I will be in the Hague on Wednesday for the long-awaited start of the Mladic trial, almost seventeen years after he was first indicted by the Yugoslav war crimes tribunal. While we wait to hear the prosecutor's opening statement, let's take a look at some more "roads not taken" during the run-up to the Srebrenica tragedy of July 1995, which features prominently in the Mladic indictment.

While primary responsibility for the Srebrenica massacre certainly rests with the Bosnian Serb forces commanded by Mladic, the international community also played a role through a series of diplomatic missteps. Here are three more key moments, selected by the former United Nations civil affairs official, David Harland, that led directly to Europe's worst massacre since World War II.

For three earlier decision points, click here.

Key Moment 4. The Bosnian government's decision to block the evacuation of Srebrenica in April 1993. On April 2, the U.N. high commissioner for refugees reported to the Security Council that non-combatants were "desperate to escape to safety because they see no other prospect than death if they remain where they are." On instructions from the Bosnian government, the Muslim commander in Sarajevo, Nasir Oric, prevented the evacuation of refugees on the grounds that it would pave the way for the takeover of Srebrenica by the Bosnian Serbs, and would facilitate their policy of "ethnic cleansing." A convoy of United Nations trucks was forced to leave the enclave without any refugees on board. Ironically, Oric himself left Srebrenica in April 1995, three months before the town fell.

Key moment 5. On April 16, 1993, the Security Council adopted resolution 917 declaring Srebrenica a "safe area." Subsequent resolutions authorized the dispatch of a lightly-armed peacekeeping battalion to the enclave, but failed to provide it with sufficient fire power to deter the Serbs. One UN commander, General Francis Briquemont of Belgium, commented that he had stopped reading United Nations resolutions due to the "fantastic gap" between rhetoric and reality. Security Council members, led by the United States, never resolved this fatal contradiction.

Key moment 6. Adoption of rules of engagement for close air support of United Nations peacekeepers in August 1994. U.N. commanders opposed the adoption of a tripwire arrangement for launching air strikes for violation of the safe area regime, preferring a doctrine of strategic ambiguity. They argued that such clear guidelines would encourage the Serbs to launch smaller-scale attacks that did not automatically trigger air strikes. In the event, the absence of red lines permitted U.N. officials to delay authorization of air strikes until it was far too late.

With hindsight, it seems clear that the Srebrenica massacre was a preventable tragedy. Different actions by key actors -- western governments, the United Nations, the Bosnian government -- could have produced a different outcome.

One of the first witnesses in the Mladic trial, which opens in the Hague next Wednesday, will be David Harland, who was chief of United Nations civil affairs in Bosnia at the time of the Srebrenica massacre in July 1995. A New Zealander who now heads the Centre for Humanitarian Dialogue in Geneva, Harland was also the principal author of the 1999 United Nations report on Srebrenica, which painted a devastating picture of bungling by the international community.

Harland has thought a lot about the political and diplomatic missteps that led to the fall of the former United Nations "safe area" and has frequently lectured about the subject. He provided me with a list of key "decision points" dating back to 1991, when different actions by the international community might have saved tens of thousands of lives.

Several of the fateful "decision points" cited by Harland relate to the chaotic final days prior to the fall of Srebrenica on July 11, 1995. I have reviewed several of these missed opportunities in previous posts looking at the failure of United Nations commanders to approve requests from the beleaguered Dutch peacekeeping battalion for close air support.  Here I will go back to the early days of the conflict, which obviously represented the best chance for western governments to prevent the downward spiral into violence.

Harland comments that it is probable that "many more people would be alive today" had any of the following decisions "gone the other way."

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And now for something completely different that has nothing to do with Ratko Mladic, war criminals, or Srebrenica! My post today does, however, involve an issue that is familiar to anyone following international war crimes trials, namely historical veracity and the contradictory testimony of different eyewitnesses. So please indulge me.

As a former Washington Post reporter turned historian, I am intrigued by a spat involving two people I greatly respect, Bob Woodward and Ben Bradlee. A new book by a former Woodward researcher named Jeff Himmelman claims that the legendary Post editor once expressed doubts about some minor details in the reporting of his even more legendary Watergate sleuth. To be specific, Bradlee privately questioned Woodward's account of his meetings with his super-secret source, known as "Deep Throat," subsequently revealed as deputy FBI director, Mark Felt.

An unpublished 1990 interview unearthed by Himmelman reveals that Bradlee was unconvinced by Woodward's description of how he communicated with Deep Throat. Woodward has long claimed that he set up meetings with his source by moving a flower pot around on his balcony in downtown Washington, D.C. They would then meet in an underground parking garage. This was a cumbersome method of communication since it required Deep Throat to keep Woodward's balcony under constant observation.

We now learn that Bradlee (at least in 1990) expressed "a residual fear in my soul" that something about Woodward's story was "not quite straight."

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There is an interesting back story to Barack Obama's call today for stronger action to prevent genocide that directly relates to the subject of this blog. The president's speech at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum announcing new sanctions against perpetrators of mass atrocities was shaped in large part by senior aides with first-hand experience in places like Bosnia and Rwanda.

The key person here is Samantha Power, now a senior foreign policy advisor to Obama, who was a young reporter in Bosnia in July 1995 at the time of the Srebrenica massacre, seething in frustration at the failure of the international community to take effective action against the likes of Ratko Mladic and Radovan Karadzic. As the author of the Pulitzer prize-winning A Problem from Hell: America in the Age of Genocide, Power provided much of the intellectual heft for a growing genocide prevention movement that has sought to pressure the United States government to live up to the slogan "Never Again."

In her book, Power states that she returned from Bosnia "haunted by the murder of Srebenica's Muslim men and boys, my own failure to sound a proper early warning, and the outside world's refusal to intervene even once the men's peril had become obvious." She noted pointedly that the United States "had never in its history intervened to stop genocide and had in fact rarely even made a point of condemning it as it occurred."

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It is almost axiomatic in warfare that the first reports are always wrong. Researching the Cuban missile crisis, I was startled by the erroneous intelligence reaching President Kennedy about Soviet actions and intentions. Fortunately, the former U.S. Navy lieutenant had a skeptical, questioning mind ("the military always screws up" was a favorite expression), or we might have ended up in a nuclear war.

Lyndon Johnson ordered his fateful escalation of the Vietnam war in August 1964 on the basis of mistaken reports claiming that North Vietnam had attacked U.S. Navy destroyers in the Gulf of Tonkin. More recently, we all know what happened when George W. Bush acted upon deeply flawed intelligence claims of weapons of mass destruction supposedly possessed by Saddam Hussein.

When it comes to genocide and mass atrocities, policy-makers often believe what they want to believe -- using erroneous intelligence either to build a case for military intervention or to justify a passive, hands-off approach. Let me illustrate what I mean by focusing on the false reporting of a single incident immediately prior to the capture of Srebenica on July 11, 1995 by Bosnian Serb forces under the command of Ratko Mladic. In this case, the faulty intel was to have deadly consequences for the Muslim population of the so-called "safe area."

Shortly after dawn on July 10, a United Nations armored personnel carrier protecting the approaches to the "safe area" came under fire., causing it to skid off the mountain road. A Dutchbat officer, Captain Peter Hageman, reported at 0713 that he had been attacked by the Muslim defenders of Srebrenica who were in the area. He filed a report which went all the way up the UNPROFOR chain of command, first to Zagreb and then to New York.

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The Srebenica massacre offers a prime example of the dangers of what can be called a "feel good response" to mass atrocity. By a "feel good response," I mean action that is designed to look good in the eyes of international public opinion but fails to do anything really effective to protect a threatened population. A feel good response can often wind up making a tragic situation even worse -- as was the case in Srebrenica, where around 7,000 Muslims became the victims of pre-meditated mass murder in July 1995.

Examples of such empty moralism abound -- from Bosnia to Rwanda to Darfur to Syria.

To explain what I mean, let me review the history of the establishment of the so-called United Nations "safe area" of Srebenica as a result of Security Council resolution 819, adopted on April 16, 1993. The resolution represented the response of the United States and Security Council members to the public outrage engendered by a widely publicized visit to Srebenica the previous month by General Philippe Morillon of France. The photograph above shows the charismatic U.N. general being besieged by a crowd of Muslim refugees as he tried to leave the town on March 12. Here is a YouTube clip:

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A key question for anyone interested in genocide prevention is whether outside intervention can make a difference. In order to address this question, it is necessary to study the mindset of the perpetrators of mass atrocities. Thanks to the Yugoslav war crimes tribunal, we now have a lot of evidence about the Bosnian Serb decision-making process that led to the capture of the United Nations "safe area" of Srebrenica and the murder of around 7,000 Muslim men and boys.

According to Bosnian Serb military documents, and testimony from key participants, General Ratko Mladic did not initially intend to capture the town of Srebrenica when he launched his attack on the enclave on July 6, 1995. His initial goal was to reduce the enclave to its urban core and create "an unbearable situation" for Srebrenica inhabitants, forcing them to leave of their own accord. Meeting no effective resistance from either Dutchbat or the Muslim defenders of Srebrenica, he went for the big prize.

It is now possible to pinpoint the "tipping point" when everything changed: the evening of July 9. A written message was submitted for approval to Bosnian Serb president Radovan Karadzic by a Mladic aide at 23:50 hours on July 9 ordering the final "takeover of Srebrenica". Mladic ordered his forces to move forward the following day, July 10, capturing a U.N. armored personnel carrier as you can see in the photograph at the top of this post. The "safe area" fell on July 11.

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The Dutch have rightly come under a lot of criticism for their failure to prevent Europe's worst massacre since World War II in Srebrenica. Apart from a token air strike against Bosnian Serb troops described in my last post, Dutch peacekeepers did not offer any significant resistance to the takeover of the United Nations "safe area" in July 1995. They permitted General Ratko Mladic to forcibly separate Muslim men and boys from their families outside Dutchbat headquarters in Potocari. To put the matter very bluntly, they were bystanders to a terrible atrocity.

On the other hand, it seems unfair that a single Dutch peacekeeping battalion should become a scapegoat for the much broader failures of the international community. Many of the decisions, non-decisions, or fudged decisions that led to the Srebrenica tragedy were taken long before July 1995, at a variety of political and military levels, right up to the United Nations Security Council in New York and the White House in Washington, DC.

The Dutchbat commander, Lieutenant-Colonel Thom Karremans, (photographed above with Mladic) may have been the wrong man for the job, as I described in a previous post. But the evidence shows that he and his men were put in an almost impossible position. They were ordered to protect a "safe area" inhabited by some 40,000 Muslim refugees -- but they were not given the resources and political support they needed to accomplish their mission.

By way of illustration, let me review the history of the week preceding the fall of the "safe area." The record shows that Dutchbat requested close air support on six separate occasions -- but their calls for assistance were denied or simply ignored by their UN superiors. Since the peacekeepers themselves were only lightly armed, NATO air power represented their only means of effective defense.

The bureaucratic procedure for requesting air support was extraordinarily cumbersome. Requests were first submitted to Sector North East headquarters in Tuzla, then to the Bosnia-Herzegovina command in Sarajevo. If Sarajevo approved the request, it was then forwarded to the Crisis Action Team in Zagreb, by which time up to three hours might have been lost. Since peacekeeping was a joint UN-NATO operation, all requests were subject to a so-called "dual key." A military bureaucrat anywhere along the line could delay or even block a request for air support from the Srebrenica peacekeepers because it was submitted on "the wrong form."

A blow-by-blow chronology of air support requests from Dutchbat, with links to sources (Dutch and United Nations reports):

First request. July 6, 13:50. This request from Karremans was prompted by the shelling of the U.N. compound at Potocari by Mladic's forces, and preliminary incursions into the "safe area." Forwarded to Sarajevo by Sector North East, but turned down by Dutch general (Kees Nicolai) as premature.

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