Bosnia boils over - Bosnian Serbs intensify campaign against Croats and Muslims while US does nothing - Editorial

National Review, May 10, 1993

The rumor in Washington is that the Clinton Administration is preparing stronger action against Serb depredations in Bosnia, once Boris Yeltsin's April 25 referendum is out of the way and once our allies are on board. The Administration's outrage--or, more accurately, the outrage of public opinion to which it is responding--was provoked by the brutal assault on the town of Srebrenica, in defiance of UN peacekeepers' efforts to feed and minister to the town's 60,000 Muslim inhabitants. Even Russia (whose people tend to support the Serbs) joined in UN Security Council condemnations.

President Clinton's policy up to now has been feeble. Having criticized Mr. Bush during the campaign for moral insensitivity, he has since conducted a policy of pious criticism of Serbia backed by inaction. Mr. Bush, who was wary of a messy military intervention, at least could not be called hypocritical. NR chided him for his passivity and has long urged lifting the perverse UN embargo on the transfer of arms to those defending themselves. We praised Mr. Clinton for making the same recommendation in his campaign. After he came into office, however, he let the weenies get to him--the Vance--Owen delusion, the timid Christopherites, the politicos who wanted no distractions from the wonderful economic program. "We concentrated on the diplomatic option," an insider confided to Newsweek, "precisely because all options were too hard." Precisely.

Now, as the pressures to do something grow, there is talk of lifting the UN arms embargo. This would be a good start--but only a start. If our allies and the Russians don't go along, we should arm the Bosnians, Croatians, and others covertly. (A while back there were reports that the Russians would go along if the embargo were nominally lifted for both sides. This is just about tolerable, since Serbia's victims, desperately in need of arms, would gain more from lifting the ban.)

The next step is to contemplate more drastic military action. To do nothing is hardly an option. In the age of television, when the human suffering is in our living rooms daily, public opinion will not accept complete passivity by a superpower in the face of horrors like ethic cleansing.

But what kind of action? Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan have urged that we face the question of military action squarely--but both oppose the introduction of Western ground troops. Rightly so. So-called humanitarian intervention achieves little. Ensuring safe passage for food convoys to besieged cities like Srebrenica does no more than give the condemned man a hearty meal. And the troops then become hostages to the Serbs against more effective military intervention by their governments. The Bosnians would rather have the weapons and forgo the UN relief convoys.

As for a major land invasion to defeat Serbia, even if it were to prevail quickly--as we think likely; contrary to myth, the various Yugoslav partisans gave the Wehrmacht little trouble--a peace achieved by Western troops would require a permanent Western garrison to enforce it. Neither the U.S. not the West Europeans are prepared to supply that.

That leaves Western air power to support Bosnian resistance-fighters and to break the back of Serbian power. The aim of such a policy would be to alter the local balance of military power and thus to create the conditions for some future political settlement. Any such settlement would rest upon the greater equality between a weakened Serbia and a better-armed Bosnia--and also upon the knowledge that Western air power could return more readily than Western ground troops. That threat will be all the more effective if air power means destroying not only Serb artillery and bridges in Bosnia, but also military installations in Serbia itself. We warn against one-time air strikes and incrementalism, recalling the lesson of Vietnam that such limited efforts only advertise our hesitations and encourage resistance. If we engage militarily, we must be prepared to do so overwhelmingly and decisively. Milosevic and his thugs may think they can hunker down and outlast us as the North Vietnamese did. Saddam Hussein had the same idea--and he was proved wrong. But it didn't happen on the cheap.