Can NATO Be Decisive Again?

In the 4th Century BC, the political orator Demosthenes, speaking at a time of peril in the life of Athens, told his fellow citizens that they were like a clumsy boxer always moving his fists to shield the last place struck. In addressing the Bosnian crisis, Gen. John Shalikashvili, chairman of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff, could use a lesson from Demosthenes.

Peace became imaginable in Bosnia for the first time when NATO, implementing a longstanding U.N. resolution, delivered an ultimatum to the Serbs about their Sarajevo artillery. In plain English, it was “Move it or lose it.” The Serbs moved it.

Optimists then proposed that similar ultimatums be issued elsewhere in Bosnia. Pessimists predicted that the Serbs would move their firepower to other Muslim or Croat targets. What immediately followed was neither. It was an unexpected reconciliation between Bosnia’s Muslims and its Croats and a new peace momentum.

Within the last few weeks, however, the predictions of the post-Sarajevo pessimists have come to pass: savage ethnic cleansing of Muslims in Banja Luka and a Serb siege of the Muslim enclaves of Maglaj and Gorazde. The slaughter now taking place in Gorazde is comparable to the slaughter that prompted decisive action at Sarajevo. Can NATO be decisive again?

Shalikashvili says no. NATO air strikes, he says, could be effective against Serbian artillery at Sarajevo but would not be against the infantry doing the killing in Gorazde. But must NATO be Demosthenes’ boxer? Must Gorazde’s defense come at Gorazde?

We think not. We urge the Clinton Administration to call on NATO to deliver to the Serbs the kind of Gorazde ultimatum that could stop the siege overnight: Lift the siege or prepare for air attack. Where? On what? That should be for NATO to know and the Serbs to find out. Serb military assets are many. NATO knows where they are.

Shalikashvili claims that this course would make NATO a belligerent on one side in a conflict in which it must maintain neutrality. This is nonsense. NATO is not neutral. If it were, the Sarajevo ultimatum could never have come about. The “evenhanded” neutralization of the virtually nonexistent Bosnian artillery along with the potent Serbian artillery at Sarajevo was a transparent charade.

For the rest of its self-defense, Bosnia does not need U.S. ground troops. It needs a U.S. President who will take seriously the Senate’s 87-9 approval in February of a non-binding resolution calling for a unilateral U.S. lifting of the arms embargo against Bosnia. Ideally, a NATO Gorazde ultimatum would come in tandem with a lifting of the embargo by all the NATO members. Failing that, the Clinton Administration should offer its NATO allies a choice: Either issue a Gorazde ultimatum (an existing U.N. resolution is all the authorization needed) or plan on a unilateral U.S. lifting of the Bosnian embargo--and therewith, sadly, a tacit loss of U.S. confidence in NATO itself.