Bosnia Falls to the Sound of Bickering : As NATO shreds, only arming the Muslim forces is left

The civil war that is savaging Bosnia now threatens to shred the already frayed fabric of NATO unity.

The U.S. Senate, frustrated by international impotence in the face of the relentless advance by Bosnian Serb forces, is expected to vote to lift the arms embargo that prevents the country’s 1.9 million Muslims from defending themselves. But NATO members Britain and France, which have heavily committed ground forces to the U.N. “peacekeeping” operation, strongly oppose ending the embargo. They warn that if it is lifted their troops and others in the U.N. force that is supposed to be protecting a number of largely Muslim enclaves would have to be withdrawn.

The demonstrated ineffectiveness of these troops in preventing the Serbs from waging aggressive war where and how they choose suggests that withdrawal could hardly make the unfolding tragedy any worse. What withdrawal could do is put U.S. forces smack in the middle of the combat zone. President Clinton has already pledged up to 25,000 American troops to provide logistic support and protection for what would be a prolonged, costly (an estimated $1 billion from the United States alone) and inevitably perilous retreat. The risk of directly involving U.S. ground forces, until now so firmly resisted by Clinton, would thus become unavoidable.

What has always been a virtually impossible mission in Bosnia for the international community now shapes up as a moral debacle and a political humiliation. Peacekeeping as it is commonly understood at the United Nations barely had a chance, given the Bosnian Serbs’ implacable determination to occupy Muslim areas and expel their inhabitants. Peacemaking--or, more aptly, imposing peace--never had much of a chance either, for the international political will to mobilize and use sufficient force did not exist. Instead there was a U.N. “presence” that, while it gave some humanitarian help, provided no real deterrent to war. And there was a supposedly evenhanded arms embargo, which in fact worked wholly to the advantage of the well-armed and easily resupplied Bosnian Serbs.

A sense of impending defeat for the forces that, however halfheartedly, hoped to stop aggression in Bosnia has begun to encourage some desperate and infeasible notions. The Clinton Administration, exhibiting a faith in the effectiveness of tactical air power that no reference to recent history can justify, suggests that maybe the Bosnian Serbs can be bombed and strafed into good behavior. House Speaker Newt Gingrich, who admits he has much to learn about international affairs and whose public comments reflect that, proposes a huge, U.S.-led international force on the ground in Bosnia to prevent “a small band of barbarians” from taking over all of the country. About the duration and cost of such intervention he is silent.

These are fantasy answers. The bitter truth is that it’s probably too late to save much of anything in Bosnia. Nothing may be left now but finally to give the Bosnian Muslims the means for defending themselves after withdrawal of international forces, now apparently inevitable.