EDITORIAL
the weekly Stanaara Doing the Job in Bosnia In December 1995, over the knee-jerk objections of many Republicans—"exit strategy," "sitting ducks," "body bags"—President Clinton began deploying...
...leadership of an effective European alliance would likely shatter...
...IFOR has succeeded beyond our expectations," the president proclaimed on November 15...
...At a press briefing on the same day the president spoke, defense secretary William Perry was asked whether there were a danger that general war would again break out in Bosnia in the absence of a U.S...
...It is an application—in the national interest, and for international humanitarian purpose—of American power...
...And he has enlisted his cabinet in the deception...
...And the president's new decision to extend our presence there isn't really a decision at all...
...But even its narrowest "military job" remains unfinished...
...And the NATO force has ignored—indeed, avoided— the well-known war criminals in its midst, for fear of sparking reactive partisan uprisings...
...He has hidden Bosnia from view as best he could for most of a year...
...And yet somehow, we're supposed to believe, this new force will neatly keep the peace and accomplish the nation-building that has eluded its much larger predecessor...
...One and only one G.I...
...Could our Balkan initiative survive...
...Bill Clinton has rightly made Bosnia an American responsibility...
...The trouble here isn't that Bosnia doesn't yet look like Belgium, barely a year after the end of a conflagration that consumed 250,000 lives...
...The American contingent will be reduced to 8,500—reviewed every six months for possible further reductions, and limited to 4,000 by the end of 1997, no matter what...
...troops should suddenly die in a Bosnian firefight...
...As a practical matter, the NATO force's military and non-military responsibilities are inseparable...
...It's a deterrence mission...
...This is fiction for the most part...
...The mission has been "worth it...
...In short, much of NATO's necessary work is incomplete...
...If he hadn't, a fragile cease-fire would have broken, ethnic carnage in Bosnia would have resumed, and U.S...
...Or will another well-meaning "incomplete" at last seem indistinguishable from failure—precisely the sort of never-ending "quagmire" Clinton's most vocal Republican critics warned about to begin with...
...Quite frankly," the president pretended, "rebuilding the fabric of Bosnia's economic and political life is taking longer than anticipated...
...Bosnia is not Whitewater...
...And in December 1996, as his self-imposed one-year deadline for withdrawal approaches, what if the president were to order our soldiers home as he once promised—what then...
...Insofar as we have ever had a well-wrought plan for Bosnia, maintaining our troop commitment beyond next month was almost certainly always part of it...
...It was sent there to separate warring Bosnian factions and quarantine their heavy weapons...
...Things have gone well so far...
...This is no way to conduct a foreign policy operation, especially not a fundamentally sound one...
...Today, the initial White House decision to enter Bosnia looks wiser than ever—and yet there is fresh reason to be alarmed about the health of the mission, despite its obvious past benefits...
...To put it charitably...
...No, I do not believe that," Perry said—but in the next he breath admitted "there would be hot spots all over Bosnia, any one of which could spin out of control and escalate to a general war...
...leadership of an effective European alliance would have shattered...
...An unthinkable result, now as before...
...A year and a half from now at the latest, when our Bosnia mission's next "final" report card comes unavoidably due, will American opinion again be satisfied with any grade short of success...
...Offices of the national government, President Clinton has himself acknowledged, "are still in their infancy...
...Today, the quarantining of heavy weaponry is still in progress...
...Fine...
...It was "clear" to most Americans "before the election," the president now claims, that an extended deployment was in the cards...
...The president has done far too little to prepare the public for such an awful possibility— because he has done practically nothing to impress the public with Bosnia's symbolic and practical importance in an American-dominated international order...
...force...
...NATO troop levels will be cut by nearly 50 percent...
...So instead we will stay, the president reports, until June 1998...
...It was sent there to maintain a peace sufficient to permit the resettlement of 2 million refugees and the election of municipal and national the president governments...
...has lost his life on duty—a sergeant killed by a landmine he was attempting, without authorization, to defuse...
...The NATO force known as IFOR was sent to Bosnia to do several things...
...the weekly Stanaara Doing the Job in Bosnia In December 1995, over the knee-jerk objections of many Republicans—"exit strategy," "sitting ducks," "body bags"—President Clinton began deploying nearly 20,000 American ground troops to Bosnia...
...As a result, the mission will end as planned on December 20, and every single item on IFOR's military checklist has been accomplished...
...Clinton has done worse than nothing in this last respect...
...All at once...
...It ought to, but no one can say for sure that it would...
...Put another way, he said without evident irony, "The operation was a success, but the patient is still in danger of dying...
...Most of the refugees have not been resettled...
...And what said on November 15 when he announced the extension of the mission tends to confirm that suspicion all the more...
...The president owes himself a more aggressive mid-course correction than the one he's just unveiled, for that matter...
...It is unfulfilled...
...So that country now deserves a better effort from us, not a diminished one...
...It is the same overarching mission as before, in other words, only less ambitious in its particulars...
...And sadly, at the moment, Bill Clinton is doing the right thing . . . badly...
...And that entirely civilian project requires a brand new mission, he pretended some more, with a brand new "Stabilization Force" (called SFOR) to replace the old troops...
...But the new force's primary mission, Secretary Perry then let slip, "is to prevent a resumption of the war...
...The fact that the Balkan strategic situation has changed so little tends to confirm that suspicion...
...And the force was given a mandate to arrest Balkan war criminals for prosecution by an international tribunal...
...This time, the president's men say right up front, there will be no security guarantee for refugee resettlement, and there will be no manhunt for war criminals...
...Municipal elections have been postponed twice...
...David Tell, for the Editors...
...Early on, Bosnia "hawks" worried that the stated goals of the peace accord worked out in Dayton last year were too relaxed—and that, when it came to implementing them, a timid Clinton administration would aim merely for the loopholes, not for true success...
...His sacrifice and a relatively modest investment of American treasure have purchased the prevention of further slaughter and the preservation of NATO...
...A fragile cease-fire would likely collapse, ethnic carnage in Bosnia would likely resume, and U.S...
...It is right...
...It is serious...
...And what would happen if in the meantime, God forbid, some significant number of U.S...
...It was sent there to buy Bosnia time while its army was strengthened against future Serbian aggression and its police force trained for a post-NATO future...
...The trouble is the Clinton administration's dishonest insistence that it ever believed such a timetable might be possible...
...He has cloaked his major Bosnia moves in Whitewater-level evasion...
...Thus does Clintonian spin-baloney begin to infect a central international-security question...
Vol. 2 • December 1996 • No. 12
