U.N. Asks Backing for Wider Bosnia Air Raids : Balkans: Clinton is expected to approve today. Policy would permit NATO strikes at Serbs attacking safe areas.

WASHINGTON —  The United Nations asked the United States and its allies Monday to agree to wider air strikes to protect Gorazde and other besieged towns in Bosnia-Herzegovina, and President Clinton is expected to approve the request today, officials said.

U.N. Secretary General Boutros Boutros-Ghali said he formally asked the North Atlantic Treaty Organization to provide air strikes against Bosnian Serb forces if they attack any of six Bosnian towns that the United Nations has named safe areas.

A senior Administration official said the U.N. request was made with American encouragement; Clinton is expected to endorse it after a meeting with his foreign policy advisers this morning.

Defense Secretary William J. Perry also discussed the question of Bosnia on Monday, disclosing that the Administration is revamping its policy and will announce a plan for “vigorous action”--possibly including stepped-up military operations--later this week.

Perry said policy-makers are considering both diplomatic and military measures, among them the possibility of lifting the international embargo on arms sales to the Bosnian Muslims.

“There’ll be a new set of actions--no question about that,” he told reporters during a trip from Washington to South Korea to review the military situation there.

A senior defense official said later that the Administration is not contemplating entering the war in force in an effort to defeat the Serbs. But it was clear from Perry’s remarks that some new military action is possible.

The new mandate sought by Boutros-Ghali, which must also be approved by the 15 other NATO governments, would significantly widen the circumstances under which American, British and other Western air power might be used in Bosnia. NATO officials are expected to meet Wednesday.

Until now, NATO has agreed only to provide “close air support” to U.N. forces under attack in Bosnia. In practice, Western commanders interpreted that mandate as restricting their targets to specific units that were directly endangering U.N. forces. As a result, when NATO launched air strikes against Bosnian Serb units attacking Gorazde, the effort was too small and too late to be effective.

Under the proposed guideline, the United Nations could ask for NATO air strikes against any Bosnian Serb forces attacking the safe areas, whether U.N. forces are present or not. “This goes well beyond what we have done until now,” a senior official said.

The ultimate aim of the new expansion of NATO’s role in the war is to persuade the Bosnian Serbs and Bosnian Muslims to stop fighting and return to peace negotiations, officials said. “The idea is . . . to put together a diplomatic approach with a tougher use of force,” the senior official said.

It was unclear whether more air power could be effective in saving Gorazde, where Bosnian Serb forces are already inside the town and Muslim defenses are crumbling. The U.N. commander on the ground, Britain’s Lt. Gen. Michael Rose, said Monday that air strikes would accomplish little without ground forces to hold territory.

But senior U.S. officials were still discussing a proposal to revive a cease-fire agreement that Bosnian Serb leaders had agreed to last week, only to break it almost immediately. Under that plan, Serbian forces would withdraw from Gorazde and its immediate area and the city would be disarmed and placed under U.N. protection.

“We’re not writing off Gorazde,” one Administration official insisted. But he described the city, crammed with an estimated 65,000 terrified refugees, as primarily “a humanitarian problem.”

Even if the wider mandate for air power fails to save Gorazde, other officials said, it could help protect five other safe areas: Sarajevo, Tuzla, Bihac, Zepa and Srebrenica.

Under the proposal, the procedure for ordering air strikes would be unchanged. The U.N. commander, Rose, would submit a request to the civilian chief of the U.N. mission in Bosnia, Yasushi Akashi. If Akashi approved the request, he would forward it to NATO headquarters, and NATO’s commander in the area, U.S. Adm. Jeremy Boorda, would oversee its implementation.

American officials said they have no complaints about the way that process has worked in the past two weeks--after an initial misstep last month when the first request for an air strike to protect U.N. troops took more than three hours to arrive at NATO.

Instead, they said, the factors limiting use of air power at Gorazde have been the narrow terms of NATO’s mandate to protect U.N. forces and the difficulty of operating high-speed aircraft in mountainous, often foggy terrain.

After a day of private talks with the United States and other members of the U.N. Security Council, Boutros-Ghali announced his proposal late Monday afternoon.

“I sent a letter to the secretary general of NATO (requesting an agreement) allowing the United Nations to use air strikes to protect the different free zones in the former Yugoslavia,” he said. “We have the right to use air support, but we need special permission of the members of NATO to use air strikes, which is different.”

U.S. Ambassador Madeleine Albright said she supported the proposal. Yuli Vorontsov, Russia’s U.N. ambassador, said he opposed allowing U.N. officials to call for “indiscriminate and automatic air strikes.” But he did not take any formal action against the plan.

Clinton’s foreign policy advisers discussed the proposal at a White House meeting that lasted more than two hours, and National Security Adviser Anthony Lake briefed the President on the plan Monday evening after Clinton returned from a day in Milwaukee, officials said.

The President planned to discuss details of the proposal directly with his advisers at a rare meeting of the National Security Council this morning, they said. “We have to find a way to get the momentum back . . . for the peace effort,” Clinton said early Monday.

Still, the Administration appeared torn--as it has for months--between its desire to halt the tragedy in Bosnia and its fear of getting sucked into an escalating military commitment there.

Officials said one encouraging point was the vocal anger of Russian Foreign Minister Andrei V. Kozyrev and his special negotiator in Bosnia over the Serbs’ violation of several cease-fire agreements that the Russians negotiated.

“This could be helpful,” a State Department official said. “Up to now, the Russians have been acting as the Serbs’ protectors. This time they may feel a need to teach the Serbs a lesson.”

Times staff writer Art Pine contributed to this report.