Making the pitch for the Dayton deal; Why troops shouldn’t go

Last night, President Clinton made his case for the "Dayton Deal" – an agreement he claims will end the war in Bosnia and justify the deployment of 20,000 U.S. combat troops there. Although this column went to press before Mr. Clinton delivered his remarks, their thrust has been thoroughly telegraphed in the myriad interviews, press conferences and backgrounders supplied by his administration since the agreement was reached in Ohio last week. It is possible, therefore, to subject the president’s arguments for that accord to critical analysis. Doing so leads inexorably to the conclusion that this agreement is fatally flawed and should not be "enforced" by American servicemen and women.

• The administration says that America’s "conscience and values" demand that the United States implement this agreement and bring peace to Bosnia. That argument is perhaps the most offensive of all the possible justifications for this accord. For four years, this president and his predecessor have found ways to acquiesce to Serbian aggression and unspeakable crimes against humanity that, as Mr. Clinton noted last week, "our fellow citizens had to watch night after night after night … on their television screens." He makes it sound as though viewing the carnage on TV has been approximately as bad as being its victim!

 

Now, in the run-up to his re-election campaign, Mr. Clinton has suddenly become seized with the need to end this horror. In the name of doing so, however, the administration has forged an agreement that bears an odious resemblance to Neville Chamberlain’s appeasement of Adolf Hitler at Munich. It rewards the aggressors by allowing their war crimes to go unpunished, legitimates the results of their heinous "ethnic cleansing" and likely leaves their victims unable to defend the designated non-Serb portions of Bosnia in the future. Such arrangements may salve Mr. Clinton’s guilty conscience and his expediency-dictated values. The demeaning suggestion that the Dayton deal is consistent with the conscience and values of the American people, however, must be firmly rejected.

 

Contrast this outcome with that espoused by Senate Majority Leader Robert Dole. For example, in December 1992, Mr. Dole wrote in the Los Angeles Times: "Mr. Milosevic, your time is running out. The United States and the world won’t let you get away with genocide. … Like Hitler, you have embarked on a war against civilization. The fate of Hitler’s Germany awaits you."

 

• Perhaps because of the agreement’s serious shortcomings, the Clinton administration tends to base the case for U.S. troops’ participation in implementing it less on the accord’s merits than on other grounds. For example, it argues that America’s leadership of NATO is at stake. This contention raises two important questions. First, which would likely do more damage to the important Atlantic Alliance – an up-front American refusal to send ground troops to enforce a unjust and unworkable agreement or the unseemly withdrawal of those troops under fire when (not if) the costs associated with such enforcement become intolerable to the public and Congress?

 

Second, even if the United States can keep its forces on the ground for the full year, how will the ‘NATO-needs-us argument’ be different 12 months from now? If there is any peace to enforce then, it will almost certainly still be fragile. Our allies will surely say they will not stay if we don’t. NATO, and American leadership of the alliance, will once again be said to be at risk.

 

In short, we may be adopting a policy that asks us to choose between Dunkirk and Cyprus. Neither is good for American popular support for NATO.

 

Clearly, the Europeans need us. What is less clear is whether the American people can be persuaded that this country still needs a strong security tie to Europe -translating into presence, expense and engagement. A doomed and morally repugnant exercise in Bosnia, whether it ends precipitously and acrimoniously or winds up being a long-term quagmire, is unlikely to advance the worthy objective of American involvement in Europe.

 

• The administration argues that the failure of the Dayton deal will usher in a wider European war in which the United States will inevitably become involved." The question must be asked: Isn’t the cancer of aggression and ethnic cleansing more likely to spread if the chief perpetrator, Serbia’s Slobodan Milosevic, escapes punishment? Worse yet, won’t thugs elsewhere in the Balkans, the former Soviet Union and beyond take heart from Mr. Milosevic’s cynical transformation into a great statesman-peacemaker, rewarded for his misdeeds by the end of economic sanctions and the creation of conditions on the ground that lend themselves in the foreseeable future to the realization of his war aims for a "Greater Serbia." If one really wants to discourage a wider war, the aggressor must be punished, his victim given the means to defend against future predations and those responsible for planning and executing genocide brought to certain justice.

 

• The Clinton administration insists that the mission of U.S. forces in Bosnia will be clear and limited. In fact, the mission is anything but clear or limited. American troops will be "peace enforcers," not peacekeepers. To the extent that the peace agreement to be enforced is one that attempts to create all manner of new constitutional, political and territorial arrangements, the job will, as a practical matter, be to "enforce" nation-building. This is, as our military’s experience in Somalia and Haiti suggests, a task to which it is not well-suited and can only be applied at the expense of its real mission and esprit de corps.

 

• Finally, the administration earnestly maintains that NATO will be able to deal decisively and immediately with any threat to its forces in Bosnia. The problem is that the threat will likely come not from organized, identifiable military units against which the alliance’s vast firepower can be usefully directed. U.S. forces will have to operate in an environment more like Belfast and Beirut than Desert Storm. They will face sniper fire, land mines, ambushes and truck-bombs against which defenses are, at best, imperfect and retaliation a limited, and generally unattractive, option. Honest military personnel are making clear there will almost certainly be casualties taken. This is all the more likely if, as the Clinton administration has made clear, NATO will not remain in Bosnia if its troops’ "safety and security" cannot be guaranteed.

In 1993, President Clinton made a commitment to deploy thousands of U.S. troops in Bosnia without congressional consultations or approval. He has now made an agreement that he argues obliges us to honor that commitment. He says he seeks from Congress "an expression of support," but he and his representatives have made it clear he is going to put American forces on the ground in Bosnia, whether he gets that support or not. In fact, White House spokesman Michael McCurry actually announced that the president would "find a way" to pay for such a deployment even if the Congress votes to cut off funding.

If Mr. Clinton is, in fact, determined to proceed without either congressional support or a legal basis for expending funds in Bosnia, then the choice should be clear for legislators: Those who recognize that the Dayton deal is morally reprehensible and a formula for squandering American lives and national treasure – without correcting the underlying factors that produced the conflict – must disapprove the deployment of U.S. forces to Bosnia. Should the president nonetheless proceed to make such a deployment, responsibility for the ensuing fiasco will lie squarely with him.

If, on the other hand, Mr. Clinton deigns to comply with the will of Congress, the country will be spared a costly and ultimately counterproductive commitment of its troops to Bosnia. And the way may be cleared at last for a policy that is genuinely consistent with the conscience and values of the American people – one that affords the Bosnian government a credible chance to defend its own people, to recover its lost territory and to bring to justice those who precipitated this atrocious war in the first place.