‘SUPPORT THE TROOPS’: DON’T SEND THEM TO BOSNIA TO ‘ENFORCE’ AN ODIOUS, UNWORKABLE DAYTON DEAL

(Washington, D.C.): Today, the United States Senate
will vote on President Clinton’s decision to send U.S.
ground troops to Bosnia for the purpose of
“enforcing” an immoral, unjust and ultimately
doomed peace agreement forged at Dayton, Ohio last month.
To have any hope of securing a majority for so
dubious a proposition, the question before the Senate
will be framed in terms of “supporting the
troops,” rather than supporting the President who is
sending them in harm’s way — and his rationale for doing
so.

If the Senate is really interested in
supporting the troops, however, it will oppose,
rather than affirm Mr. Clinton’s decision. Keeping
20,000 soldiers out of a Bosnian quagmire fraught with
dangers to their personal safety, with the certainty of
mission creep and with no clear exit strategy would be a
far greater contribution to the troops’ morale,
well-being and readiness for genuine military missions
than would be platitudes about how much the Congress
appreciates their willingness to try to perform as
ordered.

Six Reasons for Just Saying ‘No’

As it happens, larger national interests would also
be served by such a repudiation of President Clinton’s
misbegotten Bosnia gambit. Consider the following:

1. The Senate would be rejecting an odious
   agreement struck with the perpetrators of
   genocide in Bosnia — primarily, Slobodan
   Milosevic and the Serbian and Bosnian Serbs he
   commands — over the strong objections of their
   victims. As the Center for Security Policy noted
   on 21 November:

“[Pursuant to the Dayton Deal]
arrangements have been put into place that
ensure the de facto partition of
Bosnia along ethnic lines, effectively
ratifying the results of campaigns of terror
conducted for the purpose of
“cleansing” desirable territory of
non-Serb populations. What is more — by
opting for arms control arrangements,
confidence-building measures and other
diplomatic sleights-of-hand rather than
providing for the arming and training of the
Bosnian forces — the government of Bosnia
will, at best, be reduced to a ward of the
international community. At worst, it will,
in due course, be dismembered altogether by
the far better equipped Serb and/or Croat
armies.”

As Joshua Muravchik, a member of the Center
for Security Policy’s Board of Advisors, put it
in an important op.ed. article published in the Los
Angeles Times on 30 November:

“…A peace that is not just may also
not be durable. Letting the butchers of
Srebrenica, or those to whom they reported,
off the hook will assure that the worst
elements will rule ‘greater Serbia.’ It will
also ensure that the thirst for revenge will
long burn in Muslim throats.”

2. The Senate would be doing NATO a favor
   by blocking this deployment. While the
   Atlantic Alliance will surely suffer from the
   rejection of the Clinton deployment commitment —
   particularly since the Administration’s campaign
   to sell this idea has greatly hyped the damage
   that would be done to NATO should that happen.
   Still, it is hard to believe that a rejection
   by Congress of so flawed an agreement now
   would be more stressing on the Alliance
   than would a subsequent, predictable American
   decision to cut-and-run as U.S. personnel in
   Bosnia start taking casualties. And, in the
   event the U.S. actually stays the course for
   “roughly one year,” does anyone
   seriously believe that NATO will not be severely
   damaged if the American forces are withdrawn and
   the Administration insists that other allied
   forces remain in place?

In an editorial that should be required
reading for all Senators, this week’s National
Review concluded:

“Refusing to deploy U.S. troops in
support of America’s own diplomatic handiwork
would certainly weaken our leadership of
NATO. But a worse outcome would be for the
U.S. to go into Bosnia and then get out again
either under fire, or having accomplished
nothing, or after falling out with our allies
over what to do there. The worst thing
about Mr. Clinton’s policy is that it offers
us only a choice of evils.

“As for [the GOP strategy of] shaping
that policy by supporting it, this ignores
the continued foot-dragging Senator Dole has
encountered from the Administration on arming
and training the Bosnians. What will our
friends advise if the Administration fails to
help the Bosnians effectively once U.S.
troops have been deployed? They could hardly
urge pulling out. Their arguments concerning
U.S. credibility and NATO leadership would
require staying even more than they are now
said to dictate going. Mr. Clinton would then
be shaping GOP policy.”

3. The Senate would actually help to reduce
   the danger posed by isolationist impulses. Although
   President Clinton regularly caricatures critics
   of his Bosnia initiative as isolationists, it can
   reasonably be argued that his own
   preoccupation with domestic policy and his
   general indifference to international affairs
   contributed greatly to the unchecked carnage in
   Bosnia over the past three years. Unfortunately,
   it is not foreordained that Mr. Clinton’s
   new-found interest in American leadership and
   engagement overseas will overcome the cumulative
   effects of inattention to these issues on public
   attitudes and preferences.

What is more, as Sen. Fred Thompson (R-TN)
observed in the course of Senate debate
yesterday, if — as seems probable — this
deployment proves a debacle, the likely result is
going to be an intensified opposition to U.S.
internationalism on the part of the American
people. It is, after all, axiomatic: For U.S.
national security policy to enjoy sustained
public support, American military forces and
resources must not be expended frivolously on
missions that are not clearly in the country’s
vital interests and that may be exceedingly
difficult to perform.

4. The Senate can make it possible to arm the
   Bosnian government’s forces — an absolutely
   essential step if there is to be any chance for
   real and lasting peace in the Balkans — without
   running the risks inherent in having U.S. troops
   on the ground while that is being accomplished.
   Many legislators are understandably concerned
   about these risks.

Regrettably, the Clinton Administration
clearly hopes to reduce them by not arming
the Bosnian Muslims. That would be a formula for
leaving the Bosnian people vulnerable to renewed
predations from Serb and/or Croat forces.
Alternatively, it will ensure the continuation,
if not the expansion, of Bosnia’s already undue
reliance upon Islamic extremists from Iran and
elsewhere.⁽¹⁾

The problems on this score inherent in the
Administration’s policy are illuminated in a
column published in this week’s New Republic by
its editor, Andrew Sullivan:

“…Richard Holbrooke [says] if we
don’t arm the Bosnians, we’ll allow others to
do so. Has he read the document he created?
Here’s what it says: ‘All foreign forces,
including individual advisors, freedom
fighters, trainers, volunteers, and personnel
from neighboring and other States, shall be
withdrawn from the territory of Bosnia and
Herzegovina in accordance with Article III,
paragraph I.’

“Before any senator or congressman
signs onto this, he should ask the President
a simple question: Which parts of Dayton do
you mean and which don’t you mean? What’s the
real agreement and what’s the phony one? And
which one are American troops supposed to
enforce: What they have in writing or what
you’ve whispered into the ear of [Bosnian
Prime Minister] Silajdzic?”

5. The Senate would be discouraging President
   Clinton from believing that he can unilaterally
   commit or deploy U.S. forces in non-emergency
   situations without congressional consultations
   and assent. As the Center has noted
   previously,⁽²⁾
   President Clinton has signaled his intention to
   deploy American forces to a “peace
   enforcement” role on the Golan Heights in
   the event of an agreement now being negotiated
   between Syria and Israel. If Congress wants to
   avoid being presented with yet another fait
   accompli involving the deployment of U.S.
   troops to a place that may prove as dangerous to
   U.S. personnel as Bosnia will be, it needs to
   insist that prior approval must be
   obtained before such presidential commitments are
   made. Rejecting the Bosnian deployment would be
   an appropriate place to express that insistence.
6. The Senate would be eliminating the principal
   pretext for placing Russian forces into Bosnia,
   namely as a means of assuaging Moscow’s
   sensibilities about a major American intervention
   in its backyard. The dangers of legitimating
   a long-standing Kremlin objective — establishing
   a permanent military presence in the Balkans —
   have been epitomized by the general selected to
   lead Russian forces in Bosnia: Colonel General
   Leonty Shevtsov was, until being assigned to
   Bosnia, the commander of the Kremlin’s genocidal
   campaign in Chechnya. The designation of a man
   with the blood of some 40,000 Muslims on his
   hands to a “peace enforcement” mission
   in the Muslim- controlled areas of Bosnia seems
   intended to alarm and intimidate their
   co-religionists in the Balkans. Those who evince
   concern about the “neutrality” and the
   safety of American forces should be alarmed at
   the prospect that such a war criminal will
   formally be associated with and subordinated to
   U.S. operational command.

The Bottom Line

The last refuge of those who support President
Clinton’s initiative seems to be, as Andrew Sullivan puts
it “the Lennonist doctrine that peace is always
better than war.” He writes in his New Republic
column:

“But peace is not always better than war. When
the peace is morally and practically crippled; when
American troops are put in the impossible position of
both enforcing and agreement and then being told to
subvert it and when the deal will almost certainly
lead in the long run to the final annihilation of
Bosnia, it is far worse than the continuation of the
conflict. At least then, with American support,
the Bosnians would have a chance.”

For all these reasons, the Senate should vote to
disapprove the Clinton plan to deploy U.S. ground forces
to Bosnia.

(1) For more on this troubling
relationship, see the Center’s recent Decision Brief
entitled Train and Arm the Bosnians — But Ensure
That the Islamic ‘Foreign Legion’ Is Sent Packing!
(No. 95-D 101, 7 December
1995).

(2) See the Center’s Decision
Brief entitled There He Goes Again: The ‘It’s
Premature’ Scam Is Designed to Defer Vote on Bosnia
Until It’s Too Late (No. 95-D
80, 24 October 1995).