The Risks of a U.S. Enforcement Role in Bosnia: Reliving Vietnam or Beirut : Vance-Owen: Christopher is right to pique our consciences, but when American lives are on the line, the national interest being served must be defined.

NEW YORK —  The Clinton Administration position on Bosnian negotiations is curious. As a way to devise an honorable diplomatic role for the United States, it is extremely skillful and deserves support. Yet care must be taken lest its enforcement provisions land the United States in a morass from which extrication will be difficult.

What is Ambassador Reginald Bartholomew’s mission? If his role is to make a good-faith effort to improve the Vance-Owen plan, he may have a limited success. But changes by negotiation will be largely cosmetic, for the Vance-Owen plan contains the maximum that is attainable without imposition. And imposition is exactly what Secretary of State Warren Christopher has explicitly rejected.

But if a Bosnian settlement is to be just, it will have to be imposed. If it is not imposed, it will reflect the situation on the ground, which is based on force. To pretend, as so many critics of the Christopher plan do, that there is a low-risk shortcut out of this dilemma is to court disaster.

Christopher was right to point out that an early engagement by the West might have prevented the deepening of the conflict. At first, the Western allies tried to preserve the old Yugoslavia to head off similar ethnic conflicts elsewhere, only to reverse themselves and to recognize most of the breakaway republics as nations, which guaranteed a wider civil war.

The best solution would have been a United Nations or European Community trusteeship for Bosnia, which would have permitted the introduction of an international force and either prevented or ameliorated the civil war. But to believe that the appalling results of that conflict can now be reversed by a negotiated settlement that all the parties, in Christopher’s words, would “voluntarily embrace” is an illusion. An agreed, fair outcome presupposes an underlying consensus and rationality inconsistent with the conduct and history of the parties.

There are two basic military options: massive pressure to undo the Serbian gains and to redraw the proposed Vance-Owen borders, or a significant military commitment to keep the parties from overthrowing the Vance-Owen arrangement or a variation of it. If the United States opts for altering the situation on the ground by military means, it will face the dilemma of Vietnam--an open-ended commitment with no visible exit. If it undertakes a major enforcement role, it will be on the road to our embarrassment in Beirut--trapped between intractable parties and in greater danger of turning into hostages than contributing to peace.

A third option is to aerially punish Serbia for its atrocities. It should be kept open to deter a new round of ethnic cleansing. But if applied to past transgressions, it would merge with the option of reversing the situation on the ground, thus running the risk of open-ended warfare or a demonstration of impotence.

The Clinton Administration appears to have chosen the course of participating in the enforcement of any agreement it helps to negotiate. The strategy seems to be to persuade the reluctant Muslims to acquiesce in the loss of territory by promising to protect them against renewed Serbian aggression. A figure of 30,000 peacekeepers has been mentioned, half supplied by the United States.

Precisely because of the stopgap nature of the Vance-Owen plan, enforcing it on the ground could turn into a nightmare. The Serbs will, no doubt, seek to stitch their enclaves together and, sooner or later, join their area to Serbia in quest of their centuries-old dream of a greater Serbia. The Muslims will attempt to reconquer lost territories.

The central government proposed in the Vance-Owen plan will be a weak reed for enforcement purposes. The high probability is that its power beyond the Muslim area would be comparable to that of the Lebanese central government in the territories controlled by the various factions in the Lebanese civil war. It is thus difficult to believe that the 10 proposed ethnic enclaves can be protected by the small force envisaged.

It eludes me why the United States should supply half the peacekeeping force. If such a force is created, its dominant element should be European. If Europe is unwilling to preserve the peace and human rights on its own territory, the United States may be walking into a heartbreaking trap by attempting to act as a substitute.

The operation and composition of the proposed enforcement mechanism raise all the problems of collective security. The Administration obviously foresees a major role for Russia, both in negotiations and presumably in enforcement. That is why Bartholomew’s first mission was to Moscow. But it is already clear that Russia’s attitude is not identical with Washington’s. Serbia has been Russia’s most dependable historic ally. Russia went to war in defense of Serbia in 1914, even though it had no national interest in the immediate issue--indeed, the murder of a dynastic heir to the throne could hardly have commended itself to the czar.

It is conceivable that Moscow would cooperate in getting the Vance-Owen plan accepted; Russian may even be prepared to help enforce it. But the idea of Russia voting to “punish” Serbian aggression or of Russian peacekeepers fighting Serbian aggression flies in the face of any historic experience.

There is also another reason to be wary of introducing a Russian military presence in Bosnia. To get there, the Russian peacekeepers would have to cross Ukraine, Hungary, Poland or Romania, a troop movement that would undoubtedly send shivers through countries that have experienced the difficulty of getting rid of Russian troops. Nor can it be in anybody’s interest to build a potential East-West confrontation into the most incendiary region of Europe.

Warren Christopher’s eloquent call for a standard for the fair treatment of minorities is worthy of praise. He is right to invoke the impact on our consciences of accepting brutality. And yet, when American lives are being risked, U.S. foreign policy must define the national interest being served by the near-permanent stationing of U.S. forces in the Balkans.

For all these reasons, Bartholomew’s mission should be pursued within the general framework of the Vance-Owen plan and under the auspices of the U.N. Security Council. It must not become an unilateral U.S. initiative.

Any U.S. participation in enforcement should be confined to aerial measures. Moreover, if we are serious about participating in enforcement, we should recognize that it must not be improvised. Bases and command machinery will be needed. Most of these will have to be in Italy. A meaningful step would be to explore what bases are available and what command machinery can be created now for either enforcement of the Vance-Owen plan or for possible reaction to ethnic cleansing in Kosovo, Macedonia or Bosnia.

It fell on me to end a war started by previous Administrations with the highest of motives and the widest possible support. Knowing the anguish of such an effort, I would hate to see another idealistic Administration slide into a comparable quagmire.