Senate Votes to Lift Bosnia Arms Embargo, 69-29 : Balkans: Rebuff of Clinton policy strong is enough to override veto, but shipment of U.S. weapons is unlikely. House, which has OKd similar measure, must vote again.

In one of the strongest rebuffs yet of President Clinton’s authority in foreign policy, the Senate voted, 69 to 29, Wednesday to lift an embargo on sales of arms to participants in the war in Bosnia-Herzegovina.

Despite strong pressure from the White House to oppose the measure, 21 Democrats joined all but five Republicans to create enough of a margin to override a presidential veto, which Clinton has promised.

“It is not about politics,” said Senate Majority Leader Bob Dole (R-Kan.), co-sponsor of the measure. “It is about whether some small country that has been ravaged on all sides, pillaged, women raped, children killed, do they have any rights in this world?”

The House has already voted overwhelmingly to lift the embargo. But House Speaker Newt Gingrich said representatives must hold another vote because the existing provision is attached to other legislation that faces a veto threat.

White House Press Secretary Mike McCurry said that, with the vote, senators are substituting their judgment for that of the President, secretary of state, the U.N. ambassador and the chairman of the military Joint Chiefs of Staff. “And good luck to all of us,” he added, “because there are going to be an awful lot of people who are going to end up dying as a result.”

Yet even if the House passes the measure and both bodies override a veto, Dole and co-sponsor Joseph Lieberman (D-Conn.) wrote in several escape hatches, making it unlikely that the United States will ever ship weaponry to the Bosnians in defiance of the embargo, imposed by the U.N. Security Council against the warring parties in the Balkans.

The measure would not take force until there is a withdrawal of U.N. troops from Bosnia or the Bosnian government requests their ouster.

For that reason, the measure is likely to affect American politics far more than it does warfare in Bosnia, where the rebel Serbs continued to besiege the U.N.-designated “safe area” of Bihac. On Wednesday, U.N. officials, the United States and its allies also revamped a much-disputed system for calling air strikes to protect Bosnian safe areas.

In Washington on Wednesday, many senators viewed the arms embargo vote as a low-risk opportunity to stake out moral high ground. The political imperative was almost irresistible: A “no” vote supported genocide, a “yes” vote endorsed “fair play.”

“This is a symbolic thing,” said Patrick Glynn, an analyst at the conservative American Enterprise Institute research center. “The senators are saying genocide is terrible. They’re not addressing the consequences of lifting the embargo.”

What the vote does do is force Clinton back into the Bosnia debate, reminding the public once more that his Administration has failed to stop the bloodshed and increasing pressure on the President to find a solution.

At the same time, if his veto is overridden, Clinton will have been rebuffed by Congress on a foreign policy issue as few presidents have been.

The debate is playing out against a backdrop of polls showing that Americans are unenthusiastic about any of the options in Bosnia, and that the President appears to have persuaded many that lifting the embargo will only add to the loss of life, not reduce it.

So while there apparently is little public faith in Clinton’s latest solution--greater use of air power to halt Bosnian Serb aggression--Dole’s counter-proposal also is viewed skeptically.

The two days of floor debate over the measure featured emotional speeches evoking the images of Bosnian victims of nationalist Serb aggressions that have filled recent media reports.

Dole argued that the embargo was both immoral and illegal because it was imposed by the U.N. Security Council in 1991 against Yugoslavia, a nation that has since dissolved into its battling republics. The Serbs took over most of weapons of the former Yugoslav military; the embargo has left the Muslim-dominated but secular Bosnian government seriously outgunned.

But opponents of the measure argued that Balkan atrocities would only increase, with Americans added to the casualty list, if the measure became law. Clinton has pledged to send 25,000 ground troops to Bosnia to help extract U.N. peacekeepers, if they withdraw, as some allies have threatened if the arms embargo is lifted.

The peacekeepers likely would be withdrawn because they almost certainly would face attacks by Bosnian Serbs, who view the ending of the embargo as a hostile act intended to aid the Bosnian Muslims.

Senate Minority Leader Tom Daschle (D-S.D.), who led the opposition to the measure, warned that American troops would be “in great peril.” He and other dissenters also argued that if America unilaterally defies the U.N.-imposed embargo, it would betray an international agreement and set a precedent for other countries to break multilateral pacts that the United States considers essential, such as the embargo against Iraq.

“We are breaking the kind of international agreement we have needed before and we may need again,” said Sen. Nancy Kassebaum of Kansas, one of five Republicans who voted against the resolution.

Dole said those concerns were ill-founded. “I don’t think the world is going to collapse if we do the right thing,” he said. “We are the leader of the free world. We haven’t acted like it in this instance, but we are.”

But senators who supported the Dole measure said that policy will fail just as previous allied efforts have, allowing many more Bosnian Muslims to suffer.

The only way to bring an end to the bloodshed, Sen. Joseph Biden (D-Del.) said, is to allow the Bosnians to fight back. “That’s when you’ll have a stalemate on the ground and that’s when you’ll have a political settlement,” Biden said after the vote.

Under terms of the measure, the United States would be required to violate the embargo only after the U.N. military force has been removed from Bosnia, or 12 weeks after the Bosnian government asks that it be removed--whether it is actually withdrawn or not.

The Administration also must take the embargo before the United Nations before unilaterally ignoring it.

At a conference in London last week, countries supplying troops to the U.N. force agreed to keep it in place, despite recent humiliations. That agreement probably cancels the main trigger in the Senate resolution.

Times staff writer Norman Kempster contributed to this report.