The Hill, Balkanized
REES, MATTHEW
The Hill, Balkanized by Matthew Rees Shortly after negotiators in Dayton, Ohio, reached an agreement on Bosnia, President Clinton appeared in the Rose Garden to explain why 20,000 U.S. troops...
...The pivotal figure is Dole, who knows his presidential bid will not be helped if he allows Clinton to proceed...
...Dole's decision not to hold a vote on Bosnia before the week-long Thanksgiving recess was an indication of the Senate's different mood...
...They aren't alone...
...Rohrabacher, Hefley's partner in fighting the deployment and a former speechwriter in the Reagan White House, claimed GOP leaders were "cautious to a fault...
...That's not Dole's plan now...
...Other Republicans, such as Representative Mark Neumann of Wisconsin, wondered if the vote on the Hefley measure was a sham...
...The war would resume...
...Sending Americans to Bosnia is wildly unpopular with rank-and-file Republicans as well as Dole's campaign staff...
...Dole ignored the letter...
...Not that Senate Republicans are happy about dispatching troops to Bosnia to enforce the US.-brokered accord...
...18 straw vote in Orlando, every denunciation of the deployment by a presidential candidate drew thunderous applause...
...And they're also concerned that the conditions linked to deployment are fuzzy and unenforceable, making the entire effort an exercise in congressional posturing...
...When Clinton said no, Hefley told the president he couldn't go along...
...When four of them (James Inhofe and Don Nickles of Oklahoma, John Kyl of Arizona, and Kay Bailey Hutchison of Texas) held a November 17 press conference, they complained merely that they hadn't been convinced of the need for U.S...
...This was just four days after the House voted to deny funds for a Bosnia peacekeeping mission unless it first receives congressional approval...
...In truth, these four, plus another 10 GOP senators, will never be convinced...
...Maybe not, but the real question is whether Dole might push for disapproval, even for cutting off funds for the Bosnia mission...
...Hefley told me he was reminded of an October 1993 briefing of over 200 members of the House and Senate by Christopher and then-Defense Secretary Les Aspin...
...troops to go to Bosnia...
...But the inevitable criticism of Dole's position by Senator Phil Gramm of Texas and other Republican presidential candidates could change that...
...The conversation ended, and the Hefley bill passed 243-171...
...She plays the same role in Dole's Balkan decision-making that the better-known Sheila Burke, Dole's chief of staff, plays in domestic policy...
...But Clinton will have an easier time satisfying Dole's conditions than overcoming the House's flat opposition to the deployment...
...He questioned whether Gingrich and his allies allowed the free-standing vote only because they knew it wouldn't fly in the Senate...
...Two days before the House vote, Hefley and a few others were invited to breakfast at the Pentagon to further discuss the issue...
...Gingrich and the entire House Republican leadership were faulted for being insufficiently aggressive in pushing the measure to a vote...
...Besides, there's a much larger group of Senate Republicans expected to support the president but who are waiting for the administration to present its case for deployment persuasively...
...And while administration officials expended enormous energy forging the Dayton agreement, they couldn't keep the House from delivering a stinging rebuke...
...For his part, Dole told the Florida gathering that Clinton has "yet to make his case" on sending troops...
...Clinton then called Hefley and asked him to pull the bill from the floor...
...That's not the chief problem conservative Republican senators have with the Dole resolution, however...
...When Clinton learned the vote was going to be held in a few hours, he called House Speaker Newt Gingrich, asking for the vote to be delayed...
...has real security interests in Bosnia...
...Despite all this, conservative Republicans aren't ready to kill the resolution...
...When Hefley asked Perry and Shalikashvili how they intended to deal with the fact that American troops would be targets in Bosnia, they dismissed the question as irrelevant...
...So Clinton used exaggerated rhetoric, though he probably didn't need to...
...They argue that it wrongly assumes the U.S...
...The briefing was held shortly after 18 American soldiers were killed on a single day in Mogadishu, but Christopher and Aspin left many members with the impression the administration didn't know what it was doing in Somalia...
...that must be met before the Senate will approve the troop deployment...
...He told Clinton this wasn't his fight, and he urged the president to talk to Congressman Hefley, a fifth-termer who spearheaded the anti-deployment drive...
...a majority of Americans are unconvinced...
...Without us, the hard-won peace would be lost," he said...
...Gingrich, then involved in fierce budget negotiations with the White House, was in no mood to help...
...Hefley came away from the Bosnia briefing with a similar thought: "If the top guys can't do better than that, then we better get hustling" to restrict U.S...
...troops should be deployed to the former Yugoslavia...
...Dole plans to introduce a resolution laying down the conditions (rules of engagement, an exit strategy, etc...
...Hefley left the meeting steamed...
...Baratta is a little-known figure in foreign policy circles, but she has been extremely influential in shaping Dole's views on Bosnia...
...Hefley didn't want to do this, but asked Clinton whether he would abide by the will of the Congress should it vote later...
...Hefley had hand-delivered a letter to Dole's office, signed by 48 House members, urging the Senate to vote on the House legislation "as soon as possible...
...At the Nov...
...Dole's resolution was cobbled together by foreign policy experts Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Perle, and Jeane Kirkpatrick, and one of Dole's foreign policy aides, Mira Baratta...
...It won't, but there's still a small chance the Senate will try to block the deployment...
...troop deployment was triggered by a briefing given in September by Secretary of State Warren Christopher, Defense Secretary William Perry, and General John Shalikashvili, chairman of the Joint Chiefs...
...troop deployment...
...When he comes to Congress, if he hasn't made his case, he's not going to get the approval...
...In fact, there's widespread unease...
...But there's even greater unease about tying the hands of the president...
...Hefley's passion for restricting the U.S...
...Rohrabacher accused them of stalling tactics...
...Thus the hard-line attitude of House Republicans-stirred by two backbenchers, Dana Rohrabacher of California and Joel Hefley of Colorado-is not mirrored in the Senate...
...Some House Republicans were also upset at the delay in getting a floor vote...
...They didn't want to make themselves vulnerable to the charge that they were undercutting the peace process...
...The Senate, led by Majority Leader Bob Dole, is likely to bail him out, acknowledging the president's right, so long as a number of conditions are met, to include American troops in the NATO peacekeeping operation...
...An ABC News/Washington Post poll in mid-November showed only 38 percent of Americans supporting Clinton's position on deployment...
...There were so many delays that it was evident the leadership was deliberately delaying this...
...But unlike House Republicans, they aren't seeking to reverse the president's deployment decision...
Vol. 1 • December 1995 • No. 12
