Iran/Bosnia ignominy

Last week, the “character issue”
that has dogged Bill Clinton since 1992 became a feature
of one of the president’s most serious foreign policy
debacles — Bosnia. With eight congressional committees
reportedly now launching inquiries into what must
inevitably become known as the Iran-Bosnia Scandal, this
nexus could become lethal for Mr. Clinton’s re-election
bid.

According to investigative reporting by the Los
Angeles Times, this newspaper and other publications, in
early 1994, President Clinton personally approved a
policy of “active acquiescence” to a request by
Croatian President Franjo Tudjman that Iran be allowed to
funnel arms to the Muslim-dominated Bosnian government
via Croatia. This action was taken, however, at a time
when the Clinton administration’s official policy was
fixedly supporting the U.N. arms embargo on the former
Yugoslavia — an odious arrangement that had the effect of
denying a member nation its right to self-defense while
doing little, if anything, to curb the war-making
potential of the Serb perpetrators of aggression and
ethnic cleansing in Bosnia.

In other words, Mr. Clinton was at once enabling the
Islamic totalitarians of Iran to secure a strategic
beachhead on the Continent of Europe — one made the more
dangerous for its combining radical Iranian theology,
arms and terrorist training with the profound alienation
of a people who had good reason to feel abandoned by the
West — and assiduously resisting congressional
initiatives sponsored by his rival, Sen. Robert Dole, to
end the arms embargo and to provide U.S. weaponry
above-board to the Bosnian government.

The bitter fruits of this misguided policy are now
evident: The United States has some 20,000 men and women
on the ground in Bosnia. It is widely understood that
this problematic — and, in any event, ephemeral –
commitment to protecting the victims of genocidal
aggression would likely have been unnecessary had the
Bosnian government been able to defend itself long ago
with nothing more than U.S. air support.

Worse yet, the safety of these troops is placed at
considerable risk due to the continued presence of
undetermined number of Iranian and other Islamic foreign
legionnaires who have now become fixtures in the
government (notably, the Interior Ministry) and armed
forces of Bosnia-Herzegovina. Even if these foreign
forces could be rooted out, the thousands of converts
they have recruited to a radical, anti-Western strain of
Islam would constitute a potentially serious threat to
NATO personnel. They will almost certainly pose a
continuing peril for European security in the years
ahead.

There are, in addition, likely to be far-reaching
costs for American interests internationally from this
covert Clinton policy (so secret it was conducted outside
the purview of the CIA!) For example, demonstrated U.S.
duplicity offers its European allies grounds for
off-loading blame for the radical Islamification of
Bosnia. It also gives rise to a pretext for the French,
British, Germans and others to spike Washington’s
halfhearted, post-Dayton bid to provide an effective,
non-Iranian arm-and-train option for the Bosnian
government.

The Clinton administration’s too-clever-by-half
Iran-Bosnia initiative also offers Russia precisely the
excuse Mr. Clinton used to hold at bay Mr. Dole and other
advocates for formally terminating the arms embargo.
Henceforth, Moscow can be expected to be even more brazen
in selectively complying with other international
embargoes (for example, that currently in effect against
the Kremlin’s former and future client, Iraq). In
addition, the likes of Boutros Boutros-Ghali are afforded
an opportunity to castigate the United States like an
errant schoolboy who has broken the rules.

Clearly, the strategic implications of these ominous,
and highly avoidable, developments must be subjected to
at least as intense investigation by the Congress as was
accorded the Reagan administration’s benighted, but
relatively innocuous, arms-for-hostages deal with Iran.
President Clinton’s less-than-candid conduct demands, in
particular, that the true nature of his so-called
“containment” policy toward Iran be assessed
with care.

In this regard, the possibility must be considered
that the Clinton administration’s policies on the
following Iran-related issues were substantially
influenced by a compromising sense of indebtedness to
Tehran for helping equip and train the Bosnian Muslims:
de facto acquiescence to Russia’s nuclear reactor deal
with Iran; failure to prosecute Iranian links to the
wholesale counterfeiting of $100 bills; initial approval
of the massive Conoco oil deal with Iran; declining even
to name Iran as a state-sponsor of terrorism at the
recent Sharm el-Sheik summit; strong opposition to the
D’Amato-King legislation that would afford significant
new import-control tools for tightening the embargo on
Iran; and turning a blind eye to the hemorrhage of North
Korean Scuds, Russian submarines and aircraft, Chinese
cruise missiles and patrol boats and other advanced
technology delivered to the Iranian armed forces. Such
policies promise greatly to compound the damage done in
the first instance by Mr. Clinton’s decision to give
President Tudjman the green light — the practical effect
of giving his representatives “no instructions”
— to set up an Iranian arms pipeline through Croatia.

Regrettably, the Iran-Bosnia Scandal is not the only
instance in which Mr. Clinton’s character problem is
complicating, and probably seriously jeopardizing, U.S.
security policy interests. Other examples that come to
mind include: his recent certification that Yasser Arafat
is complying with commitments made pursuant to the Oslo
accords (even the influential American Israel Public
Affairs Committee has acknowledged this is not true); his
claim that the United States would not try to get
involved in Boris Yeltsin’s re-election campaign (it is a
matter of record that Mr. Clinton has repeatedly and
personally done just that at the expense of billions of
American tax dollars); and his declaration that there is
no need to fear a ballistic missile attack against the
United States for at least 15 years (in the wake of
recent Chinese threats against Los Angeles, most experts
recognize such a claim to be pollyannish, if not
reckless).

Whatever comes of the congressional investigations
into the new Iran-Bosnia scandal, one thing is clear: It
will no longer be possible for President Clinton to
pretend that there is a firewall between the
“character issue” that has been the leitmotif
of his presidency’s domestic agenda and his conduct of
international affairs. The sooner the body politic comes
to grips with this reality, the sooner corrective action
can be taken across the board.