NEWS ANALYSIS : President Seeks Understanding, Not Permission

When President Clinton spoke to the nation Monday night, his aim was not to ask Congress or the public for permission to send troops to Bosnia; that decision was largely made in July, when Clinton committed U.S. military power to help bring about a peace agreement in the Balkans.

Instead, like all his modern predecessors, the President ordered military action, justified it as the burden of world leadership and dared Congress to object. And the new-style Republican leadership in Congress, like most of its predecessors, is conceding him the point.

If the United States fails to back up its diplomatic commitments in Bosnia-Herzegovina with troops, Clinton warned, “America’s commitment to leadership will be questioned”--a sentiment from the nation’s first post-Cold War, baby-boom President that echoed his Cold War forebears.

By sending 20,000 U.S. troops--and perhaps as many as 23,000--to help separate the combatants in Europe’s bloodiest conflict since World War II, Clinton is not only testing Americans’ willingness to bear the burdens of global leadership but embarking on one of the biggest political gambles of his presidency. If his Bosnian initiative goes wrong, the problem could flare up in the middle of next year’s presidential campaign--from a politician’s standpoint, a bad time to schedule a crisis.

“Foreign policy successes don’t help presidents win reelection, but foreign policy failures can hurt them,” noted Samuel Kernell, a presidential scholar at UC San Diego. “George Bush was taught that lesson in 1992 after the [Persian] Gulf War.”

But White House aides say Clinton has little choice. As a candidate, he promised to use U.S. power and influence to end the savage Balkan war. As President, he has been repeatedly frustrated by his failure to deliver on that promise. Aides said Clinton reacted with anger whenever he saw television images of the slaughter of civilians in Sarajevo, the Bosnian capital; last week, Clinton said he was acting so Americans would no longer see such pictures on their television screens.

He also acted because events were narrowing his choices to a few alternatives, all unpalatable. Britain, France and the other countries with U.N. peacekeeping troops in Bosnia were threatening to withdraw them, a messy operation that would have brought U.S. troops onto the ground to midwife the U.N. force’s defeat--and promised no peace thereafter. Sending troops to enforce a U.S.-mediated settlement is no sure thing, but at least it is not guaranteed to produce a debacle.

But Clinton and his advisers are acutely aware of the political dangers that Bosnia could hold. They tasted them two years ago, when 18 U.S. troops were killed as the result of an ambush during an ill-fated Somalia mission that exposed the new Administration’s weakness in managing its foreign policy.

So the President has embarked on a campaign-style effort to rally support behind the Bosnian effort, laying out his rationale for the mission and warning in advance that U.S. units could suffer some casualties. In Somalia, the public expected no serious risk and thus reacted especially sharply when troops were killed.

Clinton’s speech Monday was the first step in the campaign. Today, he will meet with leaders of Congress to press the arguments. And for the rest of this week, he will be in Europe visiting U.S. allies--and military units bound for Bosnia--on a trip that was already planned but has now been turned to the service of this effort.

Already, Republican leaders such as Senate Majority Leader Bob Dole (R-Kan.) are backing away from their earlier objections. Dole urged his colleagues to “keep an open mind but not an empty mind” about Clinton’s speech.

Congress is still largely skeptical of the mission, but most members appear to be taking the traditional position: giving the President his way while offering enough criticism to avoid embarrassment if things go wrong later.

“It’s one thing to attack a President before he makes a decision like this, but once he sends the troops in, it begins to look unpatriotic,” said Republican foreign policy analyst Robert Kagan.

Kagan and a few other GOP internationalists worry that the party has already been too critical of Clinton’s initiatives for its own good.

“Republicans have been predicting disaster in places like Haiti and Bosnia . . . but that actually lowers the measure of success,” he said. “If it turns out anything less than a disaster, people give Clinton credit for that--and it ends up looking better than it ought to.”

Clinton may gain one other benefit from a successful appeal to the public: a boost in his sometimes wobbly stature.

“He does seem to be taking a stand that doesn’t look like waffling,” said presidential scholar Fred Greenstein of Princeton University. “This makes him seem to be a grown-up President.”

But that possible gain may still be outweighed by the political risks, Greenstein said, because public confidence in Clinton is already more limited than it has been for most modern presidents.

“He hasn’t been very successful in getting a public response,” Greenstein said, noting that Clinton, alone of all modern presidents, has never exceeded the 60% mark in public approval of his performance. “If he were to wait for the public opinion polls, that would be a mistake.”