Objectives in modern conflict - 2 June 1995

On Thursday morning, the radio, the television, the papers seem to be united in one mass lamentation for Bosnia.

The New York Times on that morning carried over three pages, seven long despatches, three commentaries and one leader editorial. With all this information and opinion from several capitals and battlefronts to go on, you might be curious to know what the influential Times editors think of it all. The editorial was entitled, "The Slippery Slope in Bosnia," and surprisingly attacked President Clinton for having blurred the clear and prudent line he once drew against using American ground forces in combat. This has to be the Time's interpretation of a clumsy word that the president used in his speech to the graduating class of the United States Air Force Academy. The word I'm afraid adds yet another faceless noun to the bloodless vocabulary of modern warfare, as in body count for dead men and collateral damage meaning the incidental slaughter of women and children. The word is one I'm sure most of us have not heard before, it is reconfiguration sounds harmless, more like a problem on geometry than one of dedicating thousands of men to a war whose end nobody can possibly predict – though I ought to say at once that President Clinton's speech from which this one word has been extracted for punishment is more thoughtful, and goes deeper than any of the commentaries on it I've seen. In three early sentences, he clarified the difference – which has been muddled ever since Mr Yeltsin stood on that tank – the difference between the main aims of American foreign policy during and after the Cold War. This is it, as clear and simple as one of those apparently naive sentences of my favourite political commentator about whom somebody said: "His genius is to state the obvious that nobody's noticed." Here it is.

In the Second World War, the objective was to win the war. In the Cold War, the objective was to contain communism and prevent nuclear war. In the aftermath of the Cold War, the objectives are often more complex and it is clear that American security in the 21st century will be determined by forces that are operating both beyond and within our own borders. However, in any speech or comment that comes from the lips of the president these days, the media, the politicians and I should say, watchful delegates at the United Nations, they all x-ray any odd or flabby word to see the bone of its meaning and the New York Times is not alone in reading reconfiguration to mean the commitment of American troops to the war. The Times headline in fact says outright: "Clinton Talks Of US Ground Role In Bosnia." On the contrary, he said: "I still believe we made the right decision in not committing our own troops to becoming embroiled in this conflict in Europe nor to join the United Nations operations." That sounds final, even if it's no help, but immediately he went on: "We have obligations to our Nato allies and I do not believe we can leave them in the lurch." So he says he'll have to think again before responding to a request for, I quote, "temporary use of our ground forces".

While he was saying this, the leading Republican in the Senate, the front runner among the clutch of Republicans running for the presidency, indeed Senator Dole has now earned the old title of Mr Republican. On Wednesday he was out in Los Angeles refreshingly trashing the movie producers for the nightmare of depravity they offer the public, but he must have seen an early release of the Clinton speech and as a determined presidential candidate, of course he can't let go any Clinton speech on any serious policy. So Senator Dole promptly put out a release and he had his say about reconfiguration and more boldly about the decision of France, Spain, Germany, Britain and Russia to add more forces and equipment to the United Nations protection force.

Senator Dole calls the mainly British and French reinforcements nothing more than a policy of reinforcing failure. What is his line? It's one that was for several years the declared policy of the United States in Vietnam: Give those splendid natives all the help you can by way of arms, material, tactical advice, medical supplies and let them beat the Northern communists by themselves. In similar words, Mr Dole says – well to be fair he said more than two years ago – to lift what he calls the immoral arms embargo on Bosnia. Also to be fair, it should be said, that the senator was one of the loudest voices months ago for Nato air strikes, that were meant to intimidate the Serbs, but have in the result, provoked them to brutal retaliation and the seizing of more than 300 UN troops as hostages. Hostages, a word in the American vocabulary almost as sinister as Vietnam. Remember the terrible episode of the hostages held for over a year in Iran and the subsequent Iran-Contra arms for hostages scandal. The holding of those hostages brought down President Carter and the secret exchange and offers of arms for the Iran hostages very nearly brought down President Reagan.

I bring up this unpalatable subject because at the root of American reluctance to send in ground troops is the political reality of the 1996 presidential election. The involvement in Vietnam, which started out as a band of military advisors, wound up with over half a million American troops on the ground and in the air and in the swamps. President Lyndon Johnson was rightly blamed for it, so widely, so savagely, in riots that for a time immobilised the scores of cities that he didn't wait to be defeated in the next election, he announced in the spring of 1968 he would not run again and he didn't.

So the, the grim bottom line is that neither the president nor any presidential candidate is going to propose joining the fray even though members of the United Nations and other people close to the war have been saying for sometime that there can be no resolution of it unless the United States sends in 25 to 30,000 troops. No American politician wants to be known as the man who committed American forces, except a move both the president and Senator Dole agree on, except to the proposed diabolical task of helping to evacuate completely the United Nations forces.

If that is the best that can be done, which let's face it amounts to a planned Dunkirk even then Senator Dole is one or two up on Mr Clinton. In the late winter he wrote to the president and said if the United States were to be sent in to cover the UN's evacuation, four conditions must be kept: a unified Nato command, robust rules of engagement not risking American lives to rescue equipment, and agreement with our allies on lifting the arms embargo. These are tough conditions and even if they are met, nobody expects the evacuation to succeed without considerable loss of life.

Incidentally, Senator Dole's views on war and peace cannot be ignored for a reason quite outside the manoeuvring's of presidential politics. He is the last of the Second World War heroes likely now to run for president – he has, you may have noticed a useless right arm, the result of a wound in the Italian Campaign. Wherever Mr Dole moves and is seen, fate has provided an essentially modest man with the reminder that he answered the call and paid a price for it, and that, by the way, Mr Clinton has never been able to shake the imputation of dodging the draft – a small mean point but one that comes up immediately anyone belittles the military views of Senator Dole. On the topic of Bosnia, the Democrats I've noticed are ready to stigmatise as warmongers practically anyone but Senator Dole.

Among all the politicians – including those at the UN and the world's policymakers – I believe there is one conviction, which most of us are too timid or saddened to say out loud. One commentator put it with brutal succinctness. An exercise of force three years ago: European troops, US air power, world economic pressure would have saved the day for collective defence but that was then, appeasement failed. A friend at the UN who shuttles between New York and Bosnia had no solution only an observation or two that don't combine into anything but the reflections of a shrewd and honest man. He said that whenever we feel the urge to see the Serbs as the single villains, we have to recognise that, as he put it, there is terrible brutality on both, on three or four sides. His second reflection was of little help in justifying the Nato air strikes: No wonder the Serbs came springing brutally back, they knew what we hope they hadn't recognised, that the United Nations doesn't have the forces to sustain any war by itself. And he agreed with what I believe has made the United Nations forces uniquely vulnerable in this war. One of the combatants, the Serbs decided, for I think the first time in the history of what we call UN peacekeeping, that the United Nations Peacekeepers were not neutral policemen controlling buffers between enemies, let's consider them, the Serbs said, combatants and therefore enemies to be shot at and killed and taken hostage.

By the way, some of you maybe surprised that the mention of my favourite political commentator without revealing his/her its identity. A few months ago, a newspaper critic thought I depended too much, as a favourite source, on the Atlanta 24 hour news and commentary channel CNN. The last time I watched CNN continuously was when Mr Gorbachev, remember, was arrested. Since then, I sometimes catch it for sport news just before I go to bed, but there is one favourite source I never fail to turn too on any serious political matter and he was the man I mentioned. His name is Aristotle.

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