Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: FRIDAY, June 2, 1995 TAG: 9506020115
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL PAGE: A-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: BOB DEANS COX NEWS SERVICE
DATELINE: WASHINGTON LENGTH: Medium
Why, then, should American lives be risked to confront the Serbs?
The answer, many analysts say, is that Serbs have attacked the very foundations of the legal and moral structure that holds together the global community and permits competing nations to coexist and prosper in peace.
No country benefits more than the United States from that system, under which Americans, with roughly 4 percent of the world's population, control one-fourth of the world's wealth.
``We have a national interest in preserving the whole concept of international law and basic standards,'' said former U.S. diplomat Joseph Montville. ``That's how society survives. When you don't make commitments and stick to them, then the jungle comes in.''
Needless to say, not everyone agrees. Critics of the Clinton administration's growing involvement in Bosnia argue that global order will not fall apart if the bloodshed continues. In any event, they say, there's not enough U.S. interest at stake to justify the loss of American lives.
Even so, many Americans have been morally affronted by the Serbs' relentless, often televised, slaughter of unarmed civilians - including the 71 people killed by a Serb shell just last week at a cafe in Tuzla - and the documented rape or torture of tens of thousands of Bosnians.
By condemning those atrocities through the United Nations, then demanding that they end or trigger reprisals from NATO, the United States and its allies already have vowed to confront Serb transgressions, said former Assistant Secretary of Defense Lawrence J. Korb.
``You've put your prestige on the line. You have committed yourself to keep people from being slaughtered wantonly,'' said Korb, director of the Center for Public Policy Education at the Brookings Institution, a Washington research outfit. ``If you don't do that, you're just going to have to walk away and live with the consequences.''
Finally, others say, the United States is too far engaged in Bosnia to retreat just when U.S.-backed policies have resulted in Serbs taking hostages from the forces provided by U.S. allies in NATO and the United Nations.
``We're at the beginning of the quagmire already, and the war is getting worse,'' said Marshall Freeman Harris, who resigned from the State Department's Balkans desk nearly two years ago in protest against the Clinton administration's Bosnia policy.
Since then, said Harris, executive director of the Action Council for Peace in the Balkans, a Washington activist group, the allies' options in Bosnia have only grown less and less palpable.
``We're being dragged into a situation where we're going to get in under very unfavorable terms,'' said Harris, who argues for lifting the international arms embargo against Bosnia and backing that up with aggressive NATO air power.
Global order can't be maintained without enforcement authority, said Montville, director of the Preventive Diplomacy Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. The Bosnian crisis has cast the United States as the central figure in a test of the global will to police itself.
When diplomacy fails as monumentally as it has in Bosnia, ``You have to be able to call 911 and have somebody answer,'' Montville said. ``At a certain point, you're asked to stand up and be counted or shrink away.''
These could be difficult points for President Clinton to make to the American public, particularly in the face of gathering isolationism in Congress.
``He better do a good selling job, because it's not self-evident that all of this is worth the risk of somebody out in Cincinnati's son or daughter dying for,'' said Korb. ``You've got to tell them what the stakes are.''
And yet, a recent poll by the University of Maryland suggests that the American public may be more willing to send troops to Bosnia than is generally assumed.
Asked whether they favored sending U.S. forces to help bolster U.N. peacekeepers in Bosnia, 66 percent of the poll's respondents replied yes.
by CNB