The Doves Are Right About Bosnia

By Charles Krauthammer

There is a rising chorus for intervention in the Balkan wars. It is a call to folly. There is an understandable desire to "do something" -- but without any calculation of cost or effectiveness. Worse, without any consideration of the objective.

The impulse for intervention is all means and no ends. For the question in Bosnia is not intervention. The question is, Intervention in the service of what political objective?

If the objective is the re-creation of the Bosnian state -- a fiction with no history of independence, a state composed of ethnic groups with a demonstrated and murderous inability to live together -- then intervention is sheer madness. Well-intentioned madness, but madness nonetheless. Perhaps a year ago a prescient West could have stationed forces to prevent the current war. But that time is long past. The Bosnian egg cannot be unscrambled. Intervention to reconstitute the broken Bosnian state would require enormous force, entail enormous risk, and offer no chance of success.

On the other hand, intervention in the name of the only conceivable solution -- partition along lines proposed by the Vance-Owen mediation -- is at least rational. If bombing Serbian guns or arming the Muslims would bring the recalcitrant Serbs around, then intervention might make sense.

But such calculations are not so easy. Intervention on behalf of the Muslims might make the Serbs more pliable, but it might also make the Muslims more intractable. "Shifting battlefield fortunes have apparently made Bosnia's Slavic Muslim-led government reluctant to accept the ((Vance)) plan," reports Peter Maass of the Washington Post. And nothing would shift Muslim battlefield fortunes more than American intervention. Its mere prospect has hardened the Muslim negotiating position.

What to do? Give all sides an ultimatum: Accept the Vance-Owen partition, or else. Serbs risk aerial bombardment, Muslims risk total abandonment.

The virtue of partition is that it is the only real chance for peace. The nine-year-old girls on sleds now being murdered by half-witted gunmen will not be saved by relief convoys that bring them food so they can later be shot. They will not be saved by dreams of rolling Serbia out of Bosnia. They will only be saved by peace. And if we've learned anything from Cyprus and India and Palestine, it is that the best way to bring peace is to separate the combatants and let them live apart.

The Vance plan would let the Bosnians do that within a largely ceremonial and insubstantial Bosnian state. Yet there is much grumbling in the U.S. about Vance. Those who worshipped him when his State Department was negotiating away American control of the Panama Canal now find him insufficiently zealous in ; defending Muslim interests in Bosnia.

The grumblers object that the Vance plan gives the Serbs too much territory. They make up only 31% of the Bosnian population and would end up with 42% of the territory. But that overlooks the fact that the Serbs are the most rural people in Bosnia. They owned or occupied about 60% of the country before the war (up to 70% now). Vance would have them give up about a third of their holdings -- which is the reason the Serbs are so reluctant to sign on.

Moreover, are we really going to intervene because 11% of Bosnia is being misapportioned? What is the American national interest in the cantonal assignment of Brcko and Prijedor?

This, say the hardheaded interventionists: Unless the Serbs are stopped in Bosnia, they will next turn on Kosovo and Macedonia and deeply injure our interests by precipitating a larger Balkan war involving Albania, Greece, Turkey, Bulgaria and possibly Russia.

That, at least, is an argument. One would still counter that: 1) the connection between the fate of Bosnia and a larger Balkan war is speculative; 2) interventionists have not shown how they propose to drive Serbia out of Bosnia; and 3) the better way to prevent a general Balkan war is a partition of Bosnia coupled with a "red line" drawn at Kosovo and Macedonia, a strong warning to Serbia that aggression there, which would indeed engage vital American interests, would elicit a massive, Baghdad-like military response against Belgrade.

Now, it is true that Vance and Owen appear hopelessly overmatched trying to bring Anglo-Saxon-style conciliation to a place ravaged by byzantine blood feuds. It is no surprise that the Geneva talks have collapsed. Mere mediators cannot force an agreement. Which is precisely why Western governments should be providing the muscle behind the mediation. They should be putting the heaviest pressure -- including threats of intervention -- on Serbs and Muslims to accept the Vance plan. (The Croats have already done so.)

Instead the mediation is being undermined by American signals of nonconfidence. The new U.S. Secretary of State has already "expressed doubts" about whether the negotiators "can, in fact, find an agreement." With backing like that, Vance and Owen would be lucky to find the door.

Bosnia hawks in the U.S. justify this sniping at Vance on the grounds that his proposed settlement is soft on the Serbs, whom they would see tried for war crimes rather than awarded a piece of Bosnia.

^ I have no objection to putting Slobodan Milosevic on trial. But, as Aesop once asked, who is going to bell the cat? Who is going to march to Belgrade and arrest these people? More accurately, who is going to send American soldiers to force a Serbian surrender? Willing ends without means is child's play. Matching the two is the work of statesmen.