His voice quivering with emotion, Senate Majority Leader Bob Dole of Kansas spoke to his colleagues last Wednesday, just moments before the Senate voted to end U.S. participation in the arms embargo in Bosnia.
“We are a big country,” Dole said. “They are a small country. And I guess it would be good if Bosnia just went away.
“If they would just surrender, our problems would end for a while until somebody starts writing the history of this era.”
Dole’s argument, redolent of global responsibility and America’s role as leader of the Free World, carried the Senate along to an overwhelming repudiation of President Clinton’s policy of maintaining the embargo.
But the measure passed by the Senate-and sure to pass the House this week-did not commit the U.S. to any active role in the Balkans-no weapons, no training of Bosnian soldiers, no airstrikes and, certainly, no American ground troops.
It was a triumph of post-Cold War posturing, an exercise in what defense analyst Lawrence J. Korb called “symbolic intervention.”
The dithering over Bosnia comes as Americans mark a host of martial anniversaries, each producing vivid images of U.S. military history.
For five sweltering days last week, thousands of Korean War veterans trooped around Washington, celebrating the 42nd anniversary of the Panmunjom armistice and the dedication of a new memorial.
The Korean War Veterans Memorial, nearly a decade in the making, sits just a few yards from the Vietnam War Memorial, now the most popular tourist attraction in the capital.
Indeed, in the swell of remembrance that has marked the 50th anniversary of the end of World War II this summer, Americans are eager to pay homage to veterans, to summon up “forgotten” wars such as Korea, and to recall the heroics and sacrifices of Iwo Jima and Leyte Gulf, of Pork Chop Hill, of the Ia Drang Valley and Hamburger Hill.
“There’s no question about an increase in positive attitudes toward the military that’s been growing since 1980,” said Ted Galen Carpenter, director of foreign studies at the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank.
But if we are experiencing a renaissance of respect for the military, there is no discernible public appetite for putting American lives at risk, even in the face of “ethnic cleansing” and what some have called genocide in Bosnia.
By overwhelming margins, Americans tell pollsters-and the politicians who monitor the polls-they have no interest in becoming involved in Somalia or Haiti or Rwanda, or in the horrific conflict in the former Yugoslavia.
During the last days of the Bush administration, Americans endorsed the joint U.S.-UN effort in Somalia when it was viewed as a humanitarian effort, an altruistic attempt to end starvation and bring a measure of order to a disintegrating society.
The specter of American soldiers being dragged through the streets of Mogadishu as CNN cameras recorded the moment, however, ended the romantic view.
“One of our greatest problems is that for 20 years nobody believes in our staying power,” said Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.), a Vietnam combat veteran.
“Most countries have come to believe . . . that all they have to do is put us to the test. I rather suspect that is one of the reasons why (Iraqi president) Saddam Hussein went the distance that he did.”
In a New York Times/CBS News poll released last week, a majority of those asked favored an end to the arms embargo in Bosnia.
But the same poll showed that that 62 percent of those surveyed believed the U.S. “does not have a responsibility” to get involved in the conflict. And only 31 percent favored using U.S. troops to protect UN peacekeepers if they withdraw from the war zone, despite pledges from Clinton-and Dole-that the U.S. would do just that.
“I believe there’s a disconnect between the political and policy elites and mass opinion,” the Cato Institute’s Carpenter said. “Americans want to believe that if our troops are asked to intervene somewhere that the stakes are important. That is a difficult case to make.”
Certainly it’s more difficult in a world no longer defined by a nuclear standoff.
Four years ago, President George Bush organized a multinational force to confront Saddam Hussein and rolled to a high-tech victory in a matter of weeks.
Despite the triumph, which was hailed by Gen. Colin Powell and others as ending the so-called “post-Vietnam syndrome” in which Americans were reluctant to put troops at risk, Bush was defeated at the polls a year later, earning less than 40 percent of public support.
“We are experiencing a tendency to look inward,” Carpenter said. “It may be that Americans are not preoccupied with foreign policy, that these foreign crises are seen as temporary.
“With Bush, the public view may have been that he did a good job, but that without a Cold War element, it (the Persian Gulf war) was just an ugly sideshow.”
That may be the public view of Bosnia. But in straining to reach a political consensus, Clinton and his critics continue to deliver mixed messages.
Last week, former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher sent a letter to Dole-not to Clinton-maintaining that “American leadership is vital to bring order out of the present chaos” in Bosnia.
Dole himself told the Senate the U.S. “could not take a pass on Bosnia.”
But few are certain how “leadership” is defined in an age when a rhetorical response to grave foreign problems is often the rule.
Does a unilateral lifting of the arms embargo-an action opposed by NATO allies-imply a unilateral American responsibility for the fate of the Bosnians?
If the embargo is lifted and the fighting goes badly, what will America do when the Bosnians ask for assistance in resisting the Serb aggressors?
Dole and the supporters of his embargo measure insist that is not the case, that the idea is simply to let the Bosnians defend themselves and confront the Serbs on equal footing.
But how will lawmakers-and the public-respond to the wholesale routing of the Muslim enclaves as played out on television-a clear possibility once the much-maligned UN “peace- keepers” depart?
“Right now, the Senate is saying, `We’re going to feel good and if all the Bosnians wind up getting killed, well, we did something,’ ” said Korb, a former assistant secretary of defense in the Reagan administration.
He argues that Clinton, who hailed the assembled Korean War veterans on Thursday, is engaged in a similar brand of moral relativism.
In their search for consensus, perhaps Clinton and Dole understand that the American people have lost faith in the political institutions which would lead their sons and daughters into harm’s way.
Until that trust is restored, there can be no Bosnia policy that will resonate with the public and offer relief for war’s victims.
