NEWS ANALYSIS : Clinton’s New Bosnia Plan Aims to Salvage U.S. Honor

More than two months ago, the Clinton Administration and its European allies agreed to set up havens for civilians in Sarajevo and other Bosnian cities--but then stood by as Serbian gunners continued to rain terror on the towns.

One of the besieged havens, Gorazde, was so far from safe that some residents tried to flee, choosing to take their chances in no-man’s-land. An even larger tragedy loomed in Sarajevo, where U.S. intelligence analysts warned that 380,000 civilians were in increasing danger of falling to Serbian guerrillas.

So last week, when President Clinton sent the allies a last-ditch proposal to use Western air strikes against the Serbs, his main objective was not just to save civilian lives--it was also to salvage some of the United States’ tarnished honor.

“We could see a disaster coming,” an aide to Secretary of State Warren Christopher said glumly. “There were going to be a lot of ugly pictures coming out of Sarajevo. . . . There was growing discomfort with the position we had put ourselves in.”

If Sarajevo fell, a year’s worth of Western pledges to safeguard Bosnia-Herzegovina’s existence would be exposed as empty. If the Serbs slaughtered the city’s civilians, the United States’ claim to be the world’s sole superpower would ring cruelly hollow. And if the presence of a U.N. peacekeeping force in the city failed to deter the Serbs, the official noted, “it would be hard to get anyone to take a U.N. force seriously ever again.”

Clinton proposed last week that the North Atlantic Treaty Organization announce its readiness to launch air strikes against Bosnian Serb positions to accomplish three objectives: to protect U.N. forces, to allow humanitarian aid convoys to reach the havens and to halt the Serbian offensive around Sarajevo.

The President’s plan was bold in comparison to previous measures--but it still fell short of what would be needed to truly protect the six designated havens, U.S. and European officials warned.

Only a larger commitment of U.N. ground troops could do that, they said. But the United Nations has conspicuously failed to persuade its members to send more soldiers to Bosnia’s battlefields. Knowing it would be pointless even to try recruiting the needed 34,000 fresh troops, Secretary General Boutros Boutros-Ghali called for only 7,500 to guard the safe areas but still ended up with just two solid offers: 3,000 from Pakistan and 1,000 from France.

Instead, the Clinton proposal is an amalgam of holding action and hope. The holding action is aimed at blunting the Serbian offensive against Sarajevo to stave off the city’s fall. The hope is that the mere threat of air strikes, and perhaps one or two “demonstration” attacks, will push the Serbs into observing a cease-fire that freezes their army in place.

“The concept is that one way to protect the safe havens, and maybe the best way, is to help the negotiators (at Bosnian peace talks in Geneva) produce a workable agreement,” a senior State Department official said.

Not everyone is impressed. “This is all a bluff,” complained George Kenney, the State Department’s former Yugoslavia desk officer who resigned last year to protest the government’s unwillingness to do more in Bosnia.

Even if the new plan works, he pointed out, it will leave the Serbs in command of about 70% of Bosnia, much of it won through “ethnic cleansing”--ruthless attacks on Muslim civilians to drive them off their land.

And at least in the short run, the Western promise to protect Bosnia’s cities remains unfulfilled; the havens are still some of the deadliest places in the world.

But after months of diplomatic paralysis--and, aides report, genuine anguish on the part of Clinton, Christopher and National Security Adviser Anthony Lake--the United States is at least trying something new. “We are suffering the consequences of not having done anything sooner,” one official acknowledged, “but there is an element here of ‘better late than never.’ ”

From the start, the haven plan was a failure. Boutros-Ghali complained that the plan lacked any “connection to an overall political solution.” On a more practical level, the United States, Russia and most other countries refused to donate troops--although the British and French did send troops to escort food convoys through stubborn Serbian lines.

The 9,200-member U.N. peacekeeping force already on the ground said it was stretched too thin to protect the six haven cities--Sarajevo, Srebrenica, Tuzla, Zepa, Gorazde and Bihac--and complained that the mission would lead it into the very kind of confrontation its commanders had labored to avoid.

Worst of all, the Bosnian Serbs noted the disarray in the West and resumed their attacks on most of the havens. In Gorazde and Srebrenica, they blocked humanitarian relief supplies from reaching Muslim refugees. In Sarajevo, they pressed an offensive aimed at crippling the city’s defenses and cut off electricity, water and gas supplies.

But history may record that the Serbs pushed their luck a step too far last Sunday when they shelled a detachment of French peacekeeping troops, apparently deliberately. France demanded that a long-delayed move to provide NATO air support for the troops on the ground be accelerated, and Boutros-Ghali agreed; the warplanes, including U.S. aircraft, should be ready for action by Tuesday. Delegates from the 16 NATO nations are to discuss the action at a meeting in Brussels on Monday.

The more important question is whether the attack on the French will help swing European governments behind Clinton’s more assertive proposal to threaten air strikes against Serbian command centers and supply depots inside Bosnia.

That proposal brings Clinton full circle, for it is virtually the same thing he proposed as a candidate more than a year ago.

In any case, much of the damage will be irreversible. Some of the loss is human, among Bosnia’s long-suffering civilians. But to diplomats, another heavy loss is the rapid erosion of the hope, so bright at the end of the Cold War, that the U.N. Security Council, under U.S. leadership, could act decisively to stop brush-fire wars around the world.

“For me, the whole thing is just ludicrous,” said Edward C. Luck, president of the U.N. Assn. of the United States, a group that supports the strengthening of the world body. “If there ever was a case where (U.N. military action) is required to save a population, it is in the middle of a war. . . . But I think the actions of the members and the actions of the United States have made things worse. They have been talking one way in the Security Council and acting another way on the ground.”

McManus reported from Washington, and Meisler reported from the United Nations.