NEWS ANALYSIS : THE BOSNIA DILEMMA : Sarajevo’s ‘Generals’ Graveyard’ Looms Before U.N. Bosnia Commander : Balkans: Lt. Gen. Michael Rose was riding high on his triumphs. The Gorazde debacle shows how far he can fall.

A leafy courtyard and prewar parliamentary clubhouse where the U.N. Protection Force has posted its forward command have come to be known as “the generals’ graveyard.”

Three former U.N. commanders for Bosnia-Herzegovina have exited the fortified compound with venomous words for the handcuffed operation, slinking out in disgrace with their careers in tatters.

British Lt. Gen. Michael Rose, the fourth U.N. commander for Bosnia in less than two years, broke onto the scene in late January with a rapid-fire chain of successes that enhanced a daring, can-do image stemming from his days as an elite special forces commando. In February, a cease-fire and proclaimed weapons exclusion zone, backed by a threat of NATO air strikes, brought a modicum of peace and normalcy to this ruined capital after 22 months of shelling.

It was also early on Rose’s watch that American diplomats engineered the reconciliation of warring Muslims and Croats in those parts of Bosnia not overrun by nationalist Serbs. With almost miraculous speed, a desperately desired relief from killing and conflict spread across what were Bosnia’s most vicious war zones.

Buoyed by those breakthroughs, mediators and wishful thinkers even began to talk of an imminent peace treaty reuniting the Croatian-Muslim federation with the Serbian separatists whose 1992 revolt triggered the war.

But the high-riding of his first weeks in command has only given Rose farther to fall now that the truth of Serbian intentions has become clear from the savage, seemingly unstoppable assault on the U.N.-protected safe area of Gorazde.

The U.N. Protection Force has reached its hour of judgment in Bosnia with a swashbuckling hero at the helm who, much like the three generals before him, appears to be rapidly grasping that the Gorazde debacle threatening to undo him has more to do with the mission than with any one man.

Rose commands what is now a force of more than 15,000 troops whose sole responsibilities are escorting humanitarian aid and protecting Sarajevo and a handful of other safe areas.

But the mission’s ability to deliver food and medicine to civilians trapped behind the meandering lines of war has been hampered from the start by defiant Bosnian Serb gunmen who have no interest in seeing sustenance reach the homes and families of their enemies. Armed gunmen at roadblocks bar passage of aid convoys, and there is nothing the U.N. escorts can do about it. The troops are here, Rose and a chorus of other officers explain, only with the consent of the warring parties.

Now the mission’s mandate to protect the safe areas is being flouted in Gorazde, where 65,000 people are trapped inside a cordon of blazing tanks and artillery.

The rout of Gorazde has been a particular embarrassment for Rose, who repeatedly characterized the Bosnian Serb attack as limited and tactical in the first week of the siege, when a measured dose of force against the Bosnian Serbs might have done something about it.

Rose’s first resort to the force of air strikes last week provoked retaliation by the Bosnian Serb rebels, compelling the general’s civilian superiors at the faraway mission headquarters in Zagreb, Croatia, to recoil before the Bosnian Serb threats and to veto further requests for air power.

Like his unfortunate predecessors, Rose has been left to make excuses for a failed policy that was not of his making and confronted with a choice of resigning in anger or maintaining a militarily stiff upper lip.

“We do not fight war from white-painted vehicles,” Rose said of his peacekeepers’ inability to defend Gorazde.

When asked why he has refrained from calling for stepped-up North Atlantic Treaty Organization bombing to halt the Bosnian Serbs’ accelerated advance, the general snapped: “We are doing the best we are able within the limited resources and within the rules that we have, and we are not in the business of changing the balance of forces on the ground.”

Sources within the command center in the spacious villa--which in prewar days was known as the Delegates’ Club--say Rose is pushing the U.N. hierarchy to strengthen the mission’s mandate to allow better protection of his peacekeepers and genuine security for Bosnians in the safe zones.

Rose has drafted a plan for “total exclusion zones” that would require the Bosnian Serbs to pull out artillery beyond prescribed boundaries or risk having the guns destroyed by NATO air strikes. Whether Western governments would support such a powerful change of the mandate remains uncertain, as the areas would need 20,000 more troops to enforce the plan, sources said.

The lean, 53-year-old general--prone to fixing those who question him with a disarmingly unflinching stare--insists that he is determined to press on with the shackled mission, even in what may prove his Waterloo, the vanquished Gorazde.

But other figures in the crumbling diplomatic process seem close to giving up the fight to mediate an equitable solution in Bosnia, leaning toward a wholesale pullout.