Allied in Failure

BY JAMES WALSH

Reported by Jay Branegan/Brussels, James L. Graff/Vienna, J.F.O. McAllister/ Washington, and Alexandra Stiglmayer/Zagreb, with other bureaus

The tables were spread in Brussels last week for a grand conclave charting the future of NATO. Foreign ministers representing the 16 partners in one of history's strongest, most successful alliances arrived with words intended to reaffirm its solidarity, even as the war in Bosnia was testing its inner strength. The mantra of the hour was articulated by Warren Christopher, who came armed with a freshly retuned U.S. policy toward a corner of Europe that has defied Western peacemaking efforts. Declared the U.S. Secretary of State: "The crisis in Bosnia is about Bosnia, not about NATO."

But how to believe Western credibility is alive and well, despite all evidence to the contrary -- despite feckless diplomacy, a chain of broken promises and empty threats, mounting rancor among the allies and a record on Bosnia so altogether contradictory as to very nearly beggar understanding? What really stood out in red on the Brussels agenda was the unsettling truth that the crisis is about not only Bosnia but also that much vaunted chimera, the new world order.

The emergency concerns not just NATO but also the U.N. and other instruments through which the U.S. and the West's other powers have sought to enforce peace and deter aggression. In practice, if the "international community" means anything, it denotes the U.S. in tandem with Britain and France. Russia must be consulted, Germany and Japan write occasional checks, and China's nonobstruction is sometimes needed; but Washington, London and Paris are the governments that count.

In suffering Bosnia, the first test case of cohesion following the Soviet Union's collapse, the great powers have certifiably failed. Western impotence last week in the face of the Serb assault on Bihac was the culmination of more than two years of ineffectual wrangling among Washington, its European partners and the U.N. over how the horrible ethnic conflict could be stopped. Now, as the fighting worsens again, none of the peacemaking institutions so grandly charged with keeping the post-cold war world order has the vision or unity to impose a policy.

Indeed much of the diplomatic discussion last week focused on ways to bail out: how to withdraw the 24,000 U.N. peacekeepers should the need arise quickly, an undertaking that could pose appalling dangers. Extreme contingencies call for the troops to abandon equipment and dash for helicopters or the coast, shooting their way out if necessary. Already as of late last week, 360 soldiers of the U.N. "protective" force, which sometimes seems to need more protection than it delivers, were being held virtual hostages by Serb forces; their numbers could grow if a pullout were ordered.

Lost amid the recriminations was a firm grasp of how the order of battle in Bosnia really stands. Have the Serbs won, as Defense Secretary William Perry pronounced on television early last week? He wrote off the Bosnian government's hopes of regaining turf. Yet even if the town of Bihac should fall, and assuming continued supplies of food, fuel and medicine from outside, the defenders of Bosnian sovereignty are actually better prepared than ever to fight for their homeland against the viciousness of tribal aggrandizement.

Other remote Muslim enclaves would be vulnerable if fighting escalated, but Serb forces in the Bosnian republic have dwindled through desertion. According to best estimates, only about 80,000 Serb fighters remain active in the republic, but they lack sufficient fuel and are stretched thin. Though they outgun the Bosnian army 6 to 1 in heavy weapons, Sarajevo's infantry has an edge in manpower and a mobility advantage over tanks and artillery in winter. , The Bosnian army has a chance of holding its own and even of advancing -- which is probably a major reason why Serb commanders undertook to invade Bihac. At the practical level, the strategy was to take land needed to open a rail link between their forces and kindred units holding territory across the border in Croatia -- a prospect that prompted the Croatian government to threaten intervention. Beyond that, the unpunished siege of Bihac could and did shatter Western resolve.

Last week the Clinton Administration sought to patch up its differences with the Europeans by putting a stronger accent on negotiating with the militant Serbs. The fresh angle was evidently -- but for the record, not explicitly -- a further sop to the aggressors, if only they would cease further killing. That prospective inducement looked very much like a prize that the U.S., particularly since Clinton became President, has sought expressly to deny the "ethnic cleansers": formation of a Greater Serbia between the rump Yugoslav state and the Serbs in breakaway Bosnia and Croatia. Douglas Hurd, the British Foreign Secretary, and French Foreign Minister Alain Juppe were to visit Belgrade this week to consult on the initiative with Slobodan Milosevic, Serbia's nationalistic President.

In official circles, Western Europe was delighted at Washington's apparent decision to drop the calls for bombing the Serbs that had so riled Paris and London. Some news accounts crowed that the turnabout marked Europe's first success in calling the tune on a major alliance policy. But how successful is the European line? U.N. Secretary-General Boutros Boutros-Ghali got a faceful of answers last week as he flew into Sarajevo demanding cease-fires. He left empty-handed amid jeers and snubs, underscoring how low the U.N. stands in Bosnian public opinion. Radovan Karadzic, head of the rebel Serb "republic" that occupies 70% of Bosnian territory, refused to meet on the neutral ground of Sarajevo's airport, insisting that Boutros-Ghali come to see him. Boutros- Ghali declined.

Even as NATO's pep rally began in earnest in Brussels, it was treated to a shower of ice water from Russian Foreign Minister Andrei Kozyrev, who set the meeting back on its heels by suddenly refusing a long-prepared deal offering Moscow a special relationship with NATO in coordinating European security. Kozyrev's rebuff might have been meant to fend off nationalists at home, but its timing suggested that lessons from the Bosnia debacle were taken into account.

After shifting its position back and forth on NATO's future now that it no longer has an enemy, the Clinton Administration now seems to be leaning toward a more rapid enlargement of the alliance right up to Russia's doorstep, incorporating Poland, Hungary and other edgy former Soviet satellites. Clinton was to travel to Budapest last weekend to cement the pledge of good faith toward these candidate front-line states, but Moscow was not snapping up a separate compact designed to keep mistrustful Russians mollified. Not only was Kozyrev miffed that Christopher was floating the idea of another international conference on Bosnia without consulting the Kremlin, but as long as the West could not sort out whether it wanted to punish or reward aggression, expanding the alliance's frontiers seemed beside the point.

Martin McCusker, director of the Defense and Security Committee of the North Atlantic Assembly, NATO's parliamentary wing, blamed the divisions on "the shambolic command-and-control operation" in Bosnia, under which the alliance supplies the military muscle but the ever cautious U.N. calls the shots. The point, however, is that the same nations that control NATO also control the U.N. Security Council. Out of one side of their mouths, Britain and France have said they want authority to strike at Serbs attacking "safe areas"; out of the other, they veto the idea, or limit targets to unmanned tanks or empty runways.

The failure to hit at the Serbs besieging Bihac finally exposed the threats as hollow. Said Jean-Francois Deniau, a centrist French parliamentarian and critic of Western policy: "Today all rules and references have been wiped out. The U.N. has been discredited, Europe has been discredited, and NATO has been discredited. Forget all these defeated institutions and failed solutions. We're going to have to come up with a new approach." The trouble is, new approaches with any grit are all but ruled out by the old one, which has consisted mainly of keeping the conflict off the front pages and providing the Western powers a fig leaf of respectability.

The U.S., which ordinarily exercises the crucial leadership in such affairs, has fumbled on Clinton's watch. After demands by presidential candidate Clinton for an ironfisted approach toward the Serbs, the Administration proceeded to soft-sell the strategy among NATO allies. When Serbs continued to shell and "cleanse" Muslims out of their homes, the alliance belatedly < declared "safe areas," to be protected by air strikes and other military measures -- but then rarely ordered them. The only time military threats worked was around Sarajevo last February after a horrifying Serb bombardment of the capital's marketplace outraged world opinion to such a degree that for once it seemed retribution would be forthcoming. The subsequently created "total exclusion zone" for heavy weapons afforded Sarajevo a welcome semblance of peace for several months that is now beginning to fray dangerously.

Last week the Western front was roiling just about everywhere. As Christopher was peddling a revamped approach before NATO, Bob Dole was winding up visits to London and Brussels during which he called for an end to the arms embargo against the Bosnians. The man who will soon become the Republican majority leader in the U.S. Senate was given short shrift in Britain, where Defense Secretary Malcolm Rifkind termed American criticisms of British policy "disgraceful" and demanded that Washington remain silent if it would not send troops to Bosnia.

Dole, displaying what he surely hoped would be regarded as presidential stuff, said he was unconvinced that reprisals against the Serbs could not work. "I want to express my strong support for a strong NATO," he stressed in Brussels. Yet he still planned to introduce an embargo-lifting resolution in the Senate, perhaps tacked to a veto-proof spending bill, sometime after the new Congress convenes in January. He predicted at least 70 to 80 votes in favor.

The rough treatment that Republicans could dish out to what remains of the new world order visibly worries the Europeans. At the least, the Republican- controlled Congress may try to gut the U.N. peacekeeping budget, in light of the Balkan experience. Dissension was not afflicting the U.S. alone though. In Germany the Suddeutsche Zeitung last week put on its front page a classified wire sent to Bonn by the German ambassador to NATO, Hermann von Richthofen, a grandnephew of the World War I flying ace known as the Red Baron. His complaints centered on what he styled an arbitrary U.S. push to expand NATO eastward rapidly and to lift the arms embargo on Bosnia, which he said would strain the alliance "to the limits."

A strange wire indeed. The German government, or at least the Defense Ministry, has been an agitator on behalf of faster NATO enlargement. Chancellor Helmut Kohl's own Christian Democratic Union, meeting in a party congress last week, passed a resolution recognizing that the Bosnia embargo may have to be lifted. Kohl personally endorsed the measure, saying failure to protect Muslim sanctuaries was a "disgrace." Foreign Minister Klaus Kinkel said Germany "stands morally close to the American position." In practical terms, however, it stands apart.

The reason is those allied ground troops deployed under U.N. command. Britain and France both have sizable contingents in Bosnia, and they have waved the dangers to these soldiers every time a punitive action against the Serbs is mentioned. Yet the infantry forces were inserted in the first place under impossible conditions that limit them to little more than glorified Red Cross work. The humanitarian mission remains vital, but the troops also provide an excuse for not using air power and other forceful measures.

In New York last week, Kofi Annan, the U.N. Under Secretary for Peacekeeping, bridled at the charges of U.N. do-nothingness. "I believe the United Nations has been made a scapegoat," he charged, by "member states who do not want to take the risks." An official at NATO headquarters summed up U.S. frustrations: "It's because the Europeans say one thing in New York and something different here."

The double-bluff approach has worked precisely because Europeans, along with Americans, flinch at the thought of risking a single one of their soldiers in confronting such an ugly, inscrutable and remote enemy. The allies have all sought to dodge the question and posture. Margaret Thatcher was one Briton who would probably have asked for support and perhaps won it.

Offering comfort to Dole last week, the former British Prime Minister and co-architect of the war against Iraq said, "Did you ever hear of anything so absurd as to go after the runway but not the aircraft? I must say on the whole, my method of tackling aggression was quite a good one." In a Daily Mail commentary excoriating Hurd, defense analyst and Oxford historian Mark Almond concluded, "Whitehall's indignation at American criticism is all the more heated because it masks a bad conscience." His view was echoed in Washington by a similar criticism of Clinton, who has kept the dispute at arm's length and did not even attend last week's policy review. A former Administration official said, "Bill Clinton was not able to lead the Western alliance. Did he try? Who cares? He struck out." The ashes of the policy are being tasted in Bihac, but they have soiled every corner of the new world order.