President Clinton is preparing to send U.S. troops to Bosnia whether Congress and the American people like it or not. They don't.
The decision to commit the troops was made by the president long before Assistant Secretary of State Richard Holbrooke put his excellent mind and his patented, muscular negotiating style to creating a peace agreement.How long the agreement will last or what it will cost in lives to enforce it we do not know. But we do know the Bosnian enemies and America's European allies insisted on U.S. troops. For the administration, that demand vetoed the objections of the American Congress and public.
Still, for the risks to American lives, Americans would at least seem entitled to full information about how the troops will be used. They are not getting it.
Twenty thousand troops will be sent to Bosnia, more if needed. They will stay about a year, more if needed. With replacements, at least 50,000 Americans will have to serve in the Balkans. It will cost about $1.5 billion, more if needed.
That much has been said by U.S. officials, and in a letter from Clinton on Nov. 13 to Speaker Newt Gingrich in answer to a letter from him dated Oct. 26.
The Gingrich letter put some critical questions about the purpose of sending the troops and how they would be used. The president did not reply at all to some questions and evasively to many of the others.
The president has gotten away with that because few in Washington have bothered to compare the texts of both letters to find out which questions were not answered. The reason they were evaded should rack congressional nerves: Even as the troops get ready to land in Bosnian snows, the administration itself does not know the answers.
Here in roughly ascending order of importance are a few of Gingrich's questions answered vaguely or not at all.
1. The administration says American credibility and Western solidarity will be destroyed if Congress does not back up Clinton's commitment to send troops. "Precisely when did you make this commitment, to whom did you make it and what conditions if any were attached?"
2. Did you specify the type of mission the troops would be ordered to carry out - as a neutral observer of the agreement or as an armed force to coerce agreement?
3. The chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. Shalikashvili, says that from a military point of view European forces are capable of carrying out the Balkan job. So why must U.S. ground forces be involved?
4. The administration hopes for a military balance through "arms control." How? Who will enforce it? Will U.S. troops have to disarm Bosnian Serbs and others to get this "balance"?
5. A big one. Administration officials, including the president, have talked of U.S. plans to equip and train the forces of the Muslim-Croatian Federation. How? When? How does the United States remain a neutral peacekeeper if it is simultaneously arming one of the parties to the conflict?
Our allies, with 40,000 troops at risk, are hostile to the idea. Now the administration seems to be backing down. Is it?
So my question - as I trust it will be Gingrich's - is whether the president will commit himself, this time to Americans, not to change his mind yet again and order the U.S. troops to take on the mad role of a peacekeeper who trains and arms one side.
Sending U.S. soldiers to try to keep a peace among three sides that have tried to destroy each other, and likely will try again, strikes me as one more error.