U.S. Vows to Stand By Bosnia Pact : Balkans: Accord will not be altered despite Serb threats over control of Sarajevo, U.S. officials say. Clinton takes case to American people today.

As President Clinton prepared to address the nation today on his plan to send U.S. troops to enforce the Bosnian peace agreement, Administration officials insisted Sunday that they will stick with the accord despite rising threats from Bosnian Serbs.

“We are not going to renegotiate this agreement,” Defense Secretary William J. Perry declared.

Over the past several days, Bosnian Serbs have protested against provisions in the treaty that grant control of Serb-held suburbs of Sarajevo, Bosnia’s capital, to the Muslim-led Bosnian government.

“What is wrong with the . . . agreement [is that it] has created a new Beirut in Europe” by ceding control of Sarajevo to the Bosnian government, Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic told British television. “It is going to bleed for decades.”

Karadzic’s comments appeared aimed at frightening skittish American legislators into rejecting Clinton’s proposal to deploy as many as 23,000 U.S. troops to help enforce the peace accord. Western diplomats in the former Yugoslav federation dismissed Karadzic’s threats as desperate, last-minute posturing by a politician--indicted on war crimes charges--whose days in power are numbered.

Administration officials said Sunday that the treaty, which was initialed by the presidents of Serbia, Croatia and Bosnia-Herzegovina last week in Ohio, will be signed next month in Paris without revisions.

“Dayton was an initialing,” said Assistant Secretary of State Richard Holbrooke, the principal U.S. negotiator in the Dayton talks. “Paris will be the signing. There will be no change between Dayton and Paris.”

Likewise, National Security Adviser Anthony Lake said on the ABC-TV program “This Week With David Brinkley” that the Administration expects Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic to “be able to enforce discipline on the Bosnian Serbs [and] that the cease-fire will hold.”

Although Karadzic initialed the agreement Thursday, he has since demanded that the treaty’s provisions on Sarajevo’s suburbs be renegotiated before the signing ceremony in Paris.

Karadzic, who has been indicted by a U.N. war crimes tribunal, is thought to be unlikely to attend the ceremony. “If [those indicted] set foot in Paris or, for that matter, any European or American country, they would be arrested,” Holbrooke said.

The appearances by Holbrooke and the other senior Administration officials on network interview programs opened the beginning of Clinton’s campaign to win congressional approval of his plan to send the U.S. troops to join a North Atlantic Treaty Organization peacekeeping force in Bosnia.

Administration officials expect Congress to vote before Dec. 15 on the plan, which has already drawn criticism from leading Republicans.

White House officials said the arguments raised in the television appearances by Perry, Holbrooke and Lake previewed the case Clinton will present at greater length in his nationally televised address at 5 p.m. PST today.

As expressed by Administration officials Sunday, that case rests on two pillars:

* That the United States has a moral and a humanitarian obligation to help stop Bosnia’s brutal fighting, which has claimed about 200,000 lives since 1992. “Our values really are at stake here,” Lake said.

* That failure to send U.S. troops would undermine both NATO and the peace agreement, risking “the spread of this war into a wider war,” as Perry put it on the CBS program “Face the Nation.” Perry maintained, “We have vital interests at stake in preventing the spread of the war.”

The Sunday interview shows also previewed the arguments that critics of the plan are likely to raise. Appearing on ABC, Sen. Phil Gramm of Texas, a Republican presidential candidate, denounced the peace agreement as “unworkable” and said that “American military involvement on the ground” in Bosnia is not justified.

“Foreign policy is not social work,” he said. “You don’t look around the world for things you could do to make things better.”

Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison (R-Tex.) suggested that the Administration is exaggerating the stakes in the conflict to build public support for the deployment. “I don’t think the stability of Europe is at stake,” she said on the NBC-TV program “Meet the Press.”

Two other Republican senators left the door open to supporting Clinton. On “Meet the Press,” Sen. John W. Warner of Virginia did not rule out backing the President.

And Sen. John McCain of Arizona, while expressing skepticism about Clinton’s plan, said: “The President can make the case. I wouldn’t count out the ability of the President of the United States to sway public opinion.”

Asked to pinpoint his concerns about the plan, McCain said he fears the Administration lacks an “exit strategy” to remove the peacekeepers from the region.

In his remarks, Perry repeatedly said that the U.S. troops would have to remain in the region only about a year. “Our military planners, who have looked at this quite carefully, believe that one year will be sufficient to break the cycle of violence and to create a secure environment,” he said.

Despite Perry’s comments, White House officials cautioned Sunday that Clinton, in his speech today, is unlikely to specify a date for removing the U.S. troops. Instead, officials said the discussion in the White House was about leaving the troops in Bosnia for “as long as it takes to get the job done”--although the clear hope was that they would be able to leave after about 12 months.

Recent polls have shown the American public divided on whether the United States should commit troops as part of the peacekeeping force. Most Administration officials say they are optimistic that Congress will back deployment, even if only after imposing conditions.

It would be difficult for Congress to reject the President’s plan, “especially on Bosnia, because so many of these people have said for so long we have a moral responsibility there,” a senior White House official said Sunday.

Times staff writer Tracy Wilkinson contributed to this story from Belgrade, Yugoslavia.