that in modern society, alienation for even the elite MEANS that diplomats might have to deal with unpleasant thugs politely, or that in an adversary system, a lawyer might have to represent a John Gotti or Ken Lay.
Legal and political regression is a reality however, and causes more and more people to clamor for simple, "black and white" causes that, in alienated (which is to say dysfunctional in psychobabble) lives, people can vicariously identify with.
Holbrooke shows how to resolve the alienation. Not for a second did he change his personal opinion about the relative morality of the Bosnians versus that of the Serbians, nor should he have had to; just as President Clinton deserved even as President a personal life which right was violated by Starr, Holbrooke was entitled to infer, especially from his access to secret reports, that the Serbians were by far the worst.
But in childish regression, people in America (forced, they think, in low-level symbolic jobs to be Empty Suits) actually believe that one is either an ideologue or an Empty Suit, and that there are no other choices.
A diffuse sanctimony, equally diffused on the Right (with absolutist Fundamentalism being common) as on the Left (with a sort of nonsense-Heidegger committment to humility and authenticity systematically disempowering progressives), informs American life. The result is that Americans, like little old ladies with a savings account, are uniquely prey to bunkum steerage and the long con, with 2003's "weapons of mass destruction" being only the largest and smelliest pigeon drop.
Holbrooke has that urbanity and sense of humor, shared with his boss the great Bubba, which is immune to the long con.
General Marshall was different, a man of his era whose immunity to bunkum was that of the New England sort, long out of date.
In the late 1940s, there was simply nothing sexy in George Marshall's essentially pitching in with the women of Berlin at the bottom level, who cleaned up the town, for what Marshall was doing with his Plan was the same thing at the top.
Nor was there anything sexy about seeing to it that a somewhat questionable Virginia company specializing in advising foreign governments on military matters armed the Croatians with modern weapons, and pointing them west, saying, go get em, boys. In fact, the whole affair was reprehensible on a humanitarian basis because it caused mass flight of Serbians in Krajina.
Even if part of this relocation was voluntary and a symptom of the fears of poorly-informed Serbian rural folk, this was still an injustice, and to have a hand in it made Holbrooke poor copy and an undesirable guest on Larry King.
But the tasks addressed were the staple of traditional diplomacy, basically a matter of drawing lines on map so that men don't get killed, and then seeing them get killed anyway in all too many instances.
Not being sexy, taking responsibility, and staying cool: this being, in other words, a traditional grown-up of the sort that in America, is only seen for the most part in the armed services. And the tragic daily loss of real grown-ups in Iraq as a result of the chickenhawks' incompetence may encode a more global war, in America, on the very idea of being a grown up even in the reified and military way.
Even Bill Clinton, far more unable to be tarred with a Yugoslavian brush, had to delegate adult tasks to others lest a childish and regressed public start screaming bloody murder in front of TeeVee, and today, this delegation of adult tasks has reached the level of a murderous farce, with Cheney loose about the shop.
It took a grown up, a *mensch* to force Slobodan Milosevic to sit down in Dayton and negotiate an end to the war. It took a first-class individual to manage the conference by objectives.
Holbrooke, it appears, selected Wright-Paterson in one of the more boring areas of the USA so that Milosevic would not be able to party hearty while stonewalling.
There's an especially funny section about the only place where Slobo could go for a drink during the conference, a sports bar where the Butcher of the Balkans was a favorite of the waitresses. Being Middle Americans, the waitstaff didn't know anything about the Balkans and cared less, and the waitresses just thought Milosevic a charming old rogue from Cleveland, it appears.
Thanks, however, to Milosevic and the still at-large Karadzic, Bosnia is indeed more Moslem-confessional than it should be, and Holbrooke foresaw this happening; the brutalized turn brutal, with hearts grown brutal; any dog trainer knows this. As Holbrooke shows, the Serbian insistence on destroying cosmopolitanism CREATED today's Bosnia which in a limited way enforces Moslem rules: for example, today, Sarajevo's bars close at 11.
However, there is little indication today that Bosnia is a danger to its neighbors and even Serbia's record is improving.
I look forward to Secretary of State Holbrooke under President Hilary Clinton, in part because only a first class intellect and a first class temperament will rescue the US from the mess it's in, created by childish, regressed and emotionally manipulative half-truths slicker than the Serbian version of history, but able, in the same way, to galvanize TV brains into a doomed cause.
President Bush seems to think that diplomacy is public relations. As Holbrooke shows, it is hard work. I hope reading this book inspires people to enter the Foreign Service.
Of course, this would be AFTER Bush leaves office. There is no place in America's diplomatic corps today, it seems, for intelligence, just for people to lecture other countries on what they should be doing, with a signal futility even under its own value-system that was on display, this week, during Bush's trip to China.
Holbrooke shows that Americans can be cosmopolitans, and how a truly cosmopolitan foreign policy, able to suspend judgement of Milosevic at Wright-Paterson, gets results. George Marshall got the results Harry Truman wanted in Italy and France (non-communist governments) by accepting socialist parties in power, and a large Communist element in the general populace and in coalition governments.
This was because Marshall was able to "parse" international situations and subordinate ideology to specific and achievable goals. His era was an exception to the anti-intellectualism of American foreign policy in which we manage not by parsing a moral grammar but by reacting to ideological keywords.
This is hard work. Marshall and Holbrooke, as subordinate men, put in long hours and had no opportunity to grandstand as did Kissinger. Marshall was later driven out of public life by Senator McCarthy because, apparently, McCarthy wanted a 1948 war using atomic weapons between the US and Russia, on the brutalized terrain of Western Europe, and a return to the Stone Age, the favorite terrain of people like McCarthy, and Milosevic.
Holbrooke was also sidelined, of course, by the Bush coup d'etat of 2000.
I hope Mr. Holbrooke is willing like Cincinnatus to leave his plow again, and real soon. Although my own politics are to the left of Holbrooke's, I admire him for the same reason I admire John McCain.
Dick, if you're reading this: your country needs you.
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Editorial Reviews:
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"Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â One of the most important and readable diplomatic memoirs of recent times. . . . His account should restore some respect to the much maligned art of diplomacy."
--The Washington Post"Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Richard Holbrooke does for diplomacy what Indiana Jones does for archaeology
. . . a cliffhanger."Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â --USA Today "Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Holbrooke is brilliant, forceful, determined, focused. . . . In his intuitive feel for the realities of power diplomacy and his strategic vision, he is the heir to Henry Kissinger in American diplomacy."Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â --New York Post Chosen by The New York Times as one of the Best Books of the Year, To End a War is a brilliant portrayal of high-wire, high-stakes diplomacy in one of the toughest negotiations of modern times. A classic account of how foreign policy is made in Washington, its lessons go far beyond the boundaries of the Balkans and provide a powerful argument for continued American lead-
ership in the modern world. "Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Easily the best book of recent years on how to carry off a diplomatic negotia-
tion. . . . We can only hope that the White House, Congress and the public are listening, and that generations of Americans will read Holbrooke's book."
--The Philadelphia Inquirer "Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â A compelling account of lockup, great-power diplomacy. . . . To End a War is a
riveting book."Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â --Time "Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â A superb book, one that is clear and honest."Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â --Newsweek "Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â A heartfelt call to America to use its power when societies break down. . . . His com-
bativeness may offend the pinstripe set, but it is wonderfully refreshing on the page."
--The New York Times
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