Europeans’ View: Bosnia Too Risky : Balkans: Almost no one advocates full-scale military intervention. Most leaders favor a minimalist approach.

The preponderant weight of opinion among Western European political and military leaders and strategists is that risks of action involving force in Bosnia-Herzegovina are far greater than those of inaction.

“This is a horrible dilemma for Europe,” one senior British government adviser said. “Everyone is appalled by the horror of what is going on there. But the question is whether military intervention will simply make it worse, increasing the bloodshed and suffering, in what is basically a civil war.”

Secretary of State Warren Christopher, on his recent European visit, was strongly warned about the risks of action, which include possible involvement in a long civil war.

Field Marshal Richard Vincent, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization’s military committee chairman, warned of being drawn, without clear political aims, into Bosnia for a period extending “halfway through the next century.”

Almost no one in Europe advocates full-scale military intervention in Bosnia, because they believe it would mean deploying hundreds of thousands of U.N. troops in a long-term conflict whose outcome would be uncertain.

As for bombing supply lines and artillery positions, most NATO generals believe that air strikes could kill bystanders and not necessarily be effective. Smaller artillery weapons can be easily moved.

“The British remember during the Gulf War that American air attacks caused several deaths in mistakenly hitting British army vehicles in the desert,” one strategist said. “And British bombers, in taking out a bridge over the Euphrates at Fallujah, struck a marketplace, killing a lot of civilians. Imagine what it would be like in the mountainous, forested Balkans.”

When it comes to moral argument, some European commentators believe the United States is turning the conflict into a black-and-white one between Serbs and Muslims--forgetting Croatian attacks against Muslims and vice versa.

“Once we start shooting and bombing,” a British officer said, “do we hit all sides? And what are our eventual goals?”

Further, as Col. Mike Dewar, deputy director of the International Institute for Strategic Studies, put it: “The original mistake was recognizing Bosnia-Herzegovina as an independent state in the first place. Then, why be selective? What about Tajikistan, Azerbaijan, Burma? Where do you stop?”

British and French strategists are also unhappy with German officials who call for action, because the Germans say their constitution prohibits them from sending troops to the Balkans. Germany and Austria also back the creation of so-called “safe areas” in Bosnia but would not send troops.

NATO is prepared to send up to 75,000 soldiers to police a cease-fire line, if one is established under the plan for peace drafted by U.N. mediator Cyrus R. Vance and Lord Owen of the European Community, although NATO would be hard-pressed to provide that many, let alone enough to mount a full-scale military effort.

Thus, most European leaders favor the so-called minimalist approach, with continued humanitarian efforts, tightened embargoes and peacemaking efforts.

They hope such measures can contain the crisis and keep it from spilling over into the rest of Southeastern Europe.

At bottom, European leaders also think intervention doesn’t have public opinion behind it. As an aide to British Prime Minister John Major observed: “The urge people feel to do something in Bosnia will quickly change if British soldiers come home in body bags. Then they will ask, ‘Why are we intervening?’ ”

“Unfortunately,” said Dewar, who believes the conflict is basically a longstanding civil war, “there are no effective military solutions to the Bosnian crisis. Perhaps the unpalatable truth is that when a people are determined to fight each other, there is precious little that the outside world can do to help.”