COMMENTARY : PERSPECTIVE ON BOSNIA : Don’t Send Troops; Instead, Send Arms : U.S. forces will only postpone the carnage. The Bosnians must be able to defend themselves to ensure a lasting peace.

President Clinton suggested in his address to the nation that those in Congress who oppose sending U.S. troops to Bosnia are isolationists who “question the need for our continued active leadership in the world.” He has it wrong. Congress has never questioned the need for U.S. leadership; for more than three years, Congress has pleaded for just that to resolve the Balkan crisis. The question is not whether the United States should lead, but how we must lead.

I do not believe that the president’s plan to commit 20,000 U.S. troops is the best way to lead. Sending American soldiers to serve as human tripwires in Bosnia is a bad idea and will not ensure lasting peace in the Balkans. What will guarantee an enduring peace in Bosnia is not the presence of U.S. forces, but rather the presence of a credible deterrent to renewed Serbian aggression: a well-armed, well-trained Bosnian military. Regardless of whether we send troops, our primary mission must now be to create a military balance of power by helping the Bosnian government build such a deterrent.

Unfortunately, that possibility was forfeited by the president’s disclosure in London that the United States will not participate in the arming and training of Bosnian government forces. Instead, he said, the U.S. will seek to enforce a complicated and, I am convinced, unworkable arms control regime in the Balkans that will seek to reduce the Serbs’ weaponry while depending on others to arm the Bosnians in a limited fashion.

The president has his priorities backward. Arming and training the Bosnian Muslims is significantly more important in the long run than temporarily placing American forces between the warring parties or enforcing a random and haphazard arms control program.

American troops cannot guarantee peace in Bosnia. We pray that they will not be there a year from now, much less in five or 10 years. We cannot secure the long-term viability of the Bosnian state with American soldiers. But we can help the Bosnians secure the viability of their own land with American arms, training and military know-how.

Furthermore, we cannot depend on others to do this arming and training. First, with all respect to the military capabilities of other interested countries, they are nowhere equal to the U.S. armed forces. Second, having Americans doing this sends an important message to anyone who might consider a future assault on the Bosnian state: that the United States recognizes the difference between victim and aggressor and is siding with the victim. This message will play an important role in bolstering the new Bosnian military deterrent. Should war resume because of renewed Serbian aggression, the Serbs must know in no uncertain terms that the United States will be firmly allied with the Bosnian government.

No one understands the importance of this better than the Bosnians. In Dayton, they sought unsuccessfully to secure a U.S. commitment to arm and train their military as a deterrent. They view American leadership in training and arming their forces as essential to an enduring peace. They are right.

Some of us have argued from the beginning that the U.S. policy should have been to lift the arms embargo, arm the Bosnian forces and allow the Bosnians to repel Serbian aggression. By the time the Dayton talks began, the Bosnian government had clearly lost all hope that the U.S. and its allies would do this. Weary after fighting four years without arms or allies, the Bosnians saw no alternative to accepting the de facto partition of their nation as the price of peace.

Nobody knows whether this fragile partition will lead to anything more than a brief pause before the next round of Balkan wars. A peace that requires 20,000 American enforcers to make it viable is, I suspect, not viable in the first place. This much is certain: The Dayton agreement will never be viable until we help the Bosnian government build its military deterrent to repel a renewed Serbian assault.

If Clinton refuses to arm the Bosnians, it will be he who abdicates American leadership in the Balkans, not Congress.