Word: serbians
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That was the precise moment Bill Clinton chose to threaten to bomb the Serbian forces that were "strangling" Sarajevo. Encouraged, possibly believing that U.S. military intervention could still save him, Izetbegovic bolted from the talks in Geneva. When Clinton's renewed determination to mount air strikes hit the NATO council in Brussels, it set off a 12-hour meeting so acrimonious that some participants feared the alliance itself was in danger of breaking apart over what would be the first offensive military action in its 44-year history...
...Bosnian government sat down with its domestic foes and their godfathers, Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic and Croatian President Franjo Tudjman, for another round of peace talks. Everyone felt the mood of deja vu, but this time the Muslims had to choose between taking what little they might get in a settlement now, or holding out for more -- and losing everything. Washington debated whether it could use a flash of air power to warn the Serbs away from Sarajevo without encouraging the Muslims to balk at signing an agreement. That was as much a sop to conscience as a calibrated military...
...clinching failure by the West was its belief that it could influence without becoming involved -- and then threaten force but not use it. Bill Clinton entered office after campaigning to get tough in the Balkans. In April he went so far as to promise to use air power against Serbian gun positions. But the threat of force wilted in May with the ill-fated European tour of Secretary of State Warren Christopher, who could not -- some say would not -- persuade the European Community to follow the American lead. Last week Christopher essentially ruled out using force at all to stave...
...hundreds of thousands of Bosnians to flight can be undone -- and can be prevented from happening again. Wohlstetter and others contend that Washington has been too quick to abandon its option of "lift and strike" -- lift the arms embargo against the Bosnian Muslims and strike at mainly Serbian heavy weapons with aircraft and limited ground forces. But it may be too late for that, with Sarajevo on the verge of defeat. In any case, the lift option is vehemently opposed by all of Europe except Germany...
...even that concept has been undermined. U.N. forces deployed in Sarajevo and elsewhere in Bosnia became not peacekeepers or peacemakers or even trip wires, but unwilling accomplices to Serbian aggression. One of the main reasons France and Britain argued against Western air strikes was fear that their lightly armed U.N. contingents would suffer retaliation. "The blue- helmet forces were a terrible mistake," says Lothar Altmann, an analyst on Central European affairs at Munich's Sud-Ost Institute. "They were sent there as an alternative to taking military action, but once there, they became hostages whose presence made military action impossible...