Every American foreign policy setback, from Indochina to Somalia, has resulted from the failure to define objectives, to choose means appropriate to these objectives and to create public opinion prepared to pay the necessary price over the requisite period of time. We are now on the verge of sliding into a similar dilemma in Bosnia. Our goals are unrealistic, the means available do not fit the objectives and the public is unlikely to back the probable consequences of our actions.
Policy drifts because three issues await resolution.
In 1991, when Yugoslavia broke up, the United States joined the other NATO countries in recognizing its various administrative subdivisions as independent states. With respect to Croatia and Slovenia, inhabited by a dominant ethnic group, this decision made sense. But in Bosnia, populated by Croats, Serbs and Muslims whose reciprocal hatreds had broken up the much larger Yugoslavia, the attempt to bring about a multiethnic state evoked a murderous civil war. The same flaw that attended the birth of the Bosnian state lies at the heart of the dilemmas of the Dayton accords mediated by the United States that brought about the current Bosnian cease-fire. Its military provisions separate the parties substantially along the lines of the ethnic enclaves that emerged as hostilities ceased.