I am trying to still figure out why the Democrats supported that war but not Iraq. Bosnia did not have UN support and did not pose any threat to the US, which is the arguement they use in calling the Iraq War unjust.
There is a decent summary in Huntington's "Clash".
Oh boy, you picked a really thorny subject. If you'd been here when our planes were bombing over there you'd have seen some nasty arguments. Some, like MadIvan, held that it was a just war. I'd say that the majority thought that it was Clinton's war. And no one can argue that it didn't really get solved, the place is still a mess.
Mad, I've always liked and respected you, even when I disagree. I don't want to re-fight the Balkan War debates, I'm pinging you only to ask a short answer of what you think. And let's not get in any fights, or I'll never forgive myself for pinging you.
I think the above sums it up quite adequately.
I see that you are under the mistaken impression that their are really smart people in the Department of State and the Pentagon. They're not smart, they have merely hidden their stupidity until it is proven by a situation such as Bosnia.
Go to these websites for answers...
www.danielpipes.org and www.jihadwatch.org
Good luck. My wife is Serbian, her father from Bosnia-Herzegovina. We were married in my church, an Albanian Orthodox parish under the Greek Archdiocese, during the war! I thought I would try to get a handle on the situation in the Balkans and I found a lot of sources, all hopelessly biased either pro- or con-Yugoslavia. It's a complex situation, and there's a complex mixture of history, myth, and legend that sways the story whoever is telling it. The best source I found for a overall view of Yugoslavia's history, and why it turned out the way it did, is Rebecca West's "Black Lamb and Gray Falcon" written around 1938. It's pre-WW2, pre-Tito, but it shows that some of the seeds of Yugoslavia's destruction were planted practically from the beginning. What caused those seeds to germinate and grow, as far as I can tell, was Tito's shoring up his own regime by playing various ethnic groups against each other, which created a kind of order, but an order that began to unravel after Tito's death.
Try Silber and Little's Yugoslavia: Death of a Nation. You won't understand Bosnia without the context of the rest of Yugoslavia.
Clinton bombed the wrong side.
Are you asking specifically about Bosnia and not about Croatia or Kosovo?
A fairly good book (in my opinion) is Kate Hudson's; "Breaking the South Slav Dream: The Rise and Fall of Yugoslavia."
You really need to go back as far the beginning of the 20 century to understand the dynamics of the Balkan conflicts between 1989-1999. Essentially, there are four conflicts to consider: Slovenia; Croatia; Bosnia-Herzegovina; and Kosovo.
Sometime during the 50's and 60's the Slavic Muslims of B-H began to develop a national identity based primarily on their religious heritage. Originally there were 5 founding nations (peoples) Serbs, Slovenes, Croats, Montenegrens and Macedonians. The 1963 Constitution recognized 'Muslim' as a people. That is as a Slavic people, since Albanian muslims were not granted the same status, always a sore point for them.
The issue of identity was one of the primary causes of the Yugoslav civil wars. The various nationalities reaserted themselves strongly once the bonds of communism came undone. Milosevic gets most of the blame for starting this trend, but it was probably inevitable anyway. Tudjman should certainly share the blame. During the Slovenian war, a friend of mine remarked with a mixture of disappointment and admiration, that the Slovenes were behaving like Serbs. What they were doing was asserting their national identity. The Bosnian Muslims did the same but with disasterous results. The Albanians were much more successful in that they convinced the world that the disaster of the Bosnian war would be repeated if the nobody intervened.