BOOK REVIEW NONFICTION : Selling Out Bosnia and 200,000 People : LOVE THY NEIGHBOR: A Story of War by Peter Maass; Alfred A. Knopf $25, 305 pages

Most Americans probably feel that the tragedy in Bosnia has belatedly come to a decent end. Years of United Nations dithering in the face of Serb aggression gave way last summer to NATO airstrikes; the United States brokered a peace agreement in Dayton, Ohio; at least a few war criminals have been indicted.

Not so, says Peter Maass, who covered the war in the former Yugoslavia for the Washington Post in 1992-’93 and accuses the Western powers of shameless appeasement throughout.

For example, Maass says, the NATO bombing campaign in August 1995 “was exactly the kind of intervention that, for more than three years, the West’s leaders had said . . . could not work. Of course it worked. . . . [But] the West’s goal had not changed. . . . Instead of using diplomacy to persuade the Serbs to accept half of Bosnia”--rather than swallow it whole--”the West was using force.”

The result: The Serbs settled for half. Bosnia was dismembered. Previously, “our leaders did nothing . . . and watched as more than 200,000 people were killed,” Maass says. Then “they abandoned their promises never to reward ethnic cleansing.”

Critical as he is of European politicians and diplomats, Maass reserves his greatest “disgust” for President Clinton, whom he compares to British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain selling out Czechoslovakia in 1938. He makes no allowances for the likelihood that the precedent Clinton most sought to avoid wasn’t Munich but the Gulf of Tonkin incident in 1965, which pushed us precipitously into war with North Vietnam on tainted evidence.

He goes so far as to quote Richard Nixon: “Because we are the last superpower, no crisis is irrelevant to our interests.” That’s a blank check for intervention anywhere.

But Maass, understandably, is frustrated. The Clinton administration, bent on keeping the United States out of this war, clearly downplayed the evidence--the horror stories--Maass and his colleagues were risking their lives to report. The American people, prone to confuse Bosnian Muslims with the Middle Eastern variety, were all too willing to be persuaded that Bosnia was “an infinitely complex place” and that “only the high priests of politics could figure it out.”

In “Love Thy Neighbor,” Maass does three things.

First, he retells some of the horror stories, in novel-quality prose. They are infuriating and heartbreaking. He describes what it was like to be a well-fed, well-clothed Westerner in starving, freezing, surreal Sarajevo; what it was like to talk to concentration-camp inmates under the eyes of their guards. He replays interviews with sources ranging from Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic, the architect of the war, to Dr. Nedret Mujkanovic, who performed hundreds of amputations in besieged Srebrenica without anesthetic.

“Nobody held [the patients] down” while he sawed at their limbs with a dull scalpel, Mujkanovic told Maass. “They believed in me. And they knew it was the only way.”

Second, Maass, who left Bosnia in 1993 when he “no longer believed that my reporting could make a difference,” describes the peace talks in Geneva led by British mediator Lord David Owen--a papering over of genocide, in the author’s view. “The men with pens were every bit as fascinating and repulsive as the men with guns.”

Third, he ponders how the “wild beast” in human nature can so easily break the restraints of civilization and incite neighbors to torture, rape and murder one another.

Not just Serbs, Maass emphasizes. Often enough in history, they have been the victims. “Serbs are, like all humans, deeply flawed, and their actions in Bosnia are a reminder of that. It would be wrong to conclude that they are more flawed than anyone else.”

Maass takes this dark vision back to his native Los Angeles, nursing its post-Rodney King hangover. He sees homelessness, pollution, inequality, and wonders whether the United States, too, is “slipping into a sinister dimension.’

He doesn’t ask the opposite, equally interesting, question: How do people, once the shooting is over and the screams have stopped, time and again manage to put the “wild beast” back into its cage and convince themselves that they are neighbors?