Administration Defends Its OK of Bosnia Arms

The Clinton administration was following the “letter of the law” when the president secretly gave a green light to Iranian arms shipments to Bosnia, the White House said Friday.

White House spokesman Mike McCurry said that “the United States has always maintained that it upheld the letter of the law and the requirements of the U.N. Security Council resolution” calling for an international arms embargo on the warring parties in the Balkans and that the Iranian policy did not constitute a violation of the nation’s international obligations.

White House and State Department officials responded to a story in Friday’s Times about President Clinton’s 1994 approval of a decision not to object to Iranian arms shipments through Croatia and to the Muslim government of Bosnia-Herzegovina by seeking to downplay its significance and stressing that U.S. officials never directly violated the embargo.

Yet Republican congressional leaders reacted Friday by calling for a series of investigations into the administration’s actions. Senate Majority Leader Bob Dole (R-Kan.), the presumptive Republican presidential nominee now gearing up for his general election campaign against Clinton, quickly seized on the issue and said in a statement Friday that he has asked the chairmen of four Senate committees to investigate.

“The reports that President Clinton secretly approved Iran’s shipments . . . is very disturbing news,” Dole said in a statement from his vacation in Bal Harbour, Fla. “Not only are there questions raised about whether administration officials were intentionally duplicitous in their dealings with the Congress but also whether laws were broken and a covert operation was conducted.”

Tony Blankley, chief spokesman for House Speaker Newt Gingrich (R-Ga.), called the Clinton policy a “reckless action” and said four House committee chairmen are exploring the issues raised by The Times’ article.

But administration officials stressed that it was widely known that they were never enthusiastic supporters of the arms embargo--and that it is not news that they were never pushing hard for universal enforcement of its provisions. During his 1992 presidential campaign, in fact, Clinton called for lifting the arms embargo and only backed away from that proposal after his initial attempts as president to lift the arms ban ran into stiff opposition from U.S. allies.

“The administration opposed the arms embargo and sought unsuccessfully to lift it multilaterally,” said State Department spokesman Glyn Davies. “But we always abided fully by its terms. We didn’t provide arms to the Bosnian government or to Croatia directly or indirectly. The Intelligence Oversight Board [a White House office that conducted a secret six-month investigation of the policy] looked into this matter and found no evidence that U.S. laws governing covert action were in any way violated.”

Davies also noted that Congress, which had been pushing the administration to lift the embargo unilaterally, finally passed a law that by November 1994 required the United States to stop enforcing the embargo against other countries shipping arms to Bosnia.

Despite the administration statements, senior aides to the Republican congressional leadership said they are virtually certain that there will be hearings in both the House and Senate on the policy.

Blankley said in a statement that the chairmen of the House International Relations, National Security, Intelligence and Judiciary committees “are beginning to explore the issues raised in today’s L.A. Times article.”

House International Relations Committee Chairman Benjamin A. Gilman (R-N.Y.) issued a separate statement Friday charging that the Clinton policy now has the effect of making it much more difficult for Washington to attempt to get Islamic foreign fighters out of Bosnia. The Clinton green light for Iranian arms has “given a terrorist regime a foothold in the Balkans,” the statement said.

Yet as the Republicans moved aggressively Friday to seize the issue as a means to mount a political attack against Clinton, administration officials complained that, at the time of their policy decision, they were under intense pressure from Republicans in Congress, including Dole, to end the embargo and begin supplying arms to the Bosnian Muslims. Dole in fact was a vocal critic of what he said was “an illegal and unjust arms embargo on the sovereign country of Bosnia.”

But Dole and Blankley said Friday that, had the administration agreed much earlier to lift the arms embargo, it could have prevented the Iranians from having a presence in Bosnia.