Will We Arm Bosnia? Are You Serious? : The Senate’s toothless vote to lift the embargo is a sequel to Clinton’s campaign betrayal.

Let’s hope that the Bosnians are sophisticated analysts of American politics. Otherwise, they may think that the Senate’s vote to lift the arms embargo was actually intended to help them. They may even imagine that American arms are soon to start flowing in their direction and that all they need to do is hunker down until the crates of ready-to-use howitzers parachute into their laps.

That would be a grievous mistake. Because, as any seasoned observer of what used to be called the world’s greatest deliberative body could tell them, the Senate’s vote was less than meets the eye. Reasonable people can have legitimate differences about Bosnia policy, but it is difficult to feel other than shamed by the cynicism and political opportunism of the Senate’s decision.

The grubby fact of the matter is that this had little, if anything, to do with the conflict in the far-away Balkans. The bill’s small print gives that away. Implementation delays, the requirement for a Security Council vote, the provision for repeated presidential waivers: all these were deliberately included in the bill to give the administration enough wiggle room to postpone taking action for months. And, if these devices don’t work, there is always the prospect that three Democrats will change their votes and thus sustain the promised presidential veto.

To spell out the real world implications for the Bosnians: if they are expecting real weapons from Washington, they should not hold their breath.

The reason is that the specific rights and wrongs of the Bosnian conflict were not uppermost in the Senate’s calculations. Instead, a far more immediate battle called “Campaign 96” is at the top of Washington’s agenda. This is the tragedy of the Balkans, and most especially for the Bosnians. They have become the football of American domestic politics, punted back and forth as Republicans and Democrats alternately try to gain yardage.

Bill Clinton can hardly complain. In 1992, seeking to come up with a foreign policy issue on which he could outflank George Bush, he alighted on Bosnia. The Bush policy here had hardly been a model of consistency or virtue, but it did at least recognize that this was a European rather than American responsibility. This policy was beginning to bear fruit. After the London conference of August 1992 and on the back of the efforts of UN Negotiator Cyrus Vance and European Representative David Owen, the Europeans came within shouting distance of a settlement.

Unfortunately this came unstuck. Promising to be “more aggressive” than Bush in projecting American leadership on Bosnia, Clinton effectively killed off the European plan. The trouble was that he then offered nothing of his own. In retrospect the reason become obvious. The substance of the Bosnian conflict was less important to the Clinton campaign team than the prospect of denting Bush’s reputation for foreign policy brilliance. Their ideas were conceived not for their substance, but for their political effectiveness.

The Bosnian mistake was to take the American rhetoric literally. They thought (or allowed themselves to succumb to wishful thinking) that the U.S. marines would soon arrive to turn the fine words into reality. Thinking this, they hardened their negotiating stance in early 1993 just at the point when they should have been most flexible.

History cannot be undone. But the Bosnians should realize than what is playing in Washington’s theaters today is simply the sequel to yesterday’s money-making movie that made a big-time star out of Bill Clinton. We are watching “Bosnia Part Two: the Return of Easy Promises that No-one Intends to Keep.”

“That’s politics” the sophisticated folks in Washington say, as though they were excusing some mildly shameful, but widely practiced adolescent behavior. And so it is. So long as all the participants know that they are playing the same game of make-believe, no one gets hurt--or at least not too much.

But the lunch is not absolutely free. Foreigners, less schooled in Washington’s ways, take presidential and congressional declarations at their face value. They think that, if help is promised, then that implies a solemn moral obligation to deliver that help. They build their plans around this expectation. And when this is disappointed--as seems inevitable in the Bosnian case--innocent foreigners who counted on America’s word pay not just with an adverse election result, but all too often with their lives.

There is still time for second thoughts in the House of Representatives. Those who vote to arm the Bosnians need to appreciate that their moral integrity is on the line. By doing so, they make the war their own. They need to be sure that they were not simply dicing for American votes with Bosnian lives.