FINALLY, THE LEADER OF NATO LEADS

By JAMES CARNEY WASHINGTON

For once Bill Clinton could get angry about bosnia without feeling helpless. The President was outraged when he first learned about the carnage in the Sarajevo market last Monday. On the phone from Jackson Hole, Wyoming, where he was vacationing, he told his National Security Adviser, Anthony Lake, that if, as expected, the Bosnian Serbs were found to be responsible, nato would have to retaliate. By shelling Sarajevo, he said, the Serbs were daring the Western alliance--and specifically the U.S.-to live up to its recent promise to answer such attacks with substantial air strikes. "This absolutely requires a response," Clinton declared.

This time he wasn't just saying it. In fact, the President and his foreign policy team had spent much of July and August writing the scripts for last week's two-stage Bosnia drama: both the unprecedented bombardment of the Serbs and the simultaneous push for negotiations. Despite the low public visibility the President and his senior policymakers maintained as events unfolded, it was clear--both to the parties in the former Yugoslavia and to the U.S. allies in Europe--that a qualitative change had taken place. After four years of ambivalence and only partial engagement, America was taking charge. ''Clinton has recognized that without American involvement and force, no resolution is possible." said an official at the German foreign ministry. "The President knows," said White House press secretary Mike McCurry, "that the times when we make even modest progress on Bosnia are when we step in and exert leadership."

That recognition was a long time coming, and it was driven as much by fear of the political consequences awaiting Clinton if he didn't change his policy as it was by a shift in his view of America's role in leading the post-cold war world. After the fall of the U.N.'s ''safe areas" of Srebrenica and Zepa to the Serbs in July, Clinton faced a choice: either take military and diplomatic control away from the U.N. and the Europeans, or be forced to send thousands of American soldiers into harm's way to help withdraw U.N. troops. Clinton's priority in Bosnia has always been to avoid sending in soldiers while the war was going on, and he chose engagement.

After cajoling the allies into strengthening NATO's threat of using airpower against the Serbs, Clinton ordered his aides to come up with a new peace initiative. Then he dispatched Lake to Europe to sell the proposal. Two years earlier, Clinton had sent Secretary of State Warren Christopher on a similar mission with disastrous results. Instead of forcefully offering a U.S. plan, Christopher merely solicited opinions, resulting in muddle and confusion. This time Lake was given permission to present the U.S. plan as something Clinton was determined to pursue with or without the allies' support, and the allies fell into line.

Bosnia has already proved to be the most intractable foreign policy problem Clinton faces, and it could get far worse. If peace talks fail, Clinton will be held responsible, and he will probably have to send troops to help the U.N. retreat after all. But last week even Senator Bob Dole, the chief critic of Clinton's Bosnia policy, was giving him grudging praise; and it now appears that the Senate will postpone a vote to override Clinton's veto of a bill that would lift the U.S. arms embargo on Bosnia. A possibility unimaginable only days ago now suggests itself: Bill Clinton, on the campaign trail in 1996, claiming Bosnia as a success.