CONGRESS SHOULD SAY ‘NYET’ TO EITHER U.S. OR RUSSIAN GROUND FORCES AS BOSNIAN PEACEKEEPERS

(Washington, D.C.) The message President Clinton
should hear from members of the congressional leadership
meeting with him on Bosnia at the White House today
should be very simple: No U.S. forces should be put on
the ground in Bosnia in the hope of sustaining an
unsustainable peace agreement. And no attempt should be
made to find command-and-control arrangements or other
means of introducing Russian forces as peacekeeping units
in territory currently controlled or to be relinquished
by Bosnian Serb units.

Such positions appear consistent with the sentiments
expressed in a letter to Mr. Clinton dated 25 September
and signed by Senators Robert Dole, John Warner, Thad
Cochran, Jim Inhofe, Bob Smith, Dirk Kempthorne, Jesse
Helms, Jon Kyl, Arlen Specter and Kay Bailey Hutchison.
They wrote, in part: “…We have serious concerns
about the commitments you and your administration
reportedly have made with respect to U.S. participation
— to include thousands of ground forces — in enforcing
a possible Bosnian peace settlement.“

The Senators’ concerns are evident in thirteen
questions posed to the Clinton Administration in their
letter. They asked to be informed about such fundamental
information as:

• What specific commitments concerning U.S. troops
  have been made to NATO and the Bosnian
  government?
• How many troops would be involved — and how many
  reservists would be required, if any, to be
  called up to meet these force levels? Where will
  they be deployed? And for how long?
• When would the troops go in — immediately upon
  an agreement being signed or later on? And what
  would happen to these plans if fighting between
  the parties continued?
• What would be the rules of engagement?
• What are the estimated costs of this operation
  and what would be the U.S. share?

What ‘Command-and-Control’?

A particularly important line of questioning
related to elementary command-and-control arrangements:

• “Would this be a NATO-only operation or
  would Russian troops and/or other troops, from
  Islamic countries, for example, also be a part of
  that total force enforcing a settlement?”
• “Would NATO be in complete command of all
  forces involved in an enforcement operation? Or
  would Russian forces and non-NATO forces be under
  different command arrangements? If so, how would
  these varied command arrangements be ultimately
  integrated in order to achieve unity of command?
  Is there to be another dual-key command?”
  (Emphasis added.)

The President’s response, dated 28 September
1995, speaks volumes about the lack of coherent thought
or systematic preparation that has gone into the Clinton
Administration’s decision to commit up to 25,000 U.S.
troops to a Bosnian peacekeeping operation. It
answered none of the Senators’ questions.
Instead, Mr. Clinton took refuge in the shifting sands of
the Bosnian peace negotiations. The presidential letter
opined: “We cannot know the details of the required
implementation force until we know the details of a
settlement. But NATO planning is proceeding, and as it
evolves, we will provide detailed answers to your and
other questions.”

The truth of the matter is that the
Administration’s policy-makers have no idea what the
answers to the Senators’ questions should be —
let alone what they will be if and when the
parties actually reach an agreement. The square peg
of Russian troops on the ground simply cannot be fit in
the round hole of a NATO operation. Neither can the
Administration have confidence that it will be able to
pull out all U.S. ground forces in time for the November
election as its perceived political imperatives dictate.

The Real Rub

The Senators also addressed an even more intractable
problem with the Clinton-Holbrooke peace plan:

“Should [U.S. forces] be deployed to
partition a sovereign and independent country into
two entities….Do we want to place our soldiers in
harms’ way to defend the compromise of our
principles? We must also ask whether or not any
settlement reached has been agreed to freely by the
Bosnian government and without coercion. We are
concerned about news reports that senior
Administration officials gained Bosnian government
agreement on the first set of ‘Agreed Principles’ by
threatening a halt in NATO bombing.

“Finally, we must ask whether it would
not be more just and more wise to lift the arms
embargo on Bosnia and Herzegovina, and allow the
Bosnians to fight until there is a stable military
balance — the precondition for any settlement
which would not require the deployment of thousands
of American and NATO troops to police it.”
(Emphasis added.)

The Bottom Line

The Center for Security Policy finds unpersuasive the
President’s assurances that the United States is
“not partitioning a sovereign and independent
country.” No less convincing is the Administration’s
claim that this “peace process” — in
contrast to all those that have proceeded it – – will
prove more likely than the approach favored by Senator
Dole et. al. to prevent “more bloodshed and avoid
another round of fighting.”

The Center commends the href=”index.jsp?section=papers&code=95-D_69at”>attached editorial which
appeared in yesterday’s Wall Street Journal to the
attention of the legislators meeting with the President
today — and to all those concerned that the Clinton
Administration is at the threshold of making matters still
worse in Bosnia. It underscores the dangers of
proceeding willy-nilly into portentous deployments and
multinational command-and-control arrangements before
there are firm answers to the sorts of serious questions
posed by Senator Dole and his colleagues.