Bosnia: strange alliances - legislative debate over US involvement in Bosnia war not divided along partisan lines

National Review, June 7, 1993 by Vin Weber

The debate over U.S. involvement in Bosnia has made for some strange alliances in Congress. Senate Republican Leader Bob Dole (R., Kan.), for example, is allied with liberal Senators Joseph Biden (D., Del.) and Paul Wellstone (D., Minn.) in supporting a stronger U.S. response to Serbian genocide. By contrast, Senator Bob McCain (R., Ariz.) - a former Vietnam POW and consistent Cold War hawk - is allied with Senator John Glenn (D., Ohio) in opposition to U.S. involvement.

Clearly, the Bosnia debate has not broken down along traditional party lines. Rather, it has created internal challenges for both parties - challenges with long-term implications for America's role in the world.

For the Democrats, the challenge is a struggle with their past. They must answer a vital question: Are they really "New Democrats," willing and able to use military force decisively? Or are they still the captives of the last war they started - Vietnam? For the Republicans, the challenge puts them at a philosophical crossroads: With the end of the Cold War will the GOP return to its older isolationist roots and adopt an "America First" foreign policy? Or will the party continue to support America's engagement internationally and our position as leader of the free world?

How each party answers these challenges will have implications far beyond the current crisis in Bosnia. It will indicate a great deal about what America's global leadership role will be as we approach the dawn of the twenty-first century.

Many of the Democratic Party's most ardent Bosnia hawks have been doves on every other U.S. military intervention since Vietnam. Biden opposed the U.S. invasion of Grenada and voted against U.S. action in the Persian Gulf. President Clinton himself dodged service in Vietnam, and waffled on the Gulf War. He and his party have a lot to prove.

"This would be the liberals' first war, the first since Vietnam," Paul Gigot recently noted in the Wall Street Journal. "It would be good for the country, and the world, if the liberal Democrats could show they can use force successfully." The odds are not looking good.

President Clinton started out strong, rattling his saber loudly. At a White House press conference, Secretary of State Warren Christopher told reporters that, after consultations with his military advisors, the Commander-in-Chief had decided to use force against the Serbs. How soon? "We want to move as briskly as we can," Christopher said.

That strong statement raised expectations. But then weeks passed and nothing happened. Now, almost a month after announcing his intention to act, the President has said that he is still examining "whether we can do anything to end [the conflict] and to end the ethnic cleansing." According to White House Press Secretary Dee Dee Myers, the Administration's Bosnia policy is "in kind of a holding pattern for the moment."

As a result, President Clinton is increasingly being viewed as weak and indecisive. The Bosnian Serbs thumbed their nose at him, rejecting the Vance-Owen plan despite Clinton's threats to initiate air strikes if they failed to ratify it. Momentum for U.S. involvement is fading in Congress. And the Europeans are so unimpressed with Clinton's leadership that, at a recent meeting of EC foreign ministers, they felt free to vote down his plan to lift the Bosnian arms embargo and start air strikes.

It is still possible for Clinton to recover and put together a coherent policy. But even if he does so, there is the question of whether his fellow Democratic hawks in Congress will have the political will to see the policy through. And these recent converts to military force will have to contend with the pacifist majority in their own party.

Representative Robert Torricelli, a Democratic opponent of U.S. action, recently predicted: "When the bombing starts, and those now chanting for military involvement see the enormous collateral damage against civilians ...there will be an immediate abandonment of support for the Administration." Mr. Torricelli knows his party well.

While the Democrats are struggling to see if they are capable of leading the world, the Republicans are busy debating whether or not they still want to. Bosnia has exposed a growing rift in the Republican Party between neoisolationists, who believe that, having won the Cold War, America need not remain engaged in foreign affairs; and internationalists, who believe America should not abdicate the role it has cultivated over the past forty years as leader of the free world.

Today some of the most conservative leaders in the U.S. Senate oppose American involvement in Bosnia. Trent Lott, Thad Cochran, and John McCain are all Bosnia doves. Many of these are the same conservatives who - when the Democrats were still paralyzed by the Vietnam syndrome - championed aggressive U.S. military action in places such as Libya and Grenada, and supported the "Reagan Doctrine" policy of confronting and defeating Communist expansionism around the world.

Ironically, in the Bosnia debate these conservatives are the ones paralyzed by Vietnam. At a recent press conference, for example, Senator Lott argued that Bosnia "is a quagmire. It has the potential to be a Vietnam-type situation.... I think we're going to have to find more ways to apply diplomatic pressure." It is hard to imagine Lott making the same statement about Grenada, Panama, Afghanistan, or Nicaragua.