The Time Has Come

By WILLIAM SAFIRE
The New York Times, July 13, 1995

On the central moral-military challenge of his Presidency to lead the Western world in collective
defense against bloodstained aggression — Bill Clinton will be remembered in history as a man
who feared, flinched and failed.

The policy long urged by Senator Bob Dole was to lift the pernicious arms embargo to Bosnians
who want to fight for their country, and to support the defenders with air strikes at ammo dumps
and supply lines of the invading Serbs. Events have proved the Dole policy right.

But the other-directed Mr. Clinton deferred to Europeans who secretly wanted the Bosnian
victims to surrender. We now see proof that the Clinton policy of passivity was wrong.

The objective reader will recall the central argument made by the not-my-table set in the White
House: that if “lift-and-strike” was undertaken, fighting would escalate, U.N. forces would have
to be withdrawn, and safe havens would be overrun by Serbian forces.

So lift-and-strike was never tried. What has happened? Serbian attacks have escalated,
humiliated U.N. forces are preparing to withdraw, and safe havens are being overrun.

Moreover, Clinton’s failure of nerve has led to this: The U.N. is reduced to huffing resolutions
as impotent as the papal bull against the comet; NATO is revealed to be militarily musclebound, at
the mercy of terrorist hostage-takers; Nazi-style ethnic cleansing is triumphant; and Bosnian
civilians are being driven from their U.N.-guaranteed havens like cattle.

On top of that, Mr. Clinton’s message to rogue states who shoot down a U.S. F-16 on patrol:
We will not retaliate. We will rescue our downed pilot and celebrate his return with a White
House luncheon, but as for the Serbian missilemen who shot down our plane: The President turns
the other cheek. It then gets slapped at Srebrenica.

Ah, say Clinton apologists, but we kept our boys out of foreign wars. The truth is otherwise: By
refusing to help the Bosnians fight their own war, Mr. Clinton has foolishly committed us to
provide 25,000 U.S. ground troops to cover a U.N. retreat. “Clinton’s war” risks American lives
only when defeat is certain.

The White House is irritated at the attention being given the rape of Bosnia because this was
supposed to be Vietnam reconciliation week.

Consider the march of his “commercial-Communist complex.” It began by giving trade
advantages to increasingly repressive China; it moved to conferring diplomatic recognition on
Communist Vietnam; soon it hopes to help Castro maintain Communist control in Cuba.

Why? Because “the time has come” — the bored slogan of the irresolute.

Clinton’s shock-of-recognition theory is that trade and aid weave a web of contacts that
promotes civilized behavior and democratic reform. But the new Clinton detente with China is not
working any better than the old Nixon detente with the Soviet Union. Today’s pragmatic passivity
has emboldened Chinese hard-liners to crush human rights, to threaten expansion into the South
China Sea, even to snatch a Sakharovian U.S. citizen.

Global sharks can detect blood in the water anywhere: If the U.S. isn’t going to make a fuss
about one of its planes being shot down in Bosnia, why should it complain about the seizure of
the annoying Harry Wu?

Contempt is contagious. When you act weakly in one place, you are presumed to be weak
elsewhere. That presumption of weakness guarantees that you will be tested, resulting in the need
to make a showing of military might. Contrariwise, when you have earned the right to be judged
tenacious, you are less likely to be challenged, and seldom if ever forced to use force.

That is why Clinton’s Carteresque avoidance of duty in the Balkans hits home: It is the source of
the infection of weakness that now pervades his foreign policy.

Bosnia has given the world’s bullies good reason to believe that the U.S. under this President
can be had. Clinton piously preaches “engagement” but wimpishly practices detachment; he
denounces isolationism but joins perfidious Albion in isolating a victim of aggression.

Clinton has turned a superpower into a subpower, stumbling down the U.N.’s road to defeat.
Though the hour is late, in Bosnia “the time has come” to follow Dole.