COLUMN LEFT/ ALEXANDER COCKBURN : The U.S. Can’t Blame Serbia for Everything : The West helped kill Yugoslavia, and now crazily edges toward intervention.

American intervention in Yugoslavia began years ago, with both monetary and political meddling.

It was the decision in the early 1980s of institutions such as the World Bank and International Monetary Fund--in which the United States plays a dominant role--to impose austerity measures on the Yugoslav federation that accelerated its breakup. Forced to reserve one-fifth of its national income to service external debt, Yugoslavia finally could not pay its soldiers, whose loyalties and livelihoods reverted to nationalist sponsors such as Serbia’s Slobodan Milosevic and Croatia’s Franjo Tudjman.

Add to this that throughout the Cold War, and indeed to the present day, U.S. politicians and intelligence agencies pandered to the exile communities, particularly the Croats and Slovenes, and sedulously fanned their separatist hopes. For nearly half a century, the cold warriors railed against Marshal Tito’s partisans, the communists who brought into being a Bosnian republic that kept the peace and banished religious bloodshed for nearly 40 years. Now we have the alternative that the cold warriors worked for all these years: the renaissance of Croatia’s fascist ustashas and of the pan-Serbian chetniks from the sewers of nationalism.

So there’s plenty of culpability for the current disaster beyond the Serbs. There were the extortions of the bankers, the ploys of U.S. politicians, the sleepless fanaticism of exiles remembering the glories of the wartime puppet Nazi republic of Croatia, now reborn under Tudjman.

Why invoke such history as the shells crash down on Sarajevo, as the ethnic cleansers pursue their filthy pogroms through village and town? Because today there is a U.S. war lobby that echoes the intellectuals serving President Kennedy just over 30 years ago, men who were just as impetuous as many Clinton-era liberals in ignoring the reproaches and warnings of history.

As U.S. forces were dispatched to Vietnam, the language was eerily similar to today’s: Aggression (North Vietnamese/Serbian) must not be rewarded; peace plans (the Geneva accords/the Vance-Owen plan) were shameful surrenders.

The liberals of Camelot who drenched Indochina in blood can now listen to their heirs spouting the same zealous rhetoric: mission, burden, role. The warm-up was Somalia and the showcase humanitarian mission initiated by George Bush, but intervention has been pressed most hotly by the liberal Establishment, whether columnists, think tanks, relief organizations such as CARE or the directors of Human Rights Watch. These are the voices now at Bill Clinton’s ear, urging major intervention in Bosnia.

In the performance of the press, too, one can find parallels between Vietnam and Bosnia; the same partialities are at work, the same aversion to history. The Canadian general, Lewis MacKenzie, who was until recently commander of the U.N. Protection Force in Yugoslavia, pointed out last week on this page that the Serbs, while deserving a grave share of the blame, “are far from fully responsible for the carnage,” that “there is more than enough guilt to go ‘round.” Often, in the press, it is hard to find so measured a judgment.

The majority of cease-fires that he had arranged, wrote MacKenzie, had been broken by the Bosnian Muslims “because their long-term objective was, and still is, to cause the West to intervene.” There was, he added, zero evidence that the “no-fly zone” was being violated by Serbs.

Clinton is already ankle-deep in the Balkan quagmire. During his campaign, he fanned Croat and Bosnian expectations with reckless language about air strikes against Serbian positions. Now he and Secretary of State Warren Christopher, have made a surprise U-turn and supported the peace plan drawn up by mediators Cyrus Vance and David Owen. The map of Bosnia laboriously brokered by Vance and Owen might be backed by a NATO force with significant U.S. participation.

The fact that at the last minute the Clinton Administration drew back from outright refusal to endorse the Vance-Owen plan must be read as as a significant victory for the forces of reason. Already the air is thick with language about a sellout to the Serbs.

Still at issue is the scale of the proposed intervention of a peace-keeping force--Clinton has already shown that he is acutely sensitive to political pressure. For the time being, the warnings of U.N. Secretary General Boutros Boutros-Ghali, of Vance and Owen, of the Russians, seem to have had their effect. But the nature of the mission could change overnight and turn into the bloody crusade that the interventionist lobby has been howling for these long months.