ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1995, Roanoke Times
DATE: Thursday, December 7, 1995 TAG: 9512070097
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: A-15 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: E.J. DIONNE JR.
PERHAPS WE'RE not so cynical about politics as to miss a remarkable development in the last week: The country's two leading politicians have both acted against their obvious political interests in pursuit of a policy that might not work, but has to be tried. That's what both President Clinton and Senate Republican leader Bob Dole have done on Bosnia.
Neither Clinton nor Dole is exactly noted for ignoring the political implications of his actions. Clinton, until recently, had a terrible run of triangulating himself around the neck with flip-flops on taxes and welfare. Dole - against much of his own history - has spent the year reading scripts handed him by Newt Gingrich and various conservative lobbies.
Yet here was Clinton shipping 20,000 troops off to a foreign country for a mission most Americans clearly oppose. The truly cynical argue that this, too, is a political move, since the president didn't want to get blamed for inaction if Bosnia was beset with even more disasters in 1996. And there's nothing like a little bit of strength on a difficult foreign policy issue to win unaccustomed accolades for fortitude.
But as political a creature as Clinton surely realized that American voters could live more easily with additional Bosnian deaths than with new American deaths. In any event, Clinton's new engagement with Bosnia probably won't gain him much among those who have long favored an assertion of American power there. They regard Clinton as a sellout who dragged his feet for years and is now complicit in carving up Bosnia and rewarding Serbian aggression. This new policy won't change their view of the recent past.
On the other hand, all who wanted to stay out of Bosnia in the first place will attack yet another about-face. And Clinton is acutely aware that an earlier Democratic president committed to a large agenda of domestic reform found his presidency ruined by a commitment to a faraway foreign country. Bosnia and Vietnam are different, but Clinton's risk is not unlike Lyndon Johnson's.
The cynical camp also has its explanations for Dole's decision to give the president's mission highly qualified support. For one thing, Dole's support is highly qualified. He has been careful to assert that he is supporting American troops, not Clinton's policies. If the thing goes badly, Clinton will get most of the blame. In the meantime, his stance looks a lot more ``presidential'' than the carping of his Republican primary foes.
Dole also won exceptional political cover when his decision was supported by Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., a Phil Gramm supporter, a longtime critic of intervention in Bosnia and a Vietnam-era hero and POW - the sort of person for whom the words ``widely respected'' were invented.
But here again, cynicism explains either too much or too little. Dole has a long history of political consistency on Bosnia, calling for a stronger American role there long before most other people did. His criticisms of former President Bush's Balkan policies were at least as tough as his attacks on Clinton's. Dole was manifestly uncomfortable with his initial bit of trimming after Clinton's Bosnia speech precisely because he knew where he would come out in the end. As McCain put it about Dole's decision: ``From a purely political standpoint, it was probably difficult. From a philosophical standpoint, it was not as difficult as it looked.''
Moreover, Dole has compounded his own risks by insisting that the price of his support for Clinton will be efforts to arm the Bosnian government so it will eventually be able to defend itself. This stance is popular primarily among those policy specialists who care deeply about Bosnia's fate. Few of them vote in the New Hampshire primary.
And it's utterly clear that the vast majority of rank-and-file Republicans despise this Clinton policy, in large part because they despise Clinton and do not regard him as a proper commander in chief. McCain said in an interview last Friday that the day's phone calls to his office had run: six in favor of Clinton's Bosnian policy, 139 against.
But the important political issue here goes beyond Clinton and relates more to ``high'' than ``low'' politics. The widespread opposition to Clinton's Bosnia policy inside the Republican Party is not just the result of raw electoral calculation. It is also a sign that the end of the Cold War has led a lot of Republicans - not just Pat Buchanan - to re-embrace the party's anti-interventionist tradition.
Before World War II, before our major foreign enemies were Communist, most conservative Republicans viewed foreign military intervention with the same suspicion they accorded to comparable ``big government'' projects at home. With the Soviet Union gone, that view is back. For such anti-interventionists, Clinton's Bosnian peace force is a perfect example of the sort of soft-headed foreign policy they despise.
In acting as he has on Bosnia, Dole is not only taking a large short-term risk in the Republican primaries. He is also trying to keep alive his party's alternative tradition - associated with Dole's own hero, Dwight D. Eisenhower - of bipartisan support for American assertion abroad. Paradoxically, the survival of that tradition now rests heavily on Clinton's ability to pull off his Bosnian intervention. If Clinton's gamble fails, it is unlikely that anything remotely like this operation will happen again soon.
It is thus far from automatic that a Clinton catastrophe in Bosnia will be good for Bob Dole, and that is the final problem with a purely cynical view of what Dole and Clinton have at stake here. Having taken comparable risks, these two politicians have a shared interest in being proved not foolhardy but courageous - and also right.
E.J. Dionne Jr. is a member of The Washington Post editorial-page staff.
- The Washington Post
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