Indecision Is Still Clinton's Bosnia Policy

The Soviet Union was never able to undermine the NATO alliance as deeply as the Bosnian crisis has. However, until last week, the smart money in Washington was warning against writing off NATO just yet. A strong man had arisen in Clinton's administration, said the conventional wisdom. He had taken charge of a fractious and uncertain national security team, and asserted the simple priority that it is firmly in the U.S. national interest for NATO to survive.


The high point came when Clinton announced last week that he was sending up to the new Republican-dominated Congress a supplementary bill to spend a further $25 billion on defense.


Clinton cited unexpected costs of the operations in Haiti and the Persian Gulf which were eating into the Pentagon's readiness and training budgets. But as Defense Secretary William Perry stood beaming at the President's side, the symbolism of the moment was striking. What Perry wants these days will be granted to the man who seemed clearly in charge of the administration's national security policy.


Thank heavens somebody is. The dithering of the past weeks over Bosnian and NATO policies have been painful to watch, even for those of us used to the Keystone Kops way that Clinton's team lurches to its foreign-policy decisions.


Consider the latest round of indecision. On the Sunday after Thanksgiving, Perry made it clear that the Pentagon was washing its hands of Bihac and of Bosnia in a televised interview. The Serbs had "demonstrated military superiority on the ground" that could not now be reversed by air strikes, he said.


That set the scene for a three-hour national security council meeting on Monday, from which White House Chief of Staff Leon Panetta emerged to inform reporters that the United States now saw Bosnia as "a civil war." This had hitherto been the European formulation; the Americans had preferred the phrase "war of Serb aggression."


Then a senior White House official gave reporters a background briefing. He said that the Bosnians seemed to have lost a decisive battle at Bihac, and that NATO would have to swallow the Serb victory and accept an eventual confederation of the Bosnian Serbs with Serbia.


Charles Thomas, the State Department's man on the ground in the contact group on Bosnia, then announced that the United States would not support a Serbian confederation. Oh dear. Thomas had not been alerted to the new pecking order in Washington. Perry immediately went on CNN to declare: "One thing that would be considered is allowing a federation between Bosnian Serbs and the Serbs."


But just as NATO and other diplomats in Washington began to formulate a new rule, which was never to believe anything from the White House or the State Department until first checking with Perry, Clinton himself stepped in, and cut Perry off.


"We do not favor a Bosnian Serb confederation with Serbia," Clinton wrote to Bosnian president Alija Izetbegovic, adding that he saw the Bosnian conflict as "a war of aggression."


Characteristically, Clinton then equivocated, suggesting that such a Greater Serbian confederation might be acceptable: "Constitutional arrangements must be worked out by the parties on the basis of mutual consent."


The conclusion is sickening. There is no agreed U.S. policy on Bosnia. At the current rate, there will soon be no Bosnia.