Clinton tries to regain the initiative and credibility in Bosnia
by Tim Zimmermann, Peter S. Green, Bruce B. Auster, Samantha Power, Doug Stanglin
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"Assertive multilateralism." It sounds impressive. Authoritative. Cerebral. Not as direct as "containment," perhaps, but the post- cold-war world is a more complicated place. In any case, it was the product last year of the Clinton administration's best and brightest, as they struggled for months to invent a new foreign policy doctrine for a new era. Now, after having been run out of Somalia, faced down in Haiti, frustrated in North Korea and trumped at every turn in Bosnia, "assertive multilateralism" as practiced by the Clinton administration is earning a more accurate description. Oxymoron.
The gap between ends and means that has always dogged Clinton's foreign policy became a gulf in Bosnia in recent weeks. After forcing the Bosnian Serb Army to break off its siege of Sarajevo and brokering a new alliance between Bosnia's Croats and Muslims, the United Nations, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization and Western governments optimistically turned their attention to peace. But Gen. Ratko Mladic, the Bosnian Serb military leader, resolutely turned his attention to more war. As the outside world dithered, Mladic launched a ferocious attack on the strategic Muslim enclave of Gorazde in eastern Bosnia, overrunning its perimeter defenses and shelling and killing hundreds of civilians among the town's refugee-swollen population of 65,000. When the U.N. finally responded by calling in NATO air strikes to protect its tiny contingent of military observers in Gorazde, the planes had trouble finding their targets in bad weather, three of seven bombs failed to drop or explode and Bosnian Serbs shot down an attacking British Sea Harrier.
Damage control. In a belated effort to regain the initiative, Clinton last week engineered NATO authorization for wide-ranging air strikes to stop the Serb destruction of Gorazde and, if necessary, to prevent similar attacks on four other U.N.-designated safe areas. NATO's new rules of engagement allow strikes against a greatly expanded set of potential targets, and officials do not plan to play tit-for-tat. "The military objective is to exact a high price," says a senior U.S. defense official.
The White House also hopes its latest show of resolve will encourage Bosnia's Serbs to start talking peace in a serious way. A credible threat of punitive air strikes might well dissuade the Bosnian Serb militias, who already control more than 70 percent of Bosnia's territory, from taking more. But no one can explain how it will persuade them to make the significant territorial concessions demanded by the Bosnian government as part of a peace settlement, how the U.N. can maintain its neutrality or how the United States and NATO will eventually extricate themselves from the Balkan crisis.
"How the hell did we get here?" asks a senior Pentagon officer. The answer lies both in the confused efforts of the Clinton administration and its allies to manage the Bosnian crisis and in the inherent contradiction of U.N. forces trying to keep peace where there is none. General Mladic, the Bosnian Serb military's answer to the Energizer Bunny, reacted to the Sarajevo ultimatum as some State Department and other officials worried he would -- by moving heavy weapons toward Gorazde, about 30 miles southeast of Sarajevo astride the Drina River and a key highway that runs from Serbia to the Adriatic coast.
Even so, U.N., NATO and Russian officials gravely underestimated Mladic's intentions. As Russian envoy Vitaly Churkin listened to the Serbs promise numerous cease-fires and U.N. special envoy Yasushi Akashi raced back and forth between Sarajevo and Serb headquarters in Pale in what one U.N. spokesman derisively called "scuttle diplomacy," Mladic pressed home his attack. "I don't think people understood just how far the Serbs were prepared to push against everybody," says a senior NATO diplomat.
Slow reaction. By the time the U.N. military commander, British Lt. Gen. Michael Rose, did understand, the U.N response was slowed by the proximity of the attacking Serbs to the town and the U.N. observers there and by Akashi's caution in requesting NATO air strikes to protect them. The close air support that was called was too little and too late.
NATO governments had authorized their warplanes to strike only at weapons and units directly related to attacks on U.N. personnel, and Russian officials in Sarajevo objected to any loose interpretation of the mandate that would allow Rose to call for strikes on rear-echelon command posts and ammunition dumps. The British jet was shot down after it had made a number of passes under the low cloud cover searching for its target. Serb antiaircraft defenses, which Mladic had predictably placed around his artillery, were waiting. "We punched them in the nose, and they broke our arm," says a senior U.S. officer.
U-turns. The Clinton administration's call for broader strike authority for NATO and its promise of support for additional United Nations troops are both reversals of earlier policy decisions. Only weeks ago, Washington stunned U.N. officials by slashing a request from Rose for more troops from 10,000 to 3,500. The administration, along with other NATO governments, also had resisted previous calls to authorize NATO air power to protect the safe areas. "In general, I think the policy is on the mark now," says Rep. Lee Hamilton, chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee. "The implementation of it can certainly be improved."
Others are less sanguine. The broad commitment of NATO airpower to protecting civilian "safe areas" is exactly the sort of incremental and open-ended escalation that has worried the Pentagon military leadership for two years. "Do we continue supporting the U.N., or do we become the lead actor on the scene?" asks one senior officer. "If you go to an expanded strike regime, that's a very serious change."
The U.N., already concerned that its neutrality has been compromised, may not be eager to take advantage of NATO's new determination. "F-18s are not really peacekeeping," Rose says. "If you want peacemakers, count us out." Even Clinton understands the uncertain nature of his initiative, admitting that "NATO's air power alone cannot prevent further Serb aggressions or advances, or silence every gun."
NATO and the U.N. force in Bosnia could continue to teeter on the line between peacekeeping and war for an uncomfortably long time. "Without the possibility of using combat armed forces, the problem will be very difficult to solve," says German Foreign Minister Klaus Kinkel. Despite the White House's parallel emphasis on diplomacy, a peace settlement is not within easy reach. Ironically, the first bombing sorties in NATO's history may have only reinforced Serb determination to test the West's resolve, making Serb talk of giving back almost a third of the territory they now control more suspect than ever. According to a senior U.N. official, Mladic now refers to the river flowing by Gorazde and the other Muslim enclaves in eastern Bosnia as "my Drina."
The possibility that NATO may be prepared to wade deeper into the conflict could also stiffen the resistance of the Bosnian government, increasingly influenced by military hard-liners, to further compromises. Even before the attack on Gorazde, Charles Redman, the Clinton administration's special envoy who traveled to Sarajevo to plumb Bosnian attitudes, was frustrated to find that the government had abandoned its earlier commitment to accept 51 percent of Bosnia-Herzegovina's original territory. "The Bosnian government has been moving the goal posts since the Carrington days," says one veteran U.N. official, referring to former British negotiator Lord Carrington. "Now [the Clinton administration] is beginning to confront what he, and then [former Secretary of State Cyrus] Vance and [British negotia
