President Bill Clinton has made a difficult,...

President Bill Clinton has made a difficult, courageous and correct decision to engage the military power of the United States in Bosnia. The form of the engagement is not yet known, and at this point, of course, the details begin to assume strategic importance and cannot be announced in advance. In negative terms, however, the Clinton Administration has concluded that diplomacy backed only by economic sanctions has failed and that the failure must not be accepted.

The failure is not just a failure to restore peace among the warring Serb, Croat and Muslim populations of Bosnia. It is a failure to halt a slaughter of the Muslims by the Serbs that U.N. human rights envoy Tadeusz Mazowiecki has characterized as an “extermination.” The Muslims have been essentially unarmed. The Serbs have been armed, supplied and at times joined in the field by Serbia-Montenegro, the remnant of the Yugoslavia that was. The result has been “ethnic cleansing” with no end in sight. Ultimately, it is this that has prompted the change in U.S. policy.

NO LONGER AVOIDABLE: The United Nations and the European Community, through their representatives Cyrus R. Vance and Lord David Owen, went to extreme lengths to avoid Western military engagement by conciliating the Serbs. The peace plan they mediated was a dismantlement of the internationally recognized Bosnian state, a consent to ethnicity as the future basis for political organization in Bosnia, and the ratification of most of the Bosnian Serbs’ territorial expansion. But because this plan was only to be implemented when all parties, including the Bosnian Serbs, agreed to it, the Serbs not only declined to sign it but took it as a tacit international license for further aggression.

Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic has now seen fit to ratify the Vance-Owen plan, doing so even as Clinton and his advisors were deciding on military action. But a transparently insincere attempt to buy time is, at this point, not likely to buy very much of it. The Vance-Owen plan, unlike comparable plans in many past conflicts, was not to be preceded by a cease-fire. The signing thus does not prevent the Clinton Administration from taking up arms any more than it guarantees or even requires the Bosnian Serbs to lay down their arms.

Clinton’s decision is a difficult one diplomatically because, though the Serbs are without serious international support, the European members of NATO have have been determined not to intervene militarily. The President’s decision is difficult politically because though U.S. support has been steadily growing for intervention, there is also widespread reluctance to assume new foreign burdens.

Against this backdrop, Clinton’s is a courageous decision precisely because, if he does nothing (and that possibility, however faint, remains), he will have plenty of excuses.

His decision is not just courageous, however, but also correct because the United States, as a multi-ethnic, citizenship-based state, cannot ultimately be safe in a world where ethnic purity is honored as a principle of statehood and because the United Nations, born from the ashes of post-war Europe, cannot begin to police the rest of the world if it cannot first police Europe. If the game is lost in Europe, the game is simply lost. Americans could wish that Europeans saw this more clearly than they sometimes seem to. That sorrow aside, we may be glad that Clinton’s vision, on this point, seems so well in focus.

NO LONGER DEBATEABLE: The Bosnian intervention could be a long one; but in a war of attrition, time is not on the side of Serbia, much less on that of the Bosnian Serbs. Any close look at the factors that enabled North Vietnam to withstand and eventually prevail against American military power should make the weakness and the geographical as well as political vulnerability of Yugoslavia and, above all, of the Bosnian Serbs unmistakable. Among the factors that favored North Vietnam, perhaps the most important was bitter division in the United States about the basic morality of the war. This time, despite the reservations many have held about the costs U.S. military intervention in a civil war, there is no division about the morality of such an intervention. Senate Minority Leader Robert Dole (R-Kan.) and influential Republicans such as former Secretary of State George Shultz have given the President unhesitating support.

With that support at his back, Clinton may yet rally French and British support in Europe. The heroism of France’s Gen. Morillon at Srebenica and Lord Owen’s grieving and public change of heart may have gone some distance in preparing the citizenry of those countries to shoulder a burden that no one can blame them for wishing to avoid. Let us hope so, for the enemy being faced down in Bosnia is fascism. There is no other name for it. And Europe--surely no less than America--knows well that fascism must never be appeased.