A NEW LOW: JIMMY CARTER’S BOSNIAN FIASCO MUST BE HIS LAST

(Washington, D.C.): Former President Jimmy Carter has returned to the United States after his latest self-indulgent foray aimed at solving the world’s crises. He is now three-for-three: his trips this year to North Korea, Haiti and the Balkans have, in the words of the Center for Security Policy’s directory, Frank J. Gaffney, Jr., had the effect of "further eroding U.S. moral authority, confusing American and foreign publics about the true nature of the problem and implicating the United States in follow-on initiatives likely to prove profoundly harmful to its vital, long-term interests." (A copy of Mr. Gaffney’s column on this subject, which appears in today’s Washington Times, is attached.)

Interestingly, the Washington Post reached a similar conclusion in an unsigned editorial published yesterday (also attached). It observes, in part:

"Jimmy Carter has used his own personal standing and negotiating skills and others’ pessimism and fatigue to insert himself into a deadly stalemate in a manner defying order and accountability. He has only his reputation to lose. Others have much more. It is incredible that he should have gone so far.

"And unless there is an entire dimension to both these proceedings and the trumpeted agreement that has not been disclosed, it is more incredible that the Clinton administration should have let him. Jimmy Carter is a man of peace. He has also all too often been a loose cannon."

The Center for Security Policy strongly concurs. It believes that President Clinton’s latest initiative will have no beneficial effect whatsoever in Bosnia. His diplomacy will certainly not end the Serb-inflicted carnage there; it probably will not result even in an appreciable interruption of the Serb’s campaign of genocide and ethnic cleansing.

What Mr. Carter has done, however, is give the Serbs yet another infusion of international legitimacy and respectability. And he has done so at just the moment when even the most determined apologists were finding it difficult to sustain the fiction required for moral equivalence between the aggressors and their victims.

The Bottom Line

The Center for Security Policy has long encouraged the Congress to demand a resolute, responsible American policy opposing Serbian aggression in Bosnia and Croatia — and the Greater Serbia it is intended to create. The Center renews its call for a prompt, unilateral lifting of the arms embargo against Bosnia, the withdrawal of U.N. "peacekeeping" personnel and the launching of a "coalition of the willing" determined to punish Serbia for its predations and to encourage conditions that will allow the Bosnian people to secure a fair and durable peace. To this list of tasks for the new Congress must be added a new one: consideration of legislation — perhaps the amendment of the Logan Act which was intended to prevent U.S. citizens from engaging in freelance diplomacy — to discourage "Loose Cannon Carter" from doing any more damage in the future.