Road to Bosnia : Left to Waterloo, Right at Munich

“Very, very unwise,” was the way U.S. Secretary of State Warren Christopher characterized the refusal of the Bosnian Serbs to ratify the Vance-Owen peace plan for the troubled Balkan republic.

People who live in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones. As the Bosnian crisis deepens, threatening to draw the United States into its worst foreign-policy debacle since Vietnam, the Clinton Administration’s botched policy is worse than unwise. The inconsistencies and blunders of this policy are day by day, week by week, making a bad situation worse and creating a foreign-policy crisis that could, literally, wreck the Clinton Administration in its first year.

It is difficult to decide whether the Administration’s success or failure would be worse for the United States. If Administration efforts to pressure the Bosnian Serbs to accept Vance-Owen succeed, Washington will be forced to send 20,000 ground troops to police an unenforceable cease-fire in Bosnia. Let there be no mistake: Some of those troops will come home in body bags.

Serb militias, controlled neither by the Belgrade government nor by the self-proclaimed Parliament in Bosnia, are likely to refuse to evacuate their hard-won positions--no matter what diplomats say. Guerrilla fighters and terrorists will target U.S. forces, and adequate security will be impossible to provide. Clinton’s Bosnia policy will be an albatross around the neck of Democratic candidates in 1994, and he will be, at most, a one-term President.

That’s not all. A settlement in Bosnia does nothing to stop the next and more dangerous phase of the Yugoslav war: renewal of the fighting in Croatia and efforts by crazed Serbian nationalists to spread “ethnic cleansing” into Kosovo. The 20,000 U.S. peacekeepers the Administration so blithely proposes to station in Bosnia risk being caught up in these wars and involving the United States in an all-out shooting war of major proportions.

So that is what we get if the Administration’s policy works: body bags and a widening war. But what if the policy fails?

Pretty much the same. It is eerie and horrifying, 30 years after Vietnam, to hear another Democratic President talk about bombing his enemies to the negotiating table. Informed military opinion is virtually unanimous that air strikes won’t be enough to force changes among the Bosnian Serbs.

Meanwhile, nobody should forget for a minute that more than 100,000 Bosnian Muslims--most of them women and children--are, to all intents and purposes, hostages of Serbian gunmen in the hills of eastern Bosnia. The West cannot save them if their enemies decide on a massacre--or even if, as is likely, infuriated Serbian militias use Bosnian women and children as living shields for the artillery positions the United States wants to bomb. Air strikes in Bosnia are the fast track to massacres, escalation and humiliation.

The question for Bill Clinton is no longer whether he can save the Bosnian Muslims. The question is whether he can save his Administration. Already weakened by loss of domestic focus and a succession of amateurish flops and fiascoes, the wobbly Administration is headed over the cliff in Bosnia, moving toward the kind of historic blunders that the American people--rightly--don’t forgive. Lyndon B. Johnson and Harry S. Truman were both driven from office because of ill-considered foreign adventures. There was no U.S. strategy for victory in either Korea or Vietnam: Christopher, National Security Adviser Anthony Lake and Colin L. Powell don’t have a strategy for victory in Yugoslavia.

Part of the problem is simple inexperience. The Administration is still learning how to conduct foreign policy on a day-to-day basis, and it makes a few bloopers while learning on the job. The most recent example: Christopher’s botched trip across Europe. Billed as a demonstration of allied support for the United States that would frighten the Serbs into accepting Vance-Owen, the Christopher trip showed just the opposite: No European ally was willing to endorse the American strategy for Yugoslavia. Nobody but the United States wants to arm the Muslims, nobody but the United States has any faith in air strikes, and nobody thinks the United States can take either of these steps without another resolution of the Security Council--which the United States may not be able to get.

This left the Serbs feeling skeptical and Christopher looking stupid. It has further undermined Europe’s confidence in the new U.S. Administration. It could have been avoided if the Clinton Administration had observed a simple diplomatic rule: Don’t send your top people unless the deal is already cut. Let underlings build a consensus in the back rooms, then send the Cabinet secretaries and presidents for the champagne and photo-ops.

But inexperience is only the frosting on the cake of Administration incompetence in the Balkans. That the Clinton Administration has gotten this far out on a limb without rounding up solid support from the allies is the worst possible sign: The White House and the State Department are out of their depth.

The wily Serbs and the vindictive Lord Owen--no friend of the Clinton Administration--have run rings around the U.S. diplomats. Slobodan Milosevic, the not very ex-communist president of Serbia, deftly put Serbia on the side of the angels with a quick speech and a vague threat of sanctions against the Bosnian Serbs. This footwork leaves Washington helpless to build an international consensus against Serbia and, if the Serbs keep it up, could build pressure to lift sanctions on Serbia.

Meanwhile, Lord Owen, who has already snookered Washington into promising the lion’s share of the ground troops to enforce his increasingly improbable peace plan, deftly pulled the rug from under the U.S. calls for a swift multilateral response to the defiant Bosnian Serbs. Declaring that the peace process was still on track, Owen gave the European allies all the cover they needed to ignore Christopher’s call to arms.

Underneath the dismal daily headlines lies a deeper problem: The Clinton Administration has yet to develop, much less to present, a coherent foreign policy. U.S. foreign policy used to be about fighting communism; what is Washington up to in the Balkans?

The official Washington line is that ethnic cleansing must be stopped. In a new variant on the domino theory that got the United States in so much trouble in Indochina, the Administration worries that ethnic cleansing in Yugoslavia could somehow spread, especially to the rest of Eastern Europe and Russia.

This isn’t an unreasonable fear, but it isn’t enough for a real foreign policy. Neither the American people nor the Clinton Administration are ready to fight in Bosnia, but the cold, hard truth is that only force--force on the ground--can roll back the Serbs.

Either ethnic cleansing is so terrible that we have to fight a war to stop it, or it is something we dislike but must live with--as we live with so many terrible things in so many parts of the world. Let’s be honest: Most Europeans and Americans agree ethnic ethnic cleansing is a tragedy, but somehow life goes on. Outside of a handful of rabid Northeastern newspaper columnists, there is virtually no support in the United States for a ground war for Vance-Owen, and recent polls show a majority of the public opposed to air strikes.

The Clinton Administration knows this, but can’t face the conclusions. Instead, it is trying to bluff the Serbs into believing the United States will take military action if the Serbs don’t do as they are told.

The trouble is: The Serbs know Clinton is bluffing. They know the United States has no support among its allies for effective ground actions, and they can see the U.S. polls that show that people here feel the same way.

The last U.S. President who tried to bluff his enemies in this way was Richard Nixon. He wanted the North Vietnamese to believe the United States would never leave Vietnam until the North met our terms.

Nixon didn’t fool the Vietnamese and Clinton won’t fool the Serbs. This is how disasters happen: Countries overplay their hands and their enemies call their bluffs.

The Bosnian crisis is getting worse every day; the United States is closer than ever to hostilities with the Serbs-- and the Administration does not know why this is happening or what to do next. This is already the most dismal and the most dangerous moment in U.S. foreign policy in 20 years, and it is only the first of the many international crises that, for better or for worse, will determine Clinton’s place in history and in the hearts of the American people.