Greatest Collective Failure

To End a War drafts the causal factors that produced the Yugoslav crisis and covers in detail the successes and disappointments of the various parties involved in the dialogs to end the conflict. The second chapter, entitled "The Greatest Collective Failure...," is conceivably the most interesting section of the book because it is here that Holbrooke challenges to make sense of the origins of "the greatest collective security failure of the West since the 1930s." According to Holbrooke, there is no easy description for the events that took place between 1990 and 1992. As a substitute, there are five major factors that brought about this misfortune. Holbrooke covers the range of predecessors, touching on how the Yugoslav crisis was ignored because of more protruding events that ushered in the end of the Cold War; the death of Tito and the nationalist fervor that kept Communism in check; interference weakness that swept the United States after its war with Iraq; and the inept transition to a less protective American policy in which America's European allies would take a greater accountability for affairs occurring in their own back-yard. …show more content…
If the conflict was a result of prehistoric animosities, then there was not much that outsiders to the region could do to stop it. But this makes too much of history (especially the Serb defeat at the hands of the Turks in 1389), leaving the "web of animosity'' as an ill-fated but lasting fact of Balkan life. As Holbrooke sees it, "Yugoslavia's tragedy was not foreordained. It was the product of bad, even criminal, political and financial gain." Television even had a role to play in unleashing the ugly head of "violence-provoking nationalism." (ADD QUOTES FROM