Bosnia Isn’t Vietnam, It’s Spain, 1936 : Resignations at State focus attention on unprincipled American foreign policy.

From February through Aug. 5, when he resigned in protest against America’s don’t-ask-don’t-act policy, Marshall Harris, 32, was the State Department’s desk officer for Bosnia.

What it took to drive him out of State after eight years was the revelation that American foreign policy was indeed bipartisan--in its lack of principle. As a special assistant to Secretary James A. Baker III, Harris thought the Bush Administration’s hands-off policy misguided, but was convinced that it was “based purely on short-term political interests”--i.e., that American bombs stay home during the election. After Bill Clinton’s victory, Harris was willing to give the benefit of the doubt to Secretary Warren Christopher--until the disaster of Christopher’s European trip in May to hold discussion groups rather than prod the allies into action.

“My low point came on July 21,” Harris said, “when Christopher gave a press conference saying that we were already doing the best we could. The day after, the Serbs launched 3,700 shells into Sarajevo. There we have the closest thing imaginable to a cause-and-effect.” Three other State Department officials have also resigned--an unprecedented public exodus, about as many as left the Kennedy, Johnson and Nixon governments during the entire Vietnam War. An honorable tradition is in the making.

Six weeks later, Harris, now an adviser to Rep. Frank McCloskey (D-Ind.), remains “absolutely persuaded that American intervention would make an important difference. We have to declare a formal halt to the talks in Geneva. The talks as now configured will lead to nothing but the dismemberment of Bosnia and a peace that will not hold. Tell the Serbs to lift the sieges and withdraw. If they don’t, we do air strikes. (Pentagon) officials say that within one day we could destroy 70% of their artillery. At the same time, have President Clinton lift the arms embargo. Sell them (the Muslim Bosnians) weapons, enable them to defend themselves. You have a Bosnian government army that’s still quite strong--stronger than the Bosnian Serb army. We can stop goods from flowing in from Serbia quite easily. We begin by bombing bridges. I don’t think the Serbs can get appreciable reinforcements in.”

Harris is unimpressed by quagmire phobia. “It doesn’t have to get to that point,” he says crisply. “It’s simple for Clinton to lift the embargo and sell guns to the legitimate government of Bosnia. Secondly, we have genocide taking place in Bosnia. We’re a signatory to the Genocide Convention.” What about military claims, most recently stated by the incoming Joint Chiefs head, Gen. John Shalikashvili, that air strikes would be futile? “Even if you could take out only 30% of the artillery,” Harris said, “that would be a help.”

“The Administration has made these false assumptions: that it’s a three-way war; that it’s ‘the problem from hell,’ ‘ancient ethnic conflicts,’ and so on,” he said. “The great lie of the Serb ideology is that the Bosnian people are three distinct ethnic groups. Not only have these people lived among each other for the last 800 years, they’ve done it so successfully that they’re intermarried 30% or more in the cities. The press oftentimes grabs onto the Serbs’ great lie and uses it without challenging it. We look in the papers or on TV and see pictures of people dying or dead, and there’s not enough focus on how they got there. There’s one root cause: Serbian terrorists have marched through Bosnia driving people out of their homes, and if the people don’t go, they kill and rape and drive them out. It’s Serbian aggression, stupid.”

Harris sees in Bosnia “an abandonment of the principles our country pursued since World War II.” When I demur about the consistency of those principles and the record, he diplomatically adds: “I thought they were in place, in general.”

This writer doesn’t. Though I’ve never been an absolute pacifist, and the government thought I wasn’t a conscientious enough objector during Vietnam, I’ve never seen a war I liked. But in Bosnia the possible dirtiness of American intervention pales against “ethnic cleansing.”

Talk about quagmire: What we get trapped in are historical analogues. Munichs, Auschwitzes, Vietnams--the metaphors cheapen the horrors. If we have to play this game, Bosnia isn’t Vietnam, it’s Spain. Would that the Harrises of 1936 had broken with that State Department over the farce of American nonintervention at a time when Hitler and Mussolini were intervening just fine on the Fascist side. Leave callousness to Europe’s “leaders”--they’re good at it. Let’s lift our fingers.