Clinton OKs First Troops for Bosnia : Europe: Ending five-day tour, President says advance force will be in Balkans by Tuesday. He also joins other leaders in signing initiative to revive transatlantic ties.

President Clinton said Sunday that he has formally approved the immediate deployment of an advance force of American troops to Bosnia-Herzegovina, a move that effectively launches large-scale U.S. military involvement in the troubled Balkan region.

“I have authorized the secretary of defense to order the deployment of the preliminary troops, the people who have to do the preparatory work, to Bosnia,” Clinton said at a news conference here. “Those people will be going into the area over the next couple of days.”

The announcement came on the final stop of the President’s five-day European tour and on a day when he joined European leaders to sign a sweeping political, economic and cultural initiative intended to revive transatlantic relations in the wake of the Cold War.

“Our destiny in America is still linked to Europe,” Clinton said in a comment that was as much an attempt to justify the Bosnian deployment to a skeptical American public as it was to explain the broad agreement to revitalize relations with the nations of Western Europe.

Clinton said his European trip strengthened his conviction that the United States cannot turn inward and must be ready to defend democratic values.

“I think the American people should know that we have a unique responsibility at this moment in history,” he said. “After the Cold War, the United States was left with a certain superpower status and a certain economic standing that imposes on us great responsibilities along with the opportunities we have.

“And I would hope that because we have the chance to do good things . . . in a way that minimizes our risks and relies on our strengths, that the American people and the Congress would respond,” Clinton added.

Public support in the United States for committing 20,000 U.S. troops to enforce the Bosnian peace settlement reached last month in Dayton, Ohio, has never been enthusiastic, and polls indicate that the President’s initial efforts to change this have had little impact.

In Washington, leading members of Congress, including Republicans who have been critical of the deployment, confirmed Sunday that they will now offer support for the mission because U.S. troops are moving into position and deserve their nation’s full backing.

But they said they intend to attach conditions to measures on the matter that they will introduce this week. One would call for arming and training Bosnian government troops to create a balance of power that will discourage resumption of hostilities after U.S. troops withdraw. Another would require a strict delineation of the role of the U.S. forces to make sure they do not get embroiled in controversial issues, from helping secure local elections to resettling refugees, said Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) during an appearance on ABC-TV’s “This Week With David Brinkley.”

“It’ll be in the great spirit of foreign policy that I think Republicans and Democrats will now be united to support the American troops,” said Rep. John R. Kasich (R-Ohio), chairman of the House Budget Committee.

But at the Holiday Presidential Convention in frosty Manchester, N.H., several Republican presidential candidates took aim at both Clinton’s Bosnia strategy and what they view as a betrayal of their conservative values by Senate Majority Leader Bob Dole (R-Kan.).

Not only is the decision to send troops to Bosnia “ill advised,” said former State Department official Alan Keyes, but Dole is an “inadequate leader . . . acting as President Clinton’s henchman” in helping to craft a resolution of support for the Bosnian action.

About 700 U.S. soldiers are part of the NATO-led advance force being deployed to Bosnia. U.S. military sources in Germany said they will begin leaving for Bosnia today.

“Part will leave by rail from Mannheim, [Germany]; others may fly from Ramstein [a U.S. Air Force base 75 miles southwest of Frankfurt],” said James Boyle, a spokesman for the U.S. Army’s European Headquarters in Heidelberg, Germany. He said some Americans will go to Sarajevo, the Bosnian capital, while others will be directed to the northeastern town of Tuzla, which will serve as the main base of the U.S. forces.

Several hundred other Americans will be deployed to neighboring Croatia as part of the vanguard of the main peacekeeping force of 60,000 that will be led by the North Atlantic Treaty Organization.

Combat-ready troops from the main force are likely to be sent after the Dayton agreement is formally signed in Paris on Dec. 14.

Britain, France and other European countries are also contributing troops to the advance force of 2,600, but many of them are already in the region as part of the U.N. peacekeeping force and will merely be changing their roles.

Clinton’s order to begin the initial deployment came as signs of resistance to the Dayton settlement are growing among Bosnia’s Serbs. Some Bosnian Serb leaders have demanded that the plan be renegotiated, while Serbian residents of Sarajevo have held street demonstrations to protest the accord provision placing the now-divided capital under a Muslim-Croat federation.

On Sunday, the President rejected any possibility of altering the settlement.

“No, I don’t think the treaty is in trouble; no, I don’t think it needs to be renegotiated,” he said.

But Clinton strongly implied that the fate of the agreement lies primarily with Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic, who negotiated on behalf of the Bosnian Serbs.

“President Milosevic made strong commitments which he will have to fulfill to secure the support of the Bosnian Serb leaders for this agreement,” Clinton said. “We fully expect [he] will take the appropriate steps to ensure that this treaty will be honored as it is written and that we will not have undue interference with implementing it.”

But among many Serbs in Sarajevo, Milosevic is seen as a traitor for the way he negotiated at Dayton. At a weekend rally in the Serb-held Sarajevo suburb of Ilijas, the Serbian president was denounced by a hostile crowd.

A key task of the NATO-led peacekeeping mission will be to enforce the politically volatile transfer of land and authority between the warring parties so that it conforms to the terms of the accord. The greater the opposition to such transfers, the more hazardous enforcement will become.

Clinton’s comments on Bosnia came after talks with Spanish Prime Minister Felipe Gonzalez and Jacques Santer, the president of the European Union’s Executive Commission.

The comments also followed the signing of a comprehensive Transatlantic Agenda, a lengthy document committing the United States and the 15-nation European Union to a broad program of cooperation ranging from coordinating humanitarian aid and foreign assistance programs to close cooperation in the fight against international crime and in the quest for global peace and stability.

The initiative was undertaken by Spain, which holds the rotating EU presidency, and took nearly six months to negotiate. Gonzalez called it “a quantitative leap forward” in relations between the United States and Western Europe.

The agreement also includes provisions to stimulate trade by reducing or eliminating tariff and non-tariff barriers and by working for what Santer called “a transatlantic marketplace,” including mutual recognition of technical and testing standards for goods--even in sensitive areas such as pharmaceuticals.

Collectively, the 15 European Union countries constitute America’s largest trading partner, with exports and imports that last year totaled more than $200 billion. About 3 million workers in the United States are employed by European-owned companies.

The document is the result of prolonged hand-wringing, especially among Europeans, that the strong transatlantic relationship that sustained and protected Western Europe throughout the Cold War was dangerously weakened by a series of minor, but bitter, trade disputes and by a turning inward on both sides.

Times staff writers Robin Wright in Washington and Maria L. LaGanga in Manchester contributed to this report.