There is an eerie equanimity about the president these days. While his aides recognize his growing reputation for weakness and indecision, Clinton seems content to carry on like the ultimate seminar leader, conducting an endless debate on the issues-as the facts on the ground keep changing-without ever resolving them. The process by which he has struggled toward a Bosnia policy has sometimes more closely resembled a lunch at the Council on Foreign Relations than a crisis meeting of the president’s national-security team. In a scant two weeks, the administration has apparently changed course completely, from helping the Muslims win back territory to all but ceding Bosnia to the Serbs. For now, at least, Clinton seems likely to junk his original military option known as “lift and strike”-lifting the U.N. arms embargo against the Bosnians and striking Serbian artillery while the Muslims train with new weapons. NEWSWEEK has learned that Clinton is moving toward yet another new approach; it is designed to prevent the spread of Balkan violence and includes:
Shifting U.N. ground troops to the Bosnia-Serbia border to monitor Belgrade’s blockade against the Bosnian Serbs;
Supplementing a U.N. force in Macedonia, perhaps with U.S. troops;
Establishing a U.N. force along the border between Albania and the Serbian province of Kosovo;
Using U.S. air power to protect the U.N. forces guarding Muslim “safe areas.”
Why the sudden shift? It’s just the latest turn in an endless internal debate. Inside the Oval Office, the principals–cabinet members and other top Clinton advisers–have articulated a range of positions but, without Clinton’s direction, never reached a consensus. Vice President Al Gore and national-security adviser Anthony Lake have been the most hawkish proponents of force, arguing for airstrikes against the Bosnian Serbs on moral grounds. But Lake, say Pentagon insiders, lacks the ability of his predecessor, Brent Scowcroft, to push the president to make a decision. Czechborn Madeleine Albright, U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, has argued passionately for military action, but her views on this don’t carry much weight. Secretary of State Warren Christopher warned darkly against another Vietnam. And Defense Secretary Les Aspin has constantly shifted between camps, taking various sides like a graduate student in classical rhetoric. With Christopher’s support, Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Gen. Colin Powell has often won the day; his all-or-nothing Desert Storm approach has seared off many limited-force options. Clinton, who had already clashed with Powell over gays in the military, is only too happy to defer to him.
Perhaps the only time the administration showed any decisiveness was on May 1, when the president signed off on lift and strike-the plan he is about to abandon. It was Christopher’s idea: the minimalist approach to intervention avoided a potential quagmire by keeping U.S. troops out of Bosnia and leaving the fighting to the newly armed Muslims. Still, the White House sold the program publicly as a bold use of force, raising expectations that Clinton was finally flexing muscle.
That show of brawn was illusory. The plan was shaky-outside the Oval Office, it was highly unpopular with Congress, the American public and U.S. allies. Lifting the arms embargo required a new U.N. resolution, and Britain and France were set against the idea because they believed their ground troops would be turned into target practice for the Bosnian Serbs. But the administration went about selling its plan backward: instead of soliciting the support of the Europeans and the Russians, the White House announced the program and then sent Christopher abroad to beg for acceptance.
The trip was probably doomed from the start. The lift-and-strike idea needed a strong advocate: a president who, if necessary, was willing to act alone. Clinton wasn’t prepared to do so. Nor was he inclined, as George Bush often did, to soften up U.S. allies ahead of time to make the secretary of state’s selling job any easier. Christopher, ever the methodical lawyer, was anything but forceful. “He is firm, but not confrontational,” says a European official. “He makes you feel he wants to accommodate your views.” Unlike his predecessor James Baker, who helped marshal an international coalition for the gulf war, Christopher never implied that the allies might have to pay a price for stiffing the United States-threatening, say, to bow to public demands to drastically cut U.S. troops from Europe. “You don’t send Mr. Milquetoast to galvanize people for war,” complains a Senate Democratic aide.
Christopher also got sandbagged by the twists of Serbian politics. American determination was never greater than when the Belgrade-backed forces attacked Muslim civilians. But the day Christopher set foot in Europe, Radovan Karadzic, the Bosnian Serb leader, signed the Vance-Owen peace plan in Athens, deflating allied resolve for a confrontation. Suddenly, Christopher had to pursue a dual strategy: promoting the original Clinton plan and preparing for a possible international peacekeeping force if the Vance-Owen proposal held. It didn’t. But when the Bosnian Serb assembly rejected the plan, they also called for a referendum, which fed a mounting European urge to temporize.
The secretary of state also misjudged the allies, projecting the idea of cooperation where little existed. During a five-hour meeting, British Foreign Secretary Douglas Hurd reaffirmed what Prime Minister John Major had articulated at the outset: that lifting the arms embargo would never do. Yet Christopher and his aides left convinced that London would eventually go along with whatever Washington decided. He made the same miscalculation about French resistance to the idea of arming the Muslims. “Their statements weren’t, ‘We would never agree to that,’ but rather, ‘If you do that, here’s what we would need’,” an aide to the secretary of state said later. Christopher mistakenly believed that if those needs could be accommodated-for example, by herding French troops along with British troops into safe areas before the bombs dropped-Paris could be made more tractable.
In Moscow, Christopher never even got a chance to broach the subject of armed intervention with Boris Yeltsin. Instead, he allowed Yeltsin to steer the conversation to U.S. and Russian participation in a peacekeeping operation in Bosnia after the Bosnian Serbs ratified the Vance-Owen plan. It was “premature” to discuss military options, Yeltsin told him. If the plan was voted down, then “new and tougher measures” would be considered. Sensing that Yeltsin might break with the United States if confronted with an ultimatum about intervention, Christopher tried to lay the groundwork for the day when military action might become inevitable. At one point, he pulled out a NEWSWEEK cover of a bloodied Bosnian boy and noted how the war “has inflamed the people of the United States.” If the Vance-Owen plan weren’t ratified soon, “There will be a need for stronger action against the Bosnian Serbs,” he told the Russian president. Christopher thought he had made his point-but he still got no commitment from Yeltsin.
The upshot was a public-relations disaster in the making. Christopher was initially sending out positive vibes about his trip to his aides and the press. Those signals were picked up by Clinton, who asserted confidently that he and the Europeans were of like minds when it came to military action. In fact, their positions were moving apart. As Christopher flew home, the Russians hinted to Ambassador-at-large Strobe Talbott that any U.S. action at the United Nations before the Bosnian Serb referendum on May 15 and 16 might prompt a rare post-cold-war veto by Moscow. The British and French, comparing notes in the wake of Christopher’s visit, renewed their opposition to Clinton’s plan.
By the time Christopher returned to Washington, the mood was grim. His aides had warned him of a weakening of resolve in the White House. Could it be that political consultants had gotten to the president and warned him to back off Bosnia? “We don’t mess around with foreign-policy decisions,” insists Mandy Grunwald, an informal adviser. “Nobody is saying, ‘You’ve got an economic program to worry about, don’t do this’.” But other sources say the most important adviser of all-Hillary Rodham Clinton-has deep misgivings. “She regards this as a Vietnam that would compromise health-care reform,” says a friend.
Over doughnuts in the Roosevelt Room of the White House, Christopher presented the results of his trip in harsh terms, saying he met with “stiff resistance” from the allies to the president’s plan. It was still “doable,” he said, but would require Clinton to get on the phone to the allies and the Russians. The president reportedly asked the opinion of everyone in the room-including Gore, Aspin, Lake and Powell. The consensus was that Clinton should not take the lead, and that the task of salesmanship should remain with Christopher. Support for the lift-and-strike plan was clearly crumbling. Someone suggested a second look at the airstrikes-only option. Another resurrected an idea from the Bush erasending U.S. troops to Macedonia and monitors to Kosovo. Clinton asked a lot of questions but was noncommittal. It took him more than a week to decide on Bosnia II.
That indecision worries not just the allies but even politicians within Clinton’s own party. One Democratic senator recently returned from a briefing on Capitol Hill “freaked,” says an aide, by the administration’s amateurishness on the most basic “what if” questions about U.S. involvement in the Balkans. The senator wondered if the president’s foreign-policy grasp extended beyond the thought that “bad things are happening to good people.” The latest idea, to ring the borders of the former Yugoslavia with troops, gives the White House a chance to develop a broad policy for the region. But the plan already has the feel of impermanence, “particularly with this president,” says a senior administration official. Eventually, Clinton may choose a course-and stick to it.
