WHAT PRICE GLORY?

By Bruce W. Nelan

THE TROOPS OF TASK FORCE LION are convinced that they will be the first Americans into Bosnia to police the peace. For weeks the advance unit's 1,000 soldiers have prepared at the vast Hohenfels training center in northern Bavaria. They have parachuted out of Air Force transports, clattered to landing zones aboard Chinook helicopters and roared over the countryside in Bradley fighting vehicles. Their exercises, code-named Mountain Shield, were tightly coordinated with the U.S. 1st Armored Division and 3rd Infantry Division, which subsequently conducted operation Mountain Eagle 95 with 10,000 troops earmarked for Bosnian peacekeeping duty.

If NATO contingents are sent into action, says task force commander Colonel James McDonough, "we're going in first. Just give us the word." The troops are ready to fight, but they have also been mastering crowd control, learning the skills of dealing with civilian authorities, soothing ruffled residents. "My guys want to do what we train for," says Sergeant-Major Gerald Parks, his face painted green and black. "If people are dying in Bosnia and we can help out, let's go."

Whether they go depends on the peace talks in Dayton, but if those negotiations succeed, the U.S. Army could move fast. NATO plans, still secret, call for immediate American help in setting up a communications and logistics headquarters in Bosnia. Close on their heels, the Implementation Force, or I-FOR, of 60,000 troops--20,000 American--would stream into Bosnia. The provisions of the peace agreement now being discussed would give NATO's military peace force a license to throw its weight around throughout Bosnia. They could also involve the I-FOR in a fire fight the first time it crashes a Serb roadblock or seizes artillery pieces from the Bosnian army. Once the peace is shattered and American forces begin taking casualties, voices will be raised in the U.S., loudly demanding answers: What makes Bosnia worth dying for? What vital national interest is involved? In fact, the questioning has already begun, as Congress sends signals to Clinton that it will fight him vigorously on any deployment in which it has no say.

Answering the questions is no easy assignment, as the sometimes floundering efforts of official Washington demonstrate. The activist consensus of the cold war, which made every foot of turf on earth a prize to be won or lost, has evaporated. At the same time the venerable formula that U.S. forces are to be used to protect vital interests and key allies seems less than adequate to guide the country in a violent world of fluctuating priorities. Will America's $260 billion-a-year military machine be sent into action to fight only aggressors like North Korea, Iran or Iraq, as the Pentagon's conventional strategy suggests? Those are the least likely contingencies: cross-border invasions and highly visible aggression are increasingly rare. Civil wars, ethnic violence and disintegrating states now produce most of the bloodshed and agony that shock viewers on the evening news programs. Will America duck the new, more common battles? The answers that emerge from the Bosnia debate are likely to set precedents that will channel America's course for years to come.

Senior officials in Washington have been trying to persuade the country of the need to send troops to Bosnia, but they have not been doing a particularly good job of it. Clinton wrote to Congress last week, "If we do not do our part in a NATO mission, we would weaken the alliance and jeopardize American leadership in Europe." Secretary of State Warren Christopher warns that the Bosnian conflict might spread, but it remains unclear what danger the Albanian army poses. Meanwhile, William Perry, the Secretary of Defense, testified to Congress last month that the peacekeeping mission in Bosnia "affects the vital national security interests of the U.S. by maintaining the strength and credibility of NATO and, most important, by stopping the war." That use of the word vital is the heart of the issue and the argument. When officials of the Truman Administration suggested in 1950 that South Korea was not a vital interest, North Korea attacked. It is diplomatic code for an interest a country will go to war over. When President Jimmy Carter declared in 1980 that the Persian Gulf was a "vital interest," he was correctly understood to mean the U.S. would go to war to maintain its access to gulf oil.

Two weeks after Perry used the V word, he seemed to have changed his mind. In a speech in Philadelphia he labeled Bosnia a place "where our vital interests are not threatened, but we do have an important stake in the outcome." Asked to explain this contradiction last week, Pentagon spokesman Ken Bacon said Bosnia was important, though not vital, but the maintenance of U.S. leadership in NATO was at stake in the peacekeeping mission. "We're protecting NATO," Bacon said. "That's vital."

Let's get this straight: Bosnia is not a vital interest; it's an "important" interest. NATO is a vital interest. NATO is mixed up in Bosnia, so to defend our vital interest in NATO we have to fight in Bosnia. By this logic, it would make no difference whether Bosnia were an "important" interest or a "somewhat important" or an "utterly trivial" interest; we'd still have to send troops there because of our desire to preserve NATO. Bacon's explanation skips over the really hard question raised by Perry's comment: Is the defense of merely "important" interests worth the lives of American soldiers?

America's intervention in Somalia, which cost $2 billion and the lives of 30 servicemen and changed nothing, along with the crisis in Haiti and the war in Bosnia, has impelled U.S. leaders to search for new definitions of the nation's interests abroad. Even the prudent George Bush, who ordered U.S. troops to Somalia in the first place, was rethinking the old guidelines just before he left office. He suggested that "military force might be the best way to protect an interest that qualifies as important but less than vital." Force is a key adjunct to diplomacy, he argued, and "real leadership requires a willingness to use military force." Richard Haas, the former White House aide who wrote that speech, explains, "It was an attempt to come up with a slightly more flexible rationale for using force. It was also a defense of what was not being done in Bosnia, because it was hard to match an effective U.S. intervention with the limited nature of U.S. interests."

Colin Powell built on conclusions reached by former Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger of the hard-learned, post-Vietnam rules of engagement: commit troops only to clear-cut tasks, with the support of Congress and the public, and then go in with overwhelming force. Now he too is seeking fresher approaches to a changed world that is still riven by conflict. Last week Powell told an audience at Rice University, "New rules are needed; old assumptions need to be rooted out. The kind of warfare we had thought about for 50 years is gone."

In other words, if we simply abide by the Powell doctrine and hew to the Pentagon strategy of preparing for two simultaneous conventional wars, we would keep the U.S. military out of action unless the gravest kind of threat looms up.

Perry is struggling to come up with workable new guidelines. He has been thinking about separating the country's interests abroad into three categories: vital, important and humanitarian. This would roughly match the three main types of intervention the U.S. ponders most often: peacemaking, in which warring parties must be forced to stop fighting; peacekeeping, where the parties have accepted a peace agreement; and emergency humanitarian aid, often in warlike conditions. All of them are potentially bloody. "Our level of military involvement must reflect our stakes," says Perry. The Gulf War fell into the first category, and Bosnia the second. "The second category is much more difficult to deal with than the first," he says, "because we must weigh the risks against the interests involved, and because the threats are not always so clear-cut."

Interventions in the gray areas the Pentagon calls "operations other than war" are hardest to explain. General John Shalikashvili, Powell's successor as Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, is the man who directed the operation that provided refuge to the Kurds in Iraq, and he does not shrink from similar missions to bring succor to strife-torn countries. "We have a capacity like almost no one else," he says. Former Assistant Secretary of Defense Lawrence Korb finds Shalikashvili much more willing to get involved in brush fires than his predecessor. "Powell wanted low-risk operations," Korb says. "But Shali is not looking for the lowest risk. He thinks the U.S. military can have a useful role in these kinds of missions." Even Shalikashvili, however, has not been able to set forth a coherent intervention doctrine.

Perhaps no one will find a single strategic concept or a template to fit all situations. "I think it's very unlikely," says Powell. "I think that as these situations arise they will be dealt with on an ad hoc basis and in the politics of the time." That means the government will have to argue each case on its own merits, as it must for Bosnian intervention.

No one has suggested that the men and women in uniform are lobbying against any involvement in Bosnia. All the leaders in the chain of command have said the opposite: they are ready to go. What they worry about is the American public's staying power if casualties begin to mount. "Once you have decided to do it," says David Davies, a British Defense Ministry spokesman, "you must accept the consequences and not debate the decision." But there is no denying that many senior officers, singed badly by Vietnam and Somalia, are leery about the prospect of going into battle in Bosnia, taking casualties and then being suddenly, ignominiously yanked out. "The American military," says a former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, "has been let down too often by the American people not to be wary."

If the American people have let down the military, it has often been because they were squeamish about the losses that the military was taking. And it is possible that the public's criterion for sending Americans to be killed in foreign wars--the Pentagon calls it the mother test--is getting stricter. "In this new post-cold war era," says Republican Representative Dana Rohrbacher, "we expect the lives of Americans to be taken more into account." Perhaps because of the surprising success of Operation Desert Storm in the gulf, where only 148 U.S. troops died out of 500,000 allied troops in action, Americans now think low casualties are the norm in any operation.

That level of concern about casualties makes some policymakers nervous. The French, for example, have lost 55 soldiers in Bosnia, and two of their airmen are missing in Serb-controlled Bosnian territory. Such developments would have set off a major outcry in the U.S., but in France they are accepted with relative stoicism. Shalikashvili says there is a danger the U.S. is developing a standard "that cannot be retained in a war."

The public may be tougher than Shalikashvili thinks--it all depends on whether Americans are convinced of the value of the sacrifice. A 1994 study of poll data by the Rand Corp. shows that even though the public soured on the wars in Korea and Vietnam as casualties increased, the respondents did not call for a pullout of forces. Instead they supported escalation of the fighting and taking whatever action was necessary to score a decisive victory--including the use of atomic weapons in Korea and an invasion of North Vietnam. Polls also showed the U.S. public ready to go to war in the gulf even though estimates at the time indicated casualties could total 5,000 to 10,000. That steadfastness did not recur in Somalia, where the public saw no purpose in the fighting. The response there, after 18 soldiers were killed in a street battle, was to support a pullout.

"I hope," says Senator Sam Nunn, a leading congressional defense expert, "we don't set up such high hurdles for ourselves that we begin to gradually become impotent in our ability to respond." Powell thinks it has not come to that yet. He says Americans are still willing to send their sons and daughters into danger, and to lose some of them. "But," he said last week, "you'd better be able to explain why they lost their lives. If you can't rest your actions on a solid base of policy and interest, you will find yourself in an unsupportable situation." To that, Republican Congressman Mark Neumann of Wisconsin adds what might be called the father test. "I evaluate whether this is something we should be doing based on my 18-year-old son," he says. "If I were to ask the question, Do I think my son should go to Bosnia?, I would have to answer no."

A great many Americans feel that way now, and are worried that Bosnia will be followed by other interventions. During the cold war the U.S. was involved, willy-nilly, in every conflict in the world. But at the same time Washington had to be cautious about where it sent troops for fear of stumbling into a direct clash with the Soviet Union, one that could escalate to nuclear war. Now the opportunities for intervention are almost endless and carry little fear of Armageddon.

The new world order actually resembles the order as it stood at the end of World War II, when the U.S. was the sole possessor of atomic weapons and the U.N. Charter was being written. All the peace-loving countries would band together, the theory went, with the five permanent members of the Security Council in the lead. They would punish any nation that dared launch an aggressive war. That scenario was played out in Korea, but never thereafter until the Gulf War, which followed the breakup of the U.S.S.R.

Now that the superpower rivalry has ended and the danger of thermonuclear war has abated, the theory could be put into practice. International legal scholars even began toying with new approaches to intervention, suggesting that the world might have a right to take action against a government that was committing atrocities or genocide against its own people. But experiments in collective security so far have simply proved the old rule: the U.S. will act when it sees that its vital interests are at stake--as in the gulf--but feels no compulsion to send in the Marines without a very good reason. The public demanded a pullout from Somalia but said nothing about abandoning overflights in Iraq when two U.S. helicopters were mistakenly shot down in April 1994 and 15 Americans were killed. The difference between the two cases is obvious. The public understands that oil is a strategic interest, and Saddam Hussein--a tyrant hoping to build nuclear weapons--represents a threat to U.S. security. On that basis Americans can make a judgment and a choice.

If Americans rejected intervention in Somalia because their vital interests were not at stake, will they accept intervention in Bosnia? One way to persuade them to go along with the deployment, of course, is to argue that America's vital interests are at stake in Bosnia. The Administration has tried that approach, with limited success. Clinton has another alternative, which is to acknowledge that the fate of Bosnia is not crucial to the national security of the U.S., but add that we still have an interest in peace and stability there, and that our interest merits the loss of some troops.

Powell is probably correct when he says no overall strategy can ever cover all the choices open to the nation; the government of the day will have to convince the public each time that America must act. Precedent will certainly influence the debate, however. Intervention in Bosnia would help establish the principle that we should take action in situations that are less apocalyptic than the global struggle against communism or a direct attack on ourselves or our allies. So far Clinton has failed to explain the value of sending troops to Bosnia on those terms. If he never succeeds, it will be all the more difficult for the next President to involve troops in a similar conflict. To some, such a precedent would be a very good thing. But if most of the conflicts in the future are going to resemble Bosnia's, and the U.S. declares its unconcern, the world may be left a more brutal place.

--Reported by James O. Jackson/Brussels, Mark Thompson and Douglas Waller/Washington and Bruce van Voorst/Hohenfels

With reporting by JAMES O. JACKSON/BRUSSELS, MARK THOMPSON AND DOUGLAS WALLER/WASHINGTON AND BRUCE VAN VOORST/HOHENFELS