Bosnia: Support the President
the weekly Standard Bosnia: Support the President Bosnian peace diplomacy, brokered by the United States, has passed a significant checkpoint in Dayton, Ohio. Now what? Administration advocates...
...Phil Gramm, revealing previously undetected powers of international prognostication, somehow just knows that an American troop presence in Bosnia can only bring total disaster...
...But they are holding open their options, and seem seriously concerned to maintain, as best they can, a bipartisan and muscular American foreign policy under presidential leadership...
...That's saying too much...
...To prevent it, at this point, Republicans would be forced to provoke a presidential foreign policy humiliation the likes of which probably have not been seen since the failure of Woodrow Wilson's League of Nations...
...If and when Congress edges part-way toward the president's more optimistic economic assumptions (as it probably will), more money will slop into agriculture, education, and environmental programs, for example...
...That budget will, in the language of last week's agreement, "ensure Medicare solvency" and "reform welfare" (read: unprecedented retrenchment in traditionally Democratic entitlements...
...policy has never been devoted to reversing all Serbian military encroachments on Bosnian government-held territory...
...Clinton's aides, Sununu's ghost hovering over their shoulders, deny all this...
...It is obviously true, as Alan Keyes pointed out in the Florida presidential campaign debate a couple of weeks back, that for Bosnia and the rest of the world "there is a God" and U.S...
...last week put that question to rest...
...The country is to be divided along ethnic lines...
...We are in Bosnia already...
...Congress, for its part, should hold its hearings and delineate whatever conditions on deployment it believes appropriate...
...And if he ultimately decides to reject that budget, he will be doing so purely for purposes of reelection strategy...
...It will also "help working families" and "stimulate future economic growth" (read: middle-class and capital-gains tax cuts...
...And they're not...
...Among leading conservatives, only Phil Gramm is prepared, for the slight anti-Dole advantage it might earn him in coming presidential primaries, to accept the White House interpretation of last week's events...
...We're still a long way from the final details of a settlement...
...If cooler heads are to prevail, they had better open their mouths fast...
...Clinton cannot make that argument all by himself...
...military forces "are not Him...
...Medicare will be restrained and partially "marketized...
...Aside from Dick Lugar, measured and diplomatic as always, the rest of the GOP's presidential contenders are quick to agree...
...It is also true that there is a serious case against the troop deployment...
...In the narrowest sense, Gramm is right...
...The Bush "tax revenue" statement was merely a technical detail in a presidency otherwise consistent with its conservative campaign promises...
...But there aren't any serious principles still at issue in the budget fight between Clinton and Congress...
...And it cannot be squared with programmatic liberalism-no matter how ostentatiously the president grunts and sweats for the table-scrap concessions he already knows he'll win...
...The strongest case made by Bosnia doves still can't make it anything more than a judgment call...
...peacekeeping deployment required by the Dayton accord...
...official calls it a "fantastic deal" for the Bosnian Muslims...
...President Clinton has just broken his No Newt Budget pledge...
...Clinton's "principles...
...If Bill Clinton is right that this pending budget might fit his party's principles, then the Democratic party hasn't any principles...
...And in foreign policy judgment calls, prudence dictates a prejudice for presidential prerogative...
...The party-of Roosevelt and Johnson and Foley and Mitchell-is almost over...
...But if that were true, if the president had "won," then Republican backbenchers and conservative activists, always on guard against any conceivable reversal of principle, would be aboil with rage...
...And the United States would be a niggardly superpower indeed were we to withhold our mastery and muscle when they are asked for and widely expected to help halt horrifying bloodshed in Europe...
...The agreement's free-movement and resettlement promises appear fanciful...
...the weekly Standard Budget Triumph You can summarize the budget deal now emerging between the White House and Congress in four words: George Herbert Walker Clinton...
...The Republican House of Representatives has already twice voted to defund the troops if it is not first granted the power to block them outright...
...He can and should, as George Bush did before him during the Kuwait crisis, make a strong appeal to the American people that U.S...
...But he does so while candidly conceding the damage such a last-minute withdrawal would do-first to American international credibility generally, and also to the NATO-led European security arrangements in which our national interest is inextricably intertwined...
...He complains that the accounting compromises foreshadowed in the deal-the Congressional Budget Office is to update (and thereby relax) its deficit projections-will permit billions in additional domestic spending...
...He has "no confidence" in the president, whom he bitterly mocks with quotes reprinted in every American newspaper...
...Another U.S...
...Either way, a conservative victory...
...Bob Dole and Newt Gingrich expect the White House to request a non-binding resolution of congressional endorsement for the U.S...
...For those 40 pieces of silver, a 60-year federal welfare entitlement will end...
...A high-profile regional peace accord, husbanded by American diplomacy, concluded on American soil, and announced in the Rose Garden of the White House, calls for us to go in deeper...
...The president's coming "victory" will involve, at the outside limit, maybe $25 billion in annual spending above preferred Republican levels-in a $1.6 trillion budget...
...Such a drastic diminution of presidential authority is dangerous...
...Charles Krauthammer makes that case elsewhere in these pages...
...But what the peace plan can possibly accomplish- a pacification of Balkan brutality sufficiently complete and lengthy to take root-is good enough...
...Liberalism, which holds that the federal government occupies an indissolubly central role in American life, is not supposed to look like this...
...David Tell, for the Editors...
...Administration advocates of the new accord oversell its merits...
...The pact signed in Dayton ratifies most of those Serbian land-grabs-and, in effect, the demonically ethnicized regional politics that impelled them...
...And when it does, the White House will claim a stunning victory for Mr...
...They claim, quite the contrary, to have snookered their Republican budget counterparts with a clause in last week's compact that promises "adequate funding" for Medicaid and a few other social programs...
...Until that happens, the White House will holler that "American values" are gravely threatened...
...It is clear to me," read President Bush's infamous June 26, 1990, press release, "that both the size of the federal deficit problem and the need for a package that can be enacted require all of the following," including- mumble, mumble, mumble-"tax revenue increases...
...And better than much of the surprisingly strident, even cavalier, Republican opposition to the plan allows...
...And inflation-adjusted spending on non-defense discretionary programs will actually fall...
...In last week's wake, the remaining rationale for a budget veto-a monthly Medicare premium hike $10 higher than "acceptable," for instance-is simply too puny to wear the clothing of grand philosophy...
...All firmly oppose Bosnian troop deployment...
...That's what a seven-year balanced budget means...
...And they would inescapably signal, in the process, that America is badly confused about its global status...
...But while they're at it, Republicans should remember why it is they have spent the past 15 years defending presidential leadership in foreign affairs...
...He has obliged himself, in writing, to cooperate with Hill Republicans in the enactment of a strictly calculated seven-year path to fiscal balance...
...Secretary of State Christopher proclaims the agreement "a victory for all those who believe in a multiethnic democracy in Bosnia-Herzegovina...
...At the end of the day, the Republican Congress should support the president on Bosnia...
...I don't think that it is that big a change," Bush spokesman Marlin Fitzwater gamely argued...
...We may not be God, but where global security arrangements are concerned, we are the closest thing there is...
...Not so some of their vocal Republican colleagues...
...Both men have their legitimate questions about that operation's details and contingencies, and about Balkan diplomacy's ultimate prospects...
...Sound familiar...
...The Bosnia operation is a judgment call...
...Its new central government begins life enfeebled...
...And that an American president can no longer reliably serve as representative of his nation before the world...
...At that point, the White House was still pursuing John Sununu's strategically brilliant negotiations with congressional Democrats...
...national interests are at stake-and that he has a reasonable strategy to fulfill them...
Vol. 1 • December 1995 • No. 12
