COLUMN LEFT/ ALEXANDER COCKBURN : Call to War Weds Strange Bedfellows : Bosnia’s plight evokes bellicosity from the left, anti-militarism on the right.

Back in Europe, the left folk are banging the drum hardest about enlarging the war in the Balkans and dishing it out to the Serbs. Take Ken Livingstone, often derisively called “Red Ken” in the Conservative press. In the House of Commons, he stridently denounces what he calls Western “appeasement” of Serbian aggression against the Bosnian Muslims.

The British Labor Party, whose radical wing Livingstone inhabits, essentially shares his positions, as do the middle-of-the-middle-of-the-road Liberal Democrats, who have just seen a huge boost to their fortunes in county elections.

It’s the Conservatives who are displaying caution and denouncing air strikes and the idea of arming Bosnian Muslims as incendiary ploys that would merely “level the killing field,” to use the words of former Prime Minister Edward Heath.

Here in America, most discussions about military intervention sooner rather than later bump up against the word Vietnam. In Britain, the equivalent word is appeasement. The ruling Tory elites in the 1930s mostly appeased Hitler because they shared with him the view that the true enemy lay to the east, in the form of Soviet Communism. But the Labor Party, suffused with traditions of pacifism generated by the ghastly carnage of World War I, was also party to that appeasement.

Liberals and leftists prefer to couch calls for war in terms of the shouldering of moral burdens, the betterment of humanity. Conservatives are less ashamed to talk bluntly about the national interest.

In this country, the political map is blurred. As in England, there is a left-liberal muster in favor of doing something. At its forefront are those who hoped that a third way might evolve from the collapse of the old-line communist states in Eastern Europe. They see Serbia as a hardline communist residue and beleaguered Sarajevo as the incarnation of their hopes.

A month ago, Joanne Landy and Thomas Harrison of the Campaign for Peace and Democracy proclaimed that arming the Bosnian Muslims is a “moral imperative.” The Eastern European correspondent of the leftist fortnightly In These Times put it more strongly. “A quick decisive invasion of Bosnia-Herzegovina,” Paul Hockenus wrote last fall, “is an option that the left should rally around as forcefully as any issue since opposition to the Vietnam War.”

This is not to say that such views fully represent the left. They are not shared by such influential radicals as Noam Chomsky or by such publications as the Nation or the Progressive, all opposing any escalation, including the arming of Bosnian Muslims.

If the left is a patchwork, so too is the liberal to neoconservative terrain. Professional high-horsers such as Anthony Lewis have been hot for military intervention. So have those who tend to decode the Balkan crisis and Serbian onslaughts on the Muslims as a Holocaust in the making. Here are to be found Elie Wiesel and former Nixon speechwriter William Safire. Another Nixon speechwriter, Pat Buchanan, has eschewed the temptation, as a right-wing Catholic, of supporting the Croats and, as an isolationist, has written strongly against intervention.

Cold War Democrats like Zbigniew Brzezinski and Jeane Kirkpatrick bang the drum. Liberal pragmatists such as House Speaker Tom Foley are opposed. On the Republican side, the most powerful voice in favor of intervention is Senate Minority Leader Bob Dole, who once denounced “Democrat wars.” Dole’s motives are mysterious, though he has attracted enthusiastic Croatian support in recent times.

Buffeted by all these contrary opinions is a President on whom the domestic economy is turning more sour by the month and who is vulnerable to the Beltway pundits telling him to draw a line in the dirt.

Since there is no comprehensible argument to be made for the national interest as a pretext for intervention, in the end, it will be the liberal-left “moralists” whom we will have to blame if Clinton goes in.

One can support moral objectives, such as the creation and buttressing of a multi-confessional Bosnian peacekeeping force acting under U.N. auspices; also, the long-term economic improvement under EC auspices of all former Yugoslav provinces. But beyond this, military intervention opens an abyss. How many errant bombs aimed in those “surgical strikes” against Serbian supply lines will have to hit civilians, schools or hospitals before there’s somehow a moral parity in death tolls between the Muslim and the Orthodox? And if one is to bomb the Serbs at Srebrenica, why not the Croats at Mostar?

The holocaust unleashed in Sarajevo in 1914 killed millions, and the left-liberals who mostly supported what came to be known as the Great War should never forget it.