‘BRAVO ZULU’ WILLIAM SAFIRE: IN BOSNIA, ‘ALL WE ARE SAYING IS GIVE AIR POWER A CHANCE’

(Washington, D.C.): The Center for
Security Policy today offered a
“Bravo Zulu” — Navy code for Well
Done! — to the Nation’s premier
pundit, the New York Times‘
William Safire. In the href=”index.jsp?section=papers&code=94-P_40at”>attached
column published in the Times
today, Mr. Safire elegantly skewers the
Clinton Administration for its inept and
odious policy toward Bosnia.

The Center strongly endorses the
Safire analysis of what is wrong with the
Administration’s policy-making process
and policy-makers. Particularly
noteworthy are Mr. Safire’s evisceration
of: Joint Chiefs of Staff
Chairman Gen. John Shalikashvili
(“an artilleryman” who
has been offering “hypercautious
advice [against the use of] air
power”); NSC Advisor Anthony
Lake (a man “who gives
hawkish speeches on Bosnia [but] does not
strongly influence the President”); Secretary
of State Warren Christopher
(“burned by our European allies
[over Bosnia] and…twice shy); and Secretary
of Defense William Perry
(“inclined to defer to the Joint
Chiefs”).

The Center is no less admiring of the
Safire prescription for American policy
at this juncture:

• Get U.N. forces in Bosnia
  in defensible positions and give
  them close air support;
• Sever the Serb supply
  lines to their proxies in Bosnia;
• Take out with airpower
  one-third of the thirty top
  strategic Serb targets
  — give the Serbs one last chance
  to negotiate before eliminating
  the rest;
• “Go downtown”
  in Belgrade by shutting down its
  power grid, if
  necessary, to change the Serbs’
  calculus of the correlation of
  forces and the costs and benefits
  of continued aggression in Bosnia
  and Croatia.
• If we are not going to
  simply jettison the arms embargo
  on Bosnia unilaterally — as we
  should — then at the very least
  the U.S. should table a
  resolution in the U.N. forcing a
  vote on the proposition.

Given the depths to which the Clinton
Administration has plummeted in the
conduct of U.S. foreign policy, it is not
entirely clear that William Safire’s
latest, tremendous contribution to the
debate conforms to his general practice
of “kicking ’em when they’re
up.” Still, Mr. Safire’s kicks are,
as ever, well-placed and well-deserved.