Clinton Emphasizes Morality When Selling Airstrikes

Values and interests. Those are the twin pillars of the case President Clinton made to the nation Wednesday night to support military intervention in Kosovo.

“Ending this tragedy is a moral imperative,” Clinton said. “It is also important to America’s national interests.”

With those words, Clinton reaffirmed his answer to the challenge that has confronted him throughout his terms: how best to sell the American public on dangerous foreign military operations when they are no longer wrapped in the context of the Cold War and the unquestioned policy of restraining Moscow and Beijing.

Though Clinton spoke forcefully about the United States’ military and economic stake in the conflict, his real mission is building support for intervention in a dispute that offends American moral values more than vital national interests.

That has become an increasingly common challenge at a time when the United States has been called on to use force in response to humanitarian outrages--as in Bosnia-Herzegovina or called on to use force in response to humanitarian outrages--as in Bosnia-Herzegovina or Haiti--more than to any possible military threat.

The political firefights in Washington this week over the North Atlantic Treaty Organization intervention in Yugoslavia underscore how far the United States is from a consensus on when to use force. Both political parties have had difficulty even establishing a consistent line of argument.

Generally, Republicans have been cool throughout Clinton’s term to the use of American forces to compel or enforce peace agreements in disputes around the world. Despite that attitude, during Clinton’s first term many Republicans led by then-Senate Majority Leader Bob Dole pounded the president for not using airstrikes to deter Serbian aggression in the war in Bosnia.

This week, Republicans shifted course again: Seventy percent of Senate Republicans voted to oppose the use of air power in Kosovo.

Further complicating the picture, some leading Republican senators, while opposing the bombing, said this week that they would reconsider their position if Serbian forces committed more flagrant atrocities in Kosovo.

“If [Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic] started slaughtering a large number of people, yes, there would be a military action against him,” Sen. Don Nickles (R-Okla.) said.

Such arguments, of course, raise an almost theological question: What level of slaughter is enough to justify action?

Clinton and Democrats haven’t been paragons of consistency either. They have never entirely explained why intervention is justified in Kosovo, Bosnia or Haiti and not in other places that have seen atrocities in recent years, such as Algeria, Sierra Leone or Sudan.

“What bothers me,” Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison (R-Texas) argued this week, “is that we have been putting troops into civil conflicts in certain parts of the world but not all parts of the world. So every time we do it, it makes the decision not to do it somewhere else a little bit harder.”

What’s clear from early polling on Kosovo is that Americans seem to be more receptive to arguments based on morality than on national interest. Clinton’s speech reflected this preference, stressing the United States’ moral obligation to prevent “genocide” and “danger to defenseless people.”

In a CNN/Gallup/USA Today poll conducted last weekend, half of those surveyed rejected the argument that American national interests are at stake in Kosovo. But 58% agreed that the U.S. has a moral obligation to help keep the peace there.

While the country was virtually evenly divided on whether to pursue airstrikes--with 46% in favor and 43% opposed--fully 60% supported the eventual deployment of American troops as part of a NATO peacekeeping force in Kosovo. By contrast, before Bosnia’s peace agreement was hammered out in the fall of 1995, a majority of Americans consistently opposed the deployment of U.S. peacekeepers there.

That difference may reflect a positive public assessment of the U.S. role in pacifying Bosnia.

“The experience in Bosnia has led people to think . . . that we can pursue the moral imperative in an efficacious way,” Democratic pollster Geoff Garin said.

That experience may give Clinton something of a well of good feeling to draw on as the Kosovo mission begins. But with sharp partisan divisions already evident in both Congress and the country--a majority of rank-and-file Republicans questioned in the Gallup survey opposed the bombing--many analysts believe that the political battle will grow intense if the operation either suffers significant reversals or drags on without conclusive results.

“For a while I think public opinion will hold,” said Zbigniew Brzezinski, the national security advisor to President Carter. “But it is important that the operation be massive from Day One, because I don’t think there is support for a protracted campaign.”

Developing the rationale for the mission--and overseeing its details to an unusual extent even for this hands-on president--have occupied nearly all Clinton’s time since late last week.

On Wednesday, he met with his national security advisors at 9 a.m., spent 35 minutes on the telephone in an unsuccessful effort to persuade Russian President Boris N. Yeltsin to support the military operation, spoke briefly about Kosovo during a visit to the Commerce Department for the unveiling of a portrait of the late Secretary Ronald H. Brown, and was given an update on the latest developments by Samuel R. “Sandy” Berger, his national security advisor. And that was just his morning agenda.

Last Friday, he had planned to spend one hour with members of Congress, one of his rare meetings with leaders of both parties, as he sought to pave the way for making a broader public pitch at a news conference several hours later. The meeting stretched into three hours.

For Clinton, the bottom line has been this, Berger said: “The president has been very clear that this is the only choice among a series of imperfect choices.”

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Times staff writer Elizabeth Shogren contributed to this story.