Bosnia Mission: Now It’s Up to the President : Clinton must make the case for endangering American lives

The Clinton Administration labored mightily and with considerable diplomatic skill to broker a peace agreement in Bosnia. Now it faces the formidable task of winning the acquiescence of Congress and the American people for a major U.S. military role to enforce that accord. The agreement on Bosnia is based on political and territorial compromises. Rallying domestic agreement for sending American forces to that blood-soaked land requires a strong showing that the mission serves the national interest.

NATO plans to send a multinational force of about 60,000 to Bosnia to police the peace accord that is expected to be signed in Paris next month. The United States has promised to provide more than one-third of that contingent, including about 20,000 soldiers now based in Germany and up to 3,000 reservists, mainly civil affairs specialists who will help rebuild Bosnia’s battered infrastructure. The primary missions of the combat troops will be to patrol the buffer zones separating Serbian and Muslim-Croat forces, help clear the estimated 1 million or more land mines planted during the nearly four-year-long war and help at least some of the country’s millions of refugees return home.

It will be dangerous work, not least because there are those--certainly among the Bosnian Serbs--who scorn this week’s agreement and who could well try to undercut it by attacking the international peacekeepers. Defense Secretary William J. Perry warns flatly that American casualties can be expected. Voices in Congress are asking now, as they have for months past, whether enforcing this latest truce in a centuries-old blood feud is worth the life of a single American. In the light of Balkan history and the shadow it casts over the future, the question is not uncalled-for.

President Clinton says he will send U.S. troops to Bosnia because trying to stop the frightful slaughter there is morally the right thing to do and because, as NATO’s leader, the United States must play a central role in the task NATO is about to undertake. This latter point surely will carry greater weight in Congress than the former. Bosnia, for better or worse, defines and justifies NATO’s post-Cold War reason for being. If the United States doesn’t participate, there will be no NATO involvement. Neither, in fairly short order, would there probably be a NATO. And if NATO goes, a lot of American global influence could go as well.

The assurances Congress most wants is that the Bosnia mission will be limited in both duration and personnel, that the rules of engagement will permit a rapid and overwhelming military response if U.S. forces are in danger and that a clear and feasible exit plan will be in place if rapid evacuation becomes necessary. These are the nuts-and-bolts issues governing a decision to commit forces. In the end they, rather than rhetorical pleas of moral necessity, will be decisive in shaping American opinion on intervention.

In great and controversial issues of foreign policy, Congress, in the end, almost always gives Presidents what they want. But that historical pattern doesn’t relieve Clinton from the responsibility of making a clear case for sending troops to Bosnia. Congress wants to know how the national interest would be served by this undertaking. It’s a proper question, and it demands a reasoned response.