NEWS ANALYSIS : U.S. Sets Single Goal for Bosnia Talks: War’s End : Diplomacy: Proposed settlement appears to reward Serb aggression. Officials argue it’s only practical option.

WASHINGTON —  After years of groping to reach the moral high ground in the bitter ethnic war in the Balkans, the Clinton Administration is launching a high-risk strategy this week that stresses pragmatism over idealism as it brings Bosnia-Herzegovina’s warring factions to peace talks in Dayton, Ohio.

Underlining all the Administration rhetoric is a simple objective--to find a formula acceptable to all sides for ending Europe’s bloodiest war in half a century. And, officials concede, that means trying to mediate between the aggressors and the victims of the 3 1/2-year-old war.

Washington’s objective for the talks, which start Wednesday at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, is to broker a settlement that would give the Bosnian Serbs effective control of about half the country. That morally ambiguous outcome appears to reward the Serbs, perpetrators of some of the most blatant atrocities since the Holocaust. Before the war began, ethnic Serbs accounted for less than one-third of the Bosnian population.

But Administration officials argue that such a division of the country is the only practical way to end the fighting. These officials brush aside suggestions that it would be better to ship arms to the Muslim-led, though non-sectarian, Bosnian government and stand back while its army tries to retake land that the Serbs have held since the war began.

“Nobody can win this militarily,” one official said. “We’ve got them moving toward peace. Why would we turn that around? The war option wouldn’t solve anything. There would come a time when we would have to negotiate a peace agreement anyway. The danger is that it would erupt into a wider regional conflict.”

David P. Calleo, director of European studies at Johns Hopkins University’s School for Advanced International Studies, said concerns that a peace treaty would reward aggression are “understandable but not very wise.”

“Unless you are willing to go in and fight a major war to impose a settlement, you have to look for a solution that is acceptable to all sides,” Calleo said.

“It is unfortunate but true that a large number of people in the former Yugoslavia don’t want to live together in a multicultural society,” he said. “You have to admit that the Serbs occupy certain areas. There are a large number of Serbs in Bosnia, and there always have been. I don’t see that it is in our interest to force the Serbs to live in a state they don’t want to live in.”

Critics, including Senate Majority Leader Bob Dole (R-Kan.), have berated the Administration for permitting Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic into the United States to attend the talks. Although Milosevic has not been indicted by the U.N. war crimes tribunal in The Hague, Dole maintains that he bears at least some responsibility for atrocities in Bosnia.

State Department spokesman Nicholas Burns scoffed at that argument.

“There won’t be peace until the Serbs sit down with the Bosnian government and the Croatian government and negotiate a peace arrangement,” Burns said. “Like it or not, you deal with people who have made war to make peace. We don’t like negotiating with some of these people on the Bosnian Serb side, but it’s going to be absolutely necessary for them to be there to make the peace.”

On Sunday, the chief European representative to the talks also defended the decision to allow Milosevic to participate.

At a Washington news conference, European Union negotiator Carl Bildt added that, although the most intractable issues remain to be solved, “we have the best possibility for peace in a long time.”

Bildt took pains to offer neither overly optimistic nor pessimistic assessments as he previewed the meetings.

“Most of the major problems are still there to be settled,” he said. Despite the hardening of positions that precedes such negotiations, “we have a momentum.”

“We will stay as long as it takes. Either we succeed or we don’t. I don’t think there will be many alternatives between those two,” he said.

The Clinton Administration’s venture into Realpolitik stands in sharp contrast to Washington’s earlier posture of sympathy for the Muslims and condemnation for the Serbs.

“The U.S. position from the very beginning--as opposed to some of our European allies--was that there was, without a doubt, an aggressor and a victim,” the Administration official said.

Nevertheless, President Clinton has decided that it is far more important to stop the fighting and prevent more atrocities than it is to demonstrate American support for the victims. Besides, officials say, the United States has a strategic interest in ending the conflict, regardless of who seems to come out on top.

The stakes are too high, U.S. officials and experts outside the government argue, for the world’s preeminent power to stand aside and let the war take its course. The fighting is just too close to several member countries of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, Washington’s most important alliance.

The United States might have been able to ignore the conflict in its early days, but that is no longer the case, said Helmut Sonnenfeldt, a former State Department and White House expert on Europe.

“If the fighting continues, there are other areas that could become inflamed,” said Sonnenfeldt, now a scholar at the Brookings Institution in Washington.

“The refugee flows to places like Germany will pick up,” he said. “Between the corrosive effect on our principal alliance and this unsettled and highly unstable situation in southeastern Europe adjacent to areas where we have alliance commitments, there is a pretty serious national security justification for American action.”

But the pitfalls are everywhere. If the talks break down--and the odds are certainly better than 50-50 that they will--Washington will receive at least part of the blame.

“Once Holbrooke took the forward position that he did, we totally changed the political calculus of failure,” said Charles William Maynes, editor of Foreign Policy magazine, referring to Assistant Secretary of State Richard Holbrooke, the chief U.S. peace envoy to the Balkans.

“Before Holbrooke got involved,” Maynes said, “if the talks collapsed it was Europe’s failure. Now, if the talks collapse, it is America’s failure. By bringing the negotiations here, the failure will be not Holbrooke’s but the President’s.”

Moreover, even a U.S.-brokered peace agreement would not be an unmixed victory for the Administration.

It now seems certain that a peace agreement would have to be policed by an international force--with a large contingent of U.S. troops, raising the danger of American casualties. That, in turn, could shift public opinion against the whole exercise.

The possible deployment of up to 25,000 U.S. ground troops to form the core of a NATO-led peace enforcement force has already generated smoldering opposition.

Dole has said repeatedly that the Administration has not “made the case” for U.S. military participation. The conservative Heritage Foundation said congressional critics are “correct to question why the Administration is attempting to force 25,000 U.S. ground troops onto a plan that does not yet exist.”

But there seems to be no way for the Administration to walk away from its commitment without doing possibly irreparable damage to NATO and to America’s standing in Europe.

Administration officials maintain that the only question is whether U.S. troops will be sent to police a peace agreement or deployed later--and in far greater numbers--to try to prevent the conflict from spilling over the borders of the former Yugoslav federation.

“If we were to allow this conflict to fester,” a State Department official said, “the reality is that it would eventually get to a point where we [would have] to put American troops on the ground to avoid a world war from happening again.”

Times staff writer James Gerstenzang contributed to this report.