The Bosnia issue has come upon President Clinton far faster and far harder than he or his advisers feared, posing yet another distraction from his domestic agenda. The administration’s stance on the war in Bosnia demands a decision of incredible complexity.
The instant question is whether to back a peace agreement cobbled together by Cyrus Vance and Lord Owen, respected former chiefs of U.S. and British foreign policy.
Many of Clinton’s advisers oppose the Vance-Owen stance because they think it is a flawed plan that rewards the Serbians for aggression and gives little guarantee of real peace.
But even if Clinton can figure how to skate around the edge of Bosnia this week, the ugly war in the Balkans has moved itself up on his agenda and left him in a ticklish spot.
The pressure is enormous. The plight of the Bosnians has been taken up by many important liberal groups that have been central to the Democratic Party for decades; by Muslim states of the Middle East, who are linking it to peace in their region; and by Europeans clamoring for the U.S. to solve a problem they can’t.
An open letter to Clinton was published in newspapers nationwide the other day, begging that he and Congress “stop genocide in Bosnia.”
The sponsors were hallowed names in American humanism: Church World Services, Lutheran World Relief, Project Hope, to mention a few.
The list of signatures included strange bedfellows such as Ronald Reagan and Michael Dukakis, former Republican Senate Majority Leader Howard Baker and former Democratic House Speaker Thomas “Tip” O’Neill. Reagan, the president who ordered the disastrous intervention in Lebanon, has called for “an army of conscience” in the Balkans.
In Washington parlance, the plight of Bosnia has moved inside the Beltway. Clinton himself would like to take a hand. His secretary of defense, Les Aspin, believes in being “pro-active,” or moving on the world’s dangers before they can move on you. Reportedly his national security adviser, Anthony Lake, agrees, as does James Woolsey, the CIA director, and Secretary of State Warren Christopher.
In a forthcoming article in Foreign Affairs, Stephen John Stedman calls this view “the new interventionism.”
“This outlook combines an awareness that civil war is a legitimate issue of international security with a sentiment for crusading liberal internationalism. The new interventionists wed great emphasis on the moral obligations of the international community to an eagerness for a newly available United Nations to intervene in domestic conflicts throughout the world.”
Stedman has not missed the irony that many of the people pushing Clinton hard to intervene also opposed the war in Vietnam. “Ethnic cleansing” and other trigger words of the Balkan calamity seem to galvanize the isolationists of the 1960s.
It is Stedman’s brief that there is an absolute ceiling on how many civil conflicts the U.S. and the UN can get involved in with any hope of success, and he questions whether outside intervention is wise even if it is economically feasible.
“Many civil wars may have to be allowed to run an ugly course,” he writes. “Herein lies an irony that clouds the clear morality of many new interventionists: the possibility that humanitarian assistance may extend war and anarchy rather than end it.”
Along with the question of whether intervention works at all is the question of how to decide when to move. James Schlesinger, a former secretary of defense and CIA director, suggests that television is the real arbiter of intervention.
“Starvation continues in the Sudan or Mozambique, suppression in East Timor in India, ethnic wars in parts of the former Soviet Union, but it is Somalia or Bosnia that draw the attention, because the cameras are there,” he says.
Bosnia, which has become so appealing in the coffeehouses and university campuses of Europe, is a dreadful place for the Clinton administration to test intervention.
But Clinton and many in Europe are lured and possibly misled by the model of the Persian Gulf war.
At a cost of $70 billion, the UN coalition massed 690,000 ground troops-the bulk of them from the U.S.-3,700 tanks, 2,600 planes and helicopters and 2,000 artillery pieces in the Saudi desert.
Using the central U.S. doctrine of combat, the “overwhelming application of power,” the coalition drove Iraq out of Kuwait in a matter of weeks with only a handful casualties, destroyed the effectiveness of the million-member Iraqi army and provided the world with the most successful enforcement of UN decisions since its inception after World War II. They made it look easy.
But late last year, when Lt. Gen. Barry R. McCaffrey was briefing the Senate Armed Services Committee, he warned the senators not to think of Kuwait when they considered intervention in the Balkans, but to think of Lebanon.
It was the intervention in Lebanon that made it impossible for the U.S. to continue as the “honest-broker” of Middle East conflict; made the U.S. a target of terrorism and kidnapping; and ushered in the Iran-contra scandal. It didn’t achieve its objective, either.
It was in Lebanon that the U.S. military learned some sharp lessons about the difference between “peacekeeping ” and “peacemaking.”
The 100,000 troops that Vance and Owen envision to keep the peace they are arranging in Bosnia, military analysts say, would become “peacemakers” as soon as they came under fire.
Like Bosnia, Lebanon had a patchwork of armed groups, some supported by the Israelis, some by Syria, some by Iran, virtually all with a different agenda. Like Bosnia, fighters in Lebanon were intermingled with civilians-friendly groups camped next to enemies.
U.S. Marines went to Lebanon as peacekeepers, to be a presence in the face of warring groups that had agreed to a series of fragile cease-fires. The Marines soon came under fire. For a long time the U.S. restrained its response but finally allowed the fire to be returned.
The firing, some of it from the 16-inch guns of the battleship New Jersey, inevitably hit friend as well as foe and caused “collateral damage,” the military euphemism for civilians and private property.
From then on the Marines became the enemy of many in Lebanon. The Marine commander, still confused between his role as a peacekeeper and his role as a combat commander, failed to harden the defenses of the Marine camp, and as a result, 241 U.S. servicemen died in a terrorist attack.
In the end, the peacekeeping force had to withdraw from Lebanon. What peace and stability has been found there has been through negotiation and accommodation with only a slight influence of UN forces still on the scene.
In Bosnia the fighting that the U.S. would have to stop is taking place in some of the most forbidding terrain in Europe. Bosnia-Herzegovina is extraordinarily mountainous and thickly forested.
McCaffrey told the committee how for decades it had been the strategy of the Yugoslav military command that, if invaded, the army would retreat into these mountains and resist with guerrilla forces.
“Indeed,” he said, “the heartland of that defensive effort was Bosnia-Herzegovina, since it is the most mountainous and inaccessible, fortress-like part of the country.”
He said the Yugoslavs had formed the framework for guerrilla units among the populace and placed caches of military supplies throughout the countryside.
McCaffrey estimated that there are some 70,000 Bosnian Serb forces in the field with significant amounts of artillery, ground-to-air missiles and small arms. He estimated it would take a ground force of 400,000 to go into Bosnia and disarm the combatants, if they resisted.
A lot of other military experts think twice that number might be required.
Even limiting the use of air power to knock out the Serbian guns around Sarajevo or to halt resupply is unlikely to be successful.
The thick forests, cloud cover and weather patterns there can often blind spy satellites, and it was their constant picture of the movements of Saddam Hussein’s forces that made that nearly bloodless victory in the Persian Gulf possible.
Investigations by the House Armed Services Committee into civilian casualties in the Panama invasion discovered that “smart weapons,” the laser-guided rockets and bombs so successful in the gulf, could go awry in a humid atmosphere.
Last month, even when Navy and Air Force planes attacked targets in the vast arid territory of southern Iraq, they could only hit a portion of their targets.
“When it comes to the question of using this tremendous air power we have, it is difficult on the ground in a reasonably high-threat air-defense environment of SA7s, SA9s and automatic weapons to sort out one set of artillery or one set of mortars from another,” McCaffrey said.
“Much of this violence is going on at night. It is in forested country. We do not have a ground intelligence system on the spot. We do not have the ability to mark targets for air strikes.”
The general testified before Clinton took office, but in the next few weeks the new president may learn a lesson that has had to be absorbed by every president since World War II:
There are great limitations on the vast military power the United States possesses. It is unquestionably the finest military force in the world today and no other single country could successfully place it in retreat.
But if fielded unwisely, it can change a police action to a major war, a peace mission to a quagmire, a regional conflict to global conflagration.
