Leaders Clash on U.S. Role in Bosnia : Politics: Dole, Gingrich push for greater intervention. In bow to allies, Clinton favors negotiated settlement.

Recent calls from Republican congressional leaders Bob Dole and Newt Gingrich for an escalation of American intervention in Bosnia-Herzegovina point toward a contentious new round of legislative and political struggles over U.S. involvement in Europe’s bloodiest conflict since World War II.

Dole and Gingrich, in recently blasting President Clinton for inaction and urging the United States to support the Bosnian Muslims with air strikes and arms shipments, have set the stage for bruising legislative conflicts with an Administration that is now pushing for a negotiated settlement to the fighting. But the two leaders may also be precipitating a collision with members of their own party who are skeptical of greater U.S. involvement in the conflict on either military or political grounds.

“I think we have a very full plate of a legislative agenda, which are the commitments we made to the American people--and Bosnia wasn’t one of those,” said Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), a leading opponent of greater American military involvement in the war.

“I don’t think there’s a huge amount of support in Republican ranks for having a crusade on Bosnia,” said one well-connected GOP strategist, who asked not to be identified.

The sharp attacks from Dole and Gingrich, the incoming Senate majority leader and House Speaker respectively, are bringing full circle the long and tortured domestic debate over Bosnia.

As a presidential candidate in 1992, Clinton sounded much as Dole and Gingrich do today. He frequently accused President George Bush of not doing enough to support the Bosnian government and called for air strikes to limit or reverse the battlefield gains of the Bosnian Serbs.

In office, Clinton has repeatedly declared his support for greater use of force against the Bosnian Serb rebels but has been unable to persuade the Europeans to go along.

The low point came in the spring of 1993, when the Administration proposed the so-called “lift and strike” option--under which the United Nations would lift the embargo against shipment of arms to the Bosnian government and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization would undertake widespread air strikes on military facilities of the Bosnian Serbs.

Clinton was forced to back down after the major NATO countries brusquely rejected the proposal.

After a frustrating series of similar confrontations that produced only minimal military action, the Administration moved toward the European position in November. After the allies rejected an Administration call for air strikes against Serbian forces advancing on the besieged government-held area around the town of Bihac, the Administration indicated that it would drop requests for further air strikes and instead emphasize negotiations to reach a settlement.

That abrupt turn in policy created the opening for the new Republican thrust.

Last Sunday, on the ABC-TV program “This Week With David Brinkley,” Dole laid out a three-step alternative to the Administration plan. The Kansas senator called for the removal of U.N. peacekeeping forces from Bosnia; for the United States unilaterally to break the international arms embargo against the Bosnian Muslims, and for a NATO campaign of “robust bombing” against Bosnian Serb military targets intended “to bring them to the negotiating table.”

Appearing the same morning on NBC-TV’s “Meet the Press,” Gingrich (R-Ga.) endorsed Dole’s agenda, but appeared to go even further in urging air strikes against the Bosnian Serbs and perhaps Serbia itself.

Gingrich said the United States should warn the Serbs that “if you launch a general offensive, we would reserve the right to use air power against every position you have, against every command and control center, against every position, everywhere. We would reserve the right to take you apart, and we’d do it in three to five days . . . and we’re telling you to just back off and accept an armed truce.”

Secretary of State Warren Christopher and other Administration officials have denounced those proposals as a prescription for expanding the war. But many observers see broad similarities between Dole’s approach--if not Gingrich’s broader discussion of bombing--and the Administration’s own ill-fated “lift and strike” initiative. In criticizing Dole and Gingrich, the Administration has sounded some of the same cautious notes about the risks of escalating the conflict that Bush raised against candidate Clinton in 1992.

“It’s one of the ironies,” said Richard Haass, a senior associate at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and an aide on the National Security Council under Bush. “Now you have Republicans arguing for ‘lift and strike’ and you have Clinton--after the campaign where he outflanked Bush early on and talked tough at the outset of his presidency--coming around to a fairly extreme version of the Bush position.”

In some important respects, however, the Republican leaders’ plans go beyond even Clinton’s earlier approach. While Clinton sought multilateral approval for lifting the arms embargo against the Bosnian government, Dole and Gingrich want the United States to breach it alone.

Dole has indicated that he intends to move quickly next year on legislation instructing Clinton to break the arms embargo. The Administration staunchly resists that proposal, arguing that shipping arms to Bosnia without U.N. approval would undermine compliance with other international embargoes that United States supports, such as the sanctions against Iraq.

But support for lifting the arms embargo has steadily grown across the political spectrum, and even Administration officials consider it virtually inevitable that Congress will approve such legislation next year.

The real issue may be whether the votes exist to override a veto if Clinton chooses to exercise one, which White House aides say he would be inclined to do.

Even less certain is the capacity of Dole and Gingrich to generate much pressure behind their calls for wider air strikes. Even Dole allies concede that Congress can’t compel Clinton--much less NATO--to bomb more heavily.

With most legislators focused on other concerns, Republican congressional aides say, opinion has not hardened in GOP ranks about the Dole-Gingrich push for wider military action in Bosnia.

But several sources said that GOP legislators and strategists alike will be cautious about investing too much political capital in demanding greater involvement in a war still distant to most Americans.

“You want the agenda next year to be, ‘The Republicans change Congress,’ ” one GOP pollster said. “You don’t want the story for the first two months to be, ‘The Republicans go into Bosnia.’ ”