When a confused and divided Congress grapples with U.S. military involvement in Bosnia-Herzegovina, 20 lawmakers speak with a little extra weight and a bit of added urgency.
They are the members who served more than two decades ago in the Vietnam War, and they bring a special experience and focus to the inevitable analogies about the risks of intervention in a murky conflict that is half a world away.Some of them will be speaking out this week in the Senate, as it takes up a measure by Minority Leader Bob Dole, R-Kan., designed to force President Clinton to end U.S. compliance with the U.N. embargo on arms sales in Bosnia. The president has acknowledged that the weapons ban gives an unfair advantage to the Serbs, but he opposes taking unilateral action to end the embargo.
The Vietnam veterans provide a window into a broader debate over military intervention that has not been fully joined in Congress. They are more willing to discuss the overriding question - whether and how deeply the United States should become militarily involved - than are many of their colleagues.
"The Vietnam guys happen to be more at ease with discussions of troops and values and such," said Sen. John Kerry, D-Mass., who served as a Naval officer on gunboats in the Mekong Delta.
But their colleagues cannot look to the Vietnam veterans for easy answers on Bosnia. They are at least as divided as other lawmakers on how to apply the lessons of the painful U.S. experience in Southeast Asia.
Many Republicans are among the most outspoken opponents of Clinton's policy of threatening NATO airstrikes to quell Serbian aggression against Bosnia's Muslims. These Vietnam veterans believe that such an approach ultimately could enmesh the United States in a land war in the Balkans.
Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., a former naval aviator who spent nearly six years as a prisoner of war in Vietnam, described a scenario in which the United States could become trapped in the same cycle of military escalation as occurred in Vietnam.
"My fear is that the Serbs' reaction will beget new NATO strikes, which will beget stronger Serb reactions, which will beget stronger strikes, which ultimately will amount to failure reinforcing failure," McCain wrote recently in The Wall Street Journal.
By contrast, Kerry generally has supported the Democratic president. He insists that Clinton should be able to avoid the sort of open-ended conflict that destroyed the presidency of Lyndon B. Johnson and roiled that of Richard M. Nixon.
"This is not aimed at trying to roll back the Serbs or trying to alter the balance of power," he said. "We're trying to bring them to the negotiating table."
Those deep differences have been addressed only along the margins of congressional debate in recent weeks.
Rather than considering whether Congress should authorize U.S. participation in airstrikes, lawmakers have been diverted by a fight over whether they should force Clinton to act, alone if necessary, to arm the outgunned Muslims despite a U.N. arms embargo to the region.