Senate Yields to President on Troops : Policy: It votes to ask--not demand--that Clinton seek congressional consent to commit GIs to peacekeeping in Bosnia.

In a significant victory for the White House, the Senate voted overwhelmingly Wednesday to ask--but not demand--that President Clinton seek congressional consent before committing troops to a peacekeeping force for Bosnia-Herzegovina.

With opposition to U.S. military intervention abroad still running strong in Congress, the lawmakers pulled back from confrontation with Clinton over his war-making powers by wording their request as a “sense of the Senate” resolution over Bosnia without obliging Clinton to abide by their consensus.

Another challenge to Clinton’s authority to intervene militarily in Haiti was likewise avoided by a similar compromise--although the Senate is not scheduled to vote on that resolution until today.

The Bosnia resolution, passed by a vote of 99 to 1, with Sen. Mark O. Hatfield (R-Ore.) as the lone dissenter, stated simply that Congress believes no funds should be used to support participation by U.S. forces in a peacekeeping mission to Bosnia unless first authorized by Congress.

The resolution on Haiti, its passage by a similarly lopsided margin now seeming assured, made the same request but with the added exemption for the dispatch of troops to Haiti if they are needed immediately “to protect or evacuate United States citizens from a situation of imminent danger.”

The language in both resolutions had been worked out with the White House over several days of negotiations involving Democratic leaders, senior Administration officials and Senate Minority Leader Bob Dole (R-Kan.). Until Wednesday morning, Dole had been threatening to introduce tougher measures that would have restricted Clinton’s authority to intervene with military force in Haiti or to commit U.S. troops to a possible U.N. peacekeeping force for Bosnia.

As late as Tuesday, both measures were acknowledged by Democratic leaders to have significant bipartisan support in the wake of the clamor for congressional intervention in foreign policy that arose after 18 U.S. soldiers died as a result of an Oct. 3 engagement in Somalia.

But it was also clear that some of that support had begun to erode in the face of an intensive lobbying effort by White House and Senate Democratic leaders. They argued that Congress was allowing its concern over Somalia to push it too close to the edge of a constitutional crisis with the President over the disputed War Powers Act. In the end, Republicans as well as Democrats recoiled from such a contest. The act, passed in 1973, requires the President to seek congressional approval when committing U.S. troops abroad for longer than 60 days.

Even Dole, pressed by the conservative wing of his party to play up the weaknesses in Clinton’s handling of foreign policy, appeared to have second thoughts about encroaching upon the President’s authority to conduct military and foreign policy, executive privileges that he has defended strongly when Republicans controlled the White House.

While his aides maintained that he had the votes to pass tougher legislation, Dole noted that all along he had stressed his intention to refrain from “micro-managing foreign policy” and to “work with the Administration toward a compromise.”

For his part, Clinton also moved to calm congressional concerns by sending U.N. Ambassador Madeleine Albright to Capitol Hill, where she assured lawmakers Wednesday that the United States will participate in future multilateral peacekeeping missions only if they are “well planned”--and only when vital U.S. interests are at stake.

“When large-scale or high-risk operations are contemplated and American involvement is necessary, we will be unlikely to accept U.N. leadership,” Albright told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. Rather, in situations such as those contemplated in Bosnia, U.S. forces will remain either under U.S. or North Atlantic Treaty Organization command in a coalition similar to the one assembled during Operation Desert Storm, she said.

As the Senate debated the Bosnia and Haiti crises, two other notable visitors also made appearances on Capitol Hill--former President George Bush and ousted Haitian President Jean-Bertrand Aristide.

Bush went to confer over lunch with Republican senators. Afterward, he told reporters that Dole and House Republican leader Robert H. Michel of Illinois were doing a “first-class job” of leading “the loyal opposition” to Clinton.

Aristide conducted a lengthy question-and-answer session with senators and watched on closed-circuit television as Sen. Christopher J. Dodd (D-Conn.) defended him from allegations made by Sen. Jesse Helms (R-N.C.) that Aristide was a “psychopath” who had incited mob violence and encouraged political murders when he was in power.

Times staff writer Norman Kempster contributed to this report.