In Quagmire of Serbia, Path for U.S. Involvement : Europe: Unless Serbia heeds the warnings of America and its allies, a pan-European war, pitting NATO members against each other, could lie ahead.

A war that breaks up the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, divides the European Community, brings fascists to power in Russia and could cost the United States more dead than we lost in Vietnam? Impossible nightmare? Not anymore.

As Slobodan Milosevic, the communist-turned-fascist strongman just elected president of Serbia, consolidates his power, the United States has moved another step closer to its ugliest war since Vietnam: war with Serbia in the Balkans.

Nobody in the United States wants this war. The Pentagon hates the idea. This is no photo-op like Iraq; no in-and-out sweep like Panama; no clean win like Grenada. A war in the Balkans is the real thing, and it will test the armed forces of the United States like nothing else in the last generation.

American politicians don’t want this either. The outgoing Bush Administration has done everything it could, and perhaps more than it should, to stay out of it. The incoming Clintonites want to spend the next four years fixing the health-care system, not fighting guerrilla wars with bandits and rapists in the Balkan hills.

U.S. diplomats also hate the thought of this war. It will put enormous pressures on the relationships of the United States with its Western European allies. The United States will want money and men from the European allies; the allies will want more control over U.S. policy than Washington wants to give up. A Balkan war would test, perhaps destroy, the fragile consensus in the U.N. Security Council. Both Russia and China are unenthusiastic about Western policy in ex-Yugoslavia, and some Russian nationalists sympathize with the Serbs.

The American people want this war least of all. Feeding people is one thing, bombing and shooting them is something else again. The idea of becoming policeman of the world makes Americans uneasy, and rightly so. Intervention in Somalia was like responding to a domestic dispute; nasty and dangerous but manageable. Intervention in the Balkans is more like putting down a riot; this is police work at its worst.

So why are we heading toward a war nobody wants? Some people inside and outside the government argue that U.S. intervention in Somalia and the Balkans represents our national instinct to fight against evil everywhere with no thought for ourselves. No quite. The United States is neither altruistic nor stupid enough to intervene with no regard for its national interests. Important national interests, not just humanitarian concerns, dragged us into Somalia and now they are dragging us into the Balkans.

Somalia has a strategic location with the longest coastline on the Horn of Africa. As chaos descended on that unhappy country, Iranian-oriented Muslim fundamentalists--already in power in the Sudan nearby--looked likely to gain control of all or part of a country that controls the sea-lanes through which Middle Eastern oil flows to the United States, Europe and Japan.

Middle Eastern interests also help shape our Yugoslav policy. The U.S. position in the world today is inescapably bound up with the Middle East and its oil riches. This has, in practice, meant support for the oil sheikdoms of the Gulf against their enemies--whether these are foreign, like Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, or domestic, like the Islamic fundamentalists who loathe the luxury-loving sheiks and their Western alliance.

The U.S. claim to stand for a world order based on human rights and international law often rings hollow in the Muslim world. We simply cannot afford to stand idly by and wring our hands while civilized Muslim Bosnians are raped and murdered by barbarous “Christian” Serbs. Muslim freedom-fighters, including veterans of the Afghan holy war against the Soviets, are already fighting in Bosnia.

That isn’t all. The fascists in Serbia see Bosnia, after Croatia, as only the second step in their plans for carving Greater Serbia out of the Yugoslav corpse. Next on the list come Kosovo and Macedonia. Serb violence in Kosovo would set off enough wholesale massacres and deportations to make the war in Bosnia look like the Rose Parade; most foreign policy analysts say the invasion of Macedonia would probably involve Serbia, Bulgaria, Turkey, Albania and Greece in the first true European war since 1945.

So what, say America’s isolationists. This would be sad, but why should the United States get involved?

Good question. Unfortunately, it has a good answer. Turkey is America’s most important ally, after Israel, in the Middle East. It is the most powerful, stable and pro-Western country between Germany and Iran. It is the only genuinely secular state in the Islamic world and the United States depends on Turkey for everything from protecting the Kurds in northern Iraq to countering Iranian influence in the former Soviet republics of Central Asia. Many present-day Turks are descended from Balkan Muslims driven from their homes during the Balkan wars earlier in this century. Turkish minorities in Greece and Bulgaria are unhappy. Turkey and Greece have a history of bad blood and a number of unsettled disputes. Turkey could not stay out of a major Balkan war, Bulgaria, Greece and Albania cannot avoid war if the Serbs attack Macedonia.

On the other hand, Greece, like Turkey, is a member of NATO. It is also a member of the European Community. A war between Greece and Turkey, besides plunging millions of people into misery, would split NATO and even the European Community right down the middle. Germany has millions of Turks on its territory; the Mediterranean members of the EC have strong sympathies with Greece. A war between these countries would destroy America’s most important military alliance and could plunge Europe into the kind of division and rivalry that led to the two world wars earlier in this century.

And then there is Russia. Russian right-wingers will be watching the Balkans to see if the West stands for anything. If Western governments cannot stand up against a relatively weak country like Serbia, Russian fascists will be confident that Russia can reorganize its empire without worrying about the feeble protests of a divided West. They will be emboldened in their attempts to overthrow Boris N. Yeltsin and the democratic forces in Russia. Passivity before Serb aggression now will almost certainly lead to Russian aggression later; we could well find ourselves in Cold War II against Russian fascists if we cannot solve the Balkan problem. A wider war that involves the Turks--Russia’s historic enemy--against Russia’s traditional friends like Greece, Serbia and Bulgaria could lead to World War III or something like it.

All is not lost--yet. There is one chance for peace left: A clear warning backed up by overwhelming force might bring Serbia back to its senses. The dispatch of enough NATO troops to patrol safe havens--including Sarajevo--for Bosnia’s Muslims and safeguard Macedonia from Serbian invasion could still head off a wider war.

If Serbia persists on its suicidal course, it will not only suffer all the horrors of war with the United States. It will inevitably lose Kosovo, and perhaps other territories as well. Once the dogs of war are unleashed, they are impossible to control. Ethnic cleansing in reverse could drive Serb minorities from their homes in Macedonia, Croatia, Bosnia and even parts of Serbia itself. Fascism in Serbia will mean a national catastrophe on the scale of the devastation suffered by Germany and Japan 50 years ago.

Unfortunately, Serbia’s leadership seems to have taken leave of its senses. Its contempt for the West is so profound, and its arrogance so great, that mere words from the West have no effect. This fundamentally is why we are headed for war in the Balkans. Like Adolf Hitler before him, Milosevic thinks the democracies are too decadent to oppose him. His Russian cousins are watching. We must convince him that he is wrong, by peaceful means if we can but, if necessary, by war.