PERSPECTIVES ON BOSNIA : If People Are Going to Die, They Should Not be Americans : The U.S. has no credible rationale worth the risks of getting further involved, not even to evacuate U.N. forces.

Having said it would never send American soldiers to Bosnia, the Clinton Administration is now proposing to commit them “temporarily,” ostensibly to protect the regrouping or evacuation of U.N. forces there. Make no mistake: Once on the ground, U.S. troops will be drawn into the fighting. The Administration’s policy is, and is intended to be, a back-door road to U.S. involvement in the Balkans War. However, neither humanitarian nor strategic considerations justify America’s military involvement in the conflict.

What the Serbs are doing is not genocide but “compellence.” Rather than eradicating Bosnian Muslims, the Serbs are inflicting pain on an enemy’s civilian population to break morale and thereby force the opponent’s capitulation. Because the line that once separated civilians from combatants was erased long ago, compellence unfortunately has become an integral part of modern warfare. There is little difference between Serbian actions and Allied World War II bombings of Axis cities or Sherman’s march through Georgia.

That compellence’s horrors now are graphically displayed on television is no reason for U.S. military involvement. International politics is not a morality play; foreign policy must be shaped by strategic imperatives, not by outrage.

The strategic rationale for U.S. military intervention is unconvincing. Fear of a Balkan War spillover that spreads turmoil throughout Europe is simply a rehash of the Cold War’s stale domino theory. The contention that intervention would infuse NATO with new life is unpersuasive. In asserting that NATO must go out of its area (by extending its security umbrella to the Balkans and East Central Europe) or out of business, alliance proponents both define the issue and resolve it. NATO is destined to go out of business because none of its members believe that the security of the core (the United States and Western Europe) is linked inexorably to events in the periphery (Bosnia).

Finally, the argument that the United States must intervene in the Balkans to reassert its leadership is also flawed. In the Cold War’s bipolar world, both the meaning of U.S. leadership and the necessity for others to follow were self-evident. Neither is true in the emerging multipolar world.

There is no peace to keep in Bosnia. Therefore, the U.N. forces should be evacuated immediately because they are now simply the belligerents’ political pawns: The Bosnian Serbs are using them as hostages to ward off NATO intervention and the Bosnian Muslims are using them to bring the West into the war by provoking a NATO/Bosnian Serb showdown.

The U.N. arms embargo should also be kept in place. The sooner the Bosnian government resigns itself to the fact that the Bosnian Serbs have won--which will not happen as long as it believes the West will ride to its rescue--the sooner the fighting will end.

NATO’s present policy is unsupportable. It has succeeded only in causing a Vietnam-like ratcheting-up of the escalation ladder. Evacuation is a bad outcome, but it is preferable to continuing on a path that is drawing the United States into the Balkans quagmire.

Clearly, NATO could defeat the Bosnian Serbs. But nationalism is a potent ideology. People fighting for their own territory, homes and ethnic identity fight hard because they have more to gain and much more to lose than outsiders fighting only for principle. To subdue the Bosnian Serbs and enforce peace could require more than 300,000 NATO ground troops. Rather than ending the killing, intervention--which would cause combat casualties and civilian “collateral damage”--would take lives, not save them. Even if some lives were saved, the crucial questions are, whose lives would be saved and whose lost and for what purpose?

German Chancellor Otto von Bismarck said in the 19th Century that the Balkans were “not worth the bones of a single Pomeranian grenadier.” He knew something that has eluded American leaders who favor more forceful NATO military action in Bosnia: Toughness and wisdom are not synonymous.

Bluntly put: If people are going to die in the Balkans--and people will die until the parties accept a peace that reflects the underlying military balance between them--it is preferable that they be Serbs, Muslims and Croats rather than American soldiers.