ABSTRACT
There has been an impermissible erosion of civilian authority, manifest in the effective veto power illegitimately acquired by the military leadership over intervention decisions. Yet constitutionally it is the civilian authorities alone that should decide whether, when, where and how to intervene against aggressors and killers, albeit with such military advice as they care to solicit. For the Bosnian killings continue unimpeded, though there was never such a thing as anti-Bosnianism. In place of a barrier of ignorance, there has been the "real time" transmission of every species of horror; only Treblinka-type death factories have been absent, no doubt because in Bosnia the killers have a pre-industrial mentality. The agony of Bosnia has fully contradicted the conventional view of the UN's past. In post-Cold War world, the UN can offer only its endless procedural delays, its always very costly and often corrupt administration of subordinate agencies, and of course the lowest-common denominator diplomacy of its secretary-general.
