As Clinton Dithers, Bosnia Dies

By Nathan Jones

George, no one got what they voted for last November. I voted on foreign policy because I think what we do abroad right now will determine the number and quality of the domestic jobs the politicians will be dividing at home for a long time to come. I voted against a Slick Willie who had an answer to every question for the evening sound bites, but whose numbers didn't add up the next morning.

Others concerned with foreign policy voted for Willie the Wonk because they believed when he turned his compassionate intelligence to foreign policy, the results would be good.

What we all got was Waffling Willie. He promised to sustain the momentum of the Middle East peace talks. To do it, however, he sped up the naturalization of Martin Indyk, a former adviser to Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir and former lobbyist for Israel, to be the White House Middle East adviser. By the end of Clinton's first month in office the peace talks were derailed.

Even Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, who owes his Labor Party victory in Israel a year ago to Bush administration pressure on Shamir, may be in a panic. Since there no longer is even a pretext of U. S. financial coercion on Israel to trade land for peace, Rabin knows the Israeli voters can replace him with Likud strongman Binyamin Netanyahu, who doesn't conceal his own desire to keep all the land by sweeping the Palestinans out of it.

That's a bigger bite than Israel ever can chew, and Israel's immigrants from Europe and their children know it. They are leaving the country in droves. Some because they don't like the prospect of facing increasingly sophisticated Scud missiles every decade or so. Some because they don't relish living in a country to which the fascism and fundamentalism that made a Jew's life hell in Eastern Europe in the first half of this century now is following them.

Even worse, however, is Bill Clinton's unwillingness or inability to turn back the wave of ethnic and religious genocide that is a brushfire in Bosnia now, but will become a roaring forest fire in Eastern Europe if it isn't checked.

During the election campaign Clinton promised a more activist policy in Bosnia, and what he suggested on taking office made sense. He would lobby the U.N. to lift the arms embargo that kept only the legitimate government of Bosnia, not its Serb and Croat tormentors, from getting arms to defend Bosnian borders.

Instead of just sending unarmed U.S. aircraft with relief supplies daily to Sarajevo and nightly to besieged Muslim areas, he also would send armed aircraft to support U.N. peacemakers protecting Sarajevo and other besieged enclaves, with air strikes against the Serb artillery shelling "safe areas, " and bomb the bridges between Serbia and Bosnia if necessary.

The Serbs twice stopped shelling when they thought U.S. planes might be coming. Clinton had Democratic and Republican support in Congress, and polls showed more Americans for intervention than against it, so long as it was part of an international effort.

Then, suddenly, it turned out we weren't lining up an international coalition, but were only in a "listening mode." What Americans heard was the negativism we always hear from Europeans.

President Clinton should have been choosing among the military and political options presented by his staff, explaining them to Congress and the American people, and sending his secretary of state out to get the Western Europeans aboard. That's what the Europeans expected and might have welcomed. Instead, Clinton has blamed the Europeans for the failure of U. S. Leadership. Meanwhile the Republic of Bosnia, to which the U.S. has granted formal recognition, dies under Serbian guns.

"Not since the siege of Leningrad or Stalingrad has there been anything like it, " said the Christian Science Monitor. "The fall of multiethnic Sarajevo would have implications well beyond the human tragedy. It would represent the victory of a systematic racist and fascist policy and begin to define the geopolitical world. " The Washington Post has called it "one of the great set pieces of political tragedy of the late 20th century. "

George, is it possible Bill Clinton never heard of Ethiopia in 1935, and Czechoslovakia in 1938? In both places, early and unified collective action might have saved the 55 million lives lost in World War II.

The White House let it be known President Clinton was disturbed by the television footage from Bosnia he saw while he was in Tokyo. Where has he been while the rest of us have been watching this sickening slaughter for more than a year—playing video games?

This is a defining moment for his presidency and for some semblance of world order, but we're stuck with a president who loves to schmooze, make friends and run for election, but obviously hates to lead. While the Middle East peace process, Bosnia, and the "new world order" are dying, Bill Clinton's been looking for someone else to blame.

Nathan Jones is a frequent contributor to the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs.