A Tainted Peace Is Already on Shaky Ground : Bosnia: U.S. seems bent on adding to its mistakes, this time by giving Turks a dubious role.

Conventional wisdom in Washington holds that the resignation last month of Richard Holbrooke, the tough-minded architect of the Bosnian peace accords, was simply a tactical retreat: Like Achilles in his tent outside Troy, Holbrooke will bide his time on Wall Street before taking up arms again as secretary of state in the second Clinton administration.

But first he would have to get past Congress, which presumably is not entirely averse to a vetting of the administration’s record on Bosnia. Holbrooke’s feat notwithstanding, there is much to criticize in the quality of American diplomacy and the prowess of its top practitioners in safeguarding the nation’s interests.

To start at the end, the brutal reality is that almost four years of Bosnian war is ending with precisely the result that many of those closest to the action forecast from day one: ethnic partition between Serbs, Muslims and Croats and the acceptance of the results of ethnic cleansing.

This has not been a covert process intelligible only to a few sworn-to-secrecy experts. To the contrary, partition has been taking place under the arc lamps of global television. Ethnically cleansed former Muslim areas like Zepa and Srebrenica were bargained away at Dayton.

What of it? If this is the price of peace, many will say, so be it. Omelets cannot be made without cracking eggs.

This is a reasonable Realpolitik interpretation. But if partition is acceptable in 1996, why was it regarded earlier as so abhorrent? A partition-based solution to Bosnia was available under European mediator Lord Carrington’s proposals in early 1992 before any fighting had started and again under European and U.N.-sponsored plans in 1993 and 1994.

Most analysts agree that these plans collapsed because of a morality-driven American rejection of partition. In 1993, for example, President Clinton said that what was at stake in Bosnia was “standing up against the principle of ethnic cleansing.”

American policy has thus come full circle from rejection of partition to active promotion of it. Having dug itself into a deep ditch, the administration managed to extricate itself by dint of some dexterous spadework. This is a commendable effort, but the real skill of diplomacy lies in avoiding the ditch in the first place. Had the administration thought through the consequences of its early rejectionist attitudes, the worst of the Bosnian war might have been avoided.

Sadly, this failure to think things through continues today. Having clawed its way back to level ground, the administration is about to plunge off another cliff in the form of supplying weapons and training to the Bosnian government.

Included as a sweetener to the Bosnian government during the Dayton negotiations, this was a dubious proposition in the first place. Subsequent events have made it into a potential catastrophe. The recent discovery by NATO of an illegal terrorist training camp inside Bosnia run by Iranian Moujahedeen points to an ominous trend. Hard-line Islamic elements appear to be gaining the upper hand in President Alija Izetbegovic’s party, as evidenced by the resignation of the cosmopolitan Prime Minister Haris Silajdzic.

Of more pressing concern is the apparent plan to have the arms delivered to the Bosnians not by American personnel, who might exercise some control, but by Turkish subcontractors. The timing is dreadful. In the military sphere, Turkey may be a loyal NATO ally, but Turkish politics are in turmoil. The pro-Islamic Welfare Party is now the country’s largest, a challenge to the basic premise of the secular Turkish state.

To rely on Turkish intermediaries at such a time is to give a terrible hostage to fortune. What guarantee is there that virulent propaganda will not accompany the arms? The risk is that Bosnia will develop into a sort of European Sudan, dependent on Western aid to live but hospitable to anti-Western sedition.

These criticisms illustrate why, despite the Clinton administration’s growing technical expertise, it is still right to feel cautious about its grasp of foreign policy. All too often it has rushed in with half-baked notions--nation building in Somalia, shock therapy for Russia, denial of trade benefits for China--and then has reaped the whirlwind in loss of American lives, a nationalist backlash and damaged credibility.

Foreign policy success does not lie in getting out of self-inflicted disasters but in getting things right from the start. In Bosnia, the administration is about to flunk this test yet again.