A turning point came last week at a White House meeting of top officials from the National Security Council, the Defense and State departments, and the CIA. At the meeting, NEWSWEEK has learned, Adm. David Jeremiah, vice-chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, offered a withering critique of the United Nations’ relief plans. Even if a cease-fire is achieved, Jeremiah said, the recently approved U.N. plan to rely on a 1,100-man symbolic force was dangerously inadequate: it wouldn’t protect relief planes if they were attacked by Serbian antiaircraft and artillery positions in the 4,000-foot-high hills around the Sarajevo airport. Jeremiah’s message: if American soldiers were going to deliver food in American cargo planes, then American military force would have to be deployed to protect them. Some White House officials were skeptical of Jeremiah’s motives; the Pentagon tends to give worst-case assessments of a military operation in order to induce politicians to kill it. But the Pentagon is in fact now drawing up scenarios for how American military power can support an international relief operation. “Ten days ago the JCS was saying, “Hey, no way’,” said a Bush official. “Now they’re saying,‘If it has to be done, we’d better do it’.”
No one is suggesting any kind of “Sarajevo Storm.” Yugoslavia is not the Persian Gulf. There is no oil to protect, and there is no consensus among the European Community for military action to roll back Serbian aggression against Croatia or Bosnia. But even strictly “humanitarian” operations like the one envisaged for Bosnia have a way of acquiring a political character. An international force can’t deliver aid to starving Bosnians without taking and holding territory. And calling it a humanitarian mission doesn’t make it any less dangerous, since Bosnian Muslims aren’t innocent civilians to Serbian strongman Slobodan Milosevic-but targets.” Milosevic actually wants to starve the Bosnians. So if we go in to feed them, we are undermining Serbia’s strategic interest," said an administration official. “He isn’t likely to let us do it without a fight.”
Administration planners hope that just moving the U.S. Sixth Fleet offshore might scare Milosevic into letting U.N. relief operations proceed. If not, they want to confine any U.S. role to providing cargo planes and crews for airdrops and direct relief flights. The United States also would provide a small protective force at the airport, while European and U.N. troops would furnish the bulk of the 30,000- to 50,000-man force to guard the airport and other areas, and to escort convoys. If the Serbs resist, though, American warplanes would probably have to take out the Serbian gun emplacements in the hills. And there is a real risk of another Beirut: the United States goes in as a peacekeeper but comes to be regarded as a partisan-and a target.
Still, Bush may be tempted to commit American force. After all, his dose friend and political adviser, Secretary of State James Baker, brought Washington to this brink by pushing the United Nations to impose sanctions on Serbia late last month and to approve the emergency relief effort last week. The one consistent principle that seems to animate Bush is standing up to a bully-be it Panamanian dictator Manuel Noriega or Iraqi President Saddam Hussein. With his dark references to “ethnic cleansing” and his “Greater Serbia” swagger, Milosevic fills the role. Bush also may be moved by the prospect of his new world order collapsing in the rubble of Sarajevo. " If Milosevic gets away with this, the message to others like him will be: do what you like, and you will be protected by the world’s indifference," Bosnian Foreign Minister Haris Silajdzic told NEWSWEEK. " It’s not in America’s national-security interest to create a new world in which the law of the jungle prevails."
A year ago Washington was happily viewing Desert Storm as the model for resolving post-cold-war conflicts. But today Yugoslavia seems a more likely prototype. The new world disorders will be messy conflicts between people with sometimes unpronounceable names, driven by historic and ethnic passions that the American people don’t understand and have little patience for. It will be hard to determine if America’s interest lies in intervening, and even harder to sell the idea to an American public weary of foreign affairs. So far, Bush hasn’t made the political decision to commit American forces to Bosnia, and he doesn’t relish the idea. “We’re not the world’s policeman,” he said last week, almost plaintively. But as his own men were telling him, there is one constant from the cold-war era to the present: if the world community has to act, America has to lead.
