What's at Stake for the U.S. in Bosnia?

By Rep. Frank McCloskey

Bosnia is the defining moment of the post-Cold War era. Absent an early and dramatic turnaround in Western policy, we are in for very troubled and dangerous times.

In the Balkans, a Milosevic victory will mean years of conflict in Bosnia and Croatia, the extension of Milosevic's genocide to Kosovo, Sandzak and Vojvodina in Serbia and to Macedonia, and a wider Balkan war. In the long run Milosevic's "Greater Serbia" is doomed to collapse, but its rise and fall will traumatize the Balkans for generations to come.

In Europe, a Milosevic victory will make a mockery of two principles that are crucial to peace and stability, particularly in the area of the former Soviet Union: that genocide will be suppressed and punished, and that cross-border aggression will not be tolerated. It will deeply and perhaps fatally undermine the credibility and authority of the two institutions on which transatlantic peace and security are based: the CSCE and NATO.

In the wider world, a Milosevic victory will expose the end of America's military commitment to European peace and security. It will reduce the power of the United Nations and the U.N. Security Council to that of the League of Nations in the 1930s. It will poison relations between the West and the Muslim world, and strengthen fundamentalist extremism in the latter. It will embolden aggressors and extreme nationalists everywhere, and drive them and their potential victims into arms races.

These are high stakes. We are very close to losing them. We cannot afford this, and we don't need to. But this has been obscured for two years by equivocation, wishful thinking and a pervasive defeatism among Western policy makers, particularly in Europe but also in Washington. No wonder Western publics are confused.

Milosevic's genocidal aims and utter bad faith are perfectly clear. The inadequacy of diplomacy, trade sanctions, and U.N. "peacekeeping" to deter, contain, or reverse Milosevic's genocidal aggression is flagrant.

Yet Cyrus Vance, David Owen, and many European leaders continue to express hope in these failed policy tools and in Milosevic's cooperation. They even propose to commit tens of thousands of U.N. peacekeepers, including as many as 30,000 American troops, to police the Vance-Owen plan—a thinly disguised surrender to Milosevic's genocide which Serb forces clearly reject as insufficiently complete, and which their victims accept only out of despair.

Western policy on the Balkan crisis fears the quagmire of an unwinnable war. It still I fails to recognize that we are already deeply mired down in a quagmire—one of defeatism in the face of a crisis which we must confront, and which will become more and more difficult the longer we postpone that confrontation. It still fails to recognize that the Vance-Owen plan risks getting us deeper into this quagmire by entangling U. S. ground troops in an impossible and immoral mission in Bosnia, leaving Serb aggression in Croatia unresolved, and encouraging more Serb aggression in Kosovo and Macedonia.

President Clinton has signaled his determination to get us out of the quagmire of passivity and defeatism while making sure we do not get into the quagmire of an unwinnable war. He must act now to translate his determination into concrete decisions.

I hope the president will begin by admitting the profound failure of Western policy to date, suspending the Vance-Owen process, and recognizing and underscoring the genocidal nature of the Milosevic regime and its aggression.

I hope he will make clear to the American people the risks of inaction, and forge a U.S. -led victory strategy whose unequivocal objective is to defeat and contain genocidal Serb aggression.

Such a strategy cannot, should not, and need not rely on a massive U.S. or NATO ground intervention. It must and should lift the U. N. arms embargo from the states threatened by Milosevic-Bosnia, Croatia, Slovenia, and Macedonia; provide arms to Bosnia immediately; and use NATO air power to enforce the will and conscience of the international community.

Rep. Frank McCloskey (R-IN) is a member of the House Armed Services Committee