A FATAL FLINCH IN THE BALKANS

by William Safire

(The Herald Tribune, 14/07/95)

WASHINGTON - On the central moral-military challenge of his presidency - to lead the Western world in collective defense against bloodstained aggression - Bill Clinton will be remembered in history as a man who feared, flinched and failed.

The policy long urged by Senator Bob Dole was to lift the pernicious arms embargo to Bosnians who want to fight for their country, and to support the defenders with air strikes at ammunition dumps and supply lines of the invading Serbs.

Events have proved the Dole policy right. But the other-directed Mr. Clinton deferred to Europeans who secretly wanted the Bosnian victims to surrender. We now see proof that the Clinton policy of passivity was wrong.

The objective reader will recall the central argument made by the not-my-table set in the White House: that if "lift-and-strike" was undertaken, fighting would escalate, UN forces would have to be withdrawn, and "safe havens" would be overrun by Serbian forces. So lift-and-strike was never tried. What has happened? Serbian attacks have escalated, humiliated UN forces are preparing to withdraw, and safe havens are being overrun.

The United Nations is reduced to huffing resolutions as impotent as the papal bull against the comet; NATO is revealed to be militarily muscle-bound, at the mercy of terrorist hostage-takers; Nazi-style "ethnic cleansing" is triumphant; and Bosnian civilians are being driven from UN guaranteed havens like cattle.

On top of that, Mr. Clinton's message to rogue states who shoot down a U.S. F-16 on patrol: We will not retaliate. We will rescue our downed pilot and celebrate his return, but as for the Serbian missilemen who shot down our plane, the president turns the other cheek. It then gets slapped at Srebrenica.

Ah, say Clinton apologists, but we kept our boys out of foreign wars. The truth is otherwise: By refusing to help the Bosnians fight their own war, Mr. Clinton has foolishly committed America to provide 25,000 U. S. ground troops to cover a UN retreat.

The White House is irritated at the attention given the rape of Bosnia because this was supposed to be Vietnam reconciliation week. Consider the march of Mr.

Clinton's "commercial-Communist complex." It began by giving trade advantages to increasingly repressive China; it moved to conferring recognition on Communist Vietnam; it hopes to help Fidel Castro maintain Communist control in Cuba. Why? Because "the time has come."

Mr. Clinton's shock-of-recognition theory is that trade and aid weave a web of contacts that promotes civilized behaviour and democratic reform. But the new Clinton détente with China is not working any better than the old Nixon détente with the Soviet Union. Today's pragmatic passivity has emboldened Chinesehard-liners to crush human rights, to threaten expansion into the South China Sea, even to snatch a Sakharovian U.S. citizen, Harry Wu.

Global sharks can detect blood in the water anywhere: If the United States isn't going to make a fuss about one of its planes being shot down in Bosnia, why should it complain about the seizure of the annoying Mr. Wu?

Contempt is contagious. When you act weakly in one place, you are presumed to be weak elsewhere. That presumptions that you will be tested, resulting in the need to make a showing of might.

Contrariwise, when you have earned the right to be judged tenacious, you are less likely to be challenged, and seldom if ever forced to use force.

That is why Mr. Clinton's Carteresque avoidance of duty in the Balkans hits home: It is the source of the infection of weakness that now pervades his foreign policy.

Bosnia has given the world's bullies good reason to believe

that the United States under this president can be had.

Mr. Clinton piously preaches "engagement" but wimpishly practices detachment; he denounces isolationism but joins perfidious Albion in isolating a victim of aggression.

Mr. Clinton has turned a superpower into a subpower, stumbling down the United Nations' road to defeat.. Though the hour is late, in Bosnia "the time has come" to follow Bob Dole.