(The Nation, May 8, 1995)

GNATS FOR BOSNIA by David Binder

The Clinton administration does have a police on Bosnia, Bob Dole's claims to the contrary notwithstanding. The idea of sending American boys to fight in the bloody Balkans is, of course, unthinkable. But helping impose a no-fly zone, sure. Airdrops of non-military supplies to isolated Muslim enclaves? Of course. The police could be called, "Do something - but no too much."

For example: In January 1994, a fleet of unmanned aerial vehicles was dispatched by the CIA to fly surveillance missions over the combat theaters of Bosnia and Herzegovina. The drones are known as Gnats, and for the last remaining superpower to send a swarm of them against the Serbian war machine was a telling metaphor.

The distance from the airbase to the combat zone proved to be too great for the tiny aircraft, the mountain weather troublesome and the links to communications satellites inadequate. Last November, coinciding neatly with a United States-Croatia military pace just signed, the CIA moved the twenty members of the Gnat team to an island on the Dalmatian coast. The Gnat operation also coincided with Serbian counterattacks aimed at pushing back a Bosnian Muslim offensive, launched weeks earlier from the "safe houses" of Bihac.

The Croatian price for the CIA operation was access to reconnaissance data on Serbian troop positions, artillery emplacements, communications and vehicle movements. Given the involvement of Croatian forces as well as units from the Serbian Krajina region in the Bihac fighting, and given the lack of aerial surveillance capability of any of the South Slav combatants, the American military intelligence was more than welcome. Washington was already routinely sharing this data with the Muslim forces of President Alija Izetbegovic. This was at least doing something.

There has also been the variant of doing something by doing nothing, as in the case of the northern Dalmatian island Krk, where since the spring of 1994 Iran has been landing munitions and other armaments, to be sent to the Muslims overland. There, the Croatian authorities routinely skimmed 30 percent off the top.

When the Clinton administration learned of this breach of the 1991 United Nations arms embargo against all parts of former Yugoslavia, nearly everyone in the higher echelons said it should be stopped, except National Security Adviser, Anthony Lake. Just turn a blind eye, said Lake to the others at the meeting on the subject. They did.

That approach also played nicely into the Administration's equivocation on the nasty issue of whether to lift the arms embargo for the Bosnian Muslims, which Clinton had proposed during his 1992 campaign. After discovering last summer that unilaterally lifting the embargo would severely damage NATO unity, Clinton temporized. But privately Republican and Democratic critics were told that with US acquiescence some arms were getting through to the Muslims.

"Do something" actions on the covert side included the dispatch of a team headed by Roger George, the CIA's national intelligence officer, for a two-week tour of Bosnia in March. The team was in Tuzla shortly before the Bosnian army launched an offensive to capture the vital Bosnian Serb communications tower at Stolice. About the same time, old workhorse Hercules C-130 transports were flying weapons into Tuzla's airport - origins of planes and cargoes unknown - complete with "plausible denials" by the Americans of involvement in these shipments. But all of this amounted to cosmetics.

The same could be said of US efforts to end the fighting. The principal projects-the so-called contact group of the mediating powers and the Croat-Muslim Federation-remain as flimsy as they were at their inception twelve months ago. The five mediators have been divided more often than they have been united, while the Croat-Muslim Federation was undermined by the murder in Bihac of Croatia's Gen. Vlado Santic by Muslim soldiers and by other Muslim-Croat clashes. Meanwhile, Bosnia's Croats are holding firmly to their own independent "Republic of Herzeg-Bosna." They assert, credibly, that their nominal Muslim allies have been "ethnically cleansing" Bosnian Croats by the thousands from their ageold homes in Zenica, Bugojno and Sarajevo itself.

The administration chooses to overlook such ugly blemishes, saying the federation can be saved in the good old American way: with money ($35 million for the Croats, more for the Muslims). "The federation is the only thing we've got going," said a senior official who works in its life-support system. "A fragile vessel at best," Richard Holbrooke, the Assistant Secretary of State for European Affairs acknowledged.

Still the administration persists in its equally fragile expectation of compelling the Serbs to endorse the contact group plan for the preservation of a Bosnia-Herzegovina entity. The hollowness of this project is evident when one hears Holbrooke publicly denounce Serbian leaders Slobodan Milosevic and Radovan Karadzc-putative partners in a peace deal-as "Communist thugs," while Leon Fuerth, Al Gore's influential national security adviser, prepares punitive economic measures against Serbia lasting well into the twenty-first century.

One day, historians may conclude that the US policy of doing something but not too much helped prolong the fighting in the former Yugoslavia for months-years-rather than to curb it.