The Doves Are Right About Bosnia

There is a rising chorus for intervention in the Balkan wars. It is a call to folly. There is an understandable desire to "do something" -- but without any calculation of cost or effectiveness. Worse, without any consideration of the objective.

The impulse for intervention is all means and no ends. For the question in Bosnia is not intervention. The question is, Intervention in the service of what political objective?

If the objective is the re-creation of the Bosnian state -- a fiction with no history of independence, a state composed of ethnic groups with a demonstrated and murderous inability to live together -- then intervention is sheer madness. Well-intentioned madness, but madness nonetheless. Perhaps a year ago a prescient West could have stationed forces to prevent the current war. But that time is long past. The Bosnian egg cannot be unscrambled. Intervention to reconstitute the broken Bosnian state would require enormous force, entail enormous risk, and offer no chance of success.

On the other hand, intervention in the name of the only conceivable solution -- partition along lines proposed by the Vance-Owen mediation -- is at least rational. If bombing Serbian guns or arming the Muslims would bring the recalcitrant Serbs around, then intervention might make sense.

But such calculations are not so easy. Intervention on behalf of the Muslims might make the Serbs more pliable, but it might also make the Muslims more intractable. "Shifting battlefield fortunes have apparently made Bosnia's Slavic Muslim-led government reluctant to accept the ((Vance)) plan," reports Peter Maass of the Washington Post. And nothing would shift Muslim battlefield fortunes more than American intervention. Its mere prospect has hardened the Muslim negotiating position.

What to do? Give all sides an ultimatum: Accept the Vance-Owen partition, or else. Serbs risk aerial bombardment, Muslims risk total abandonment.

The virtue of partition is that it is the only real chance for peace. The nine-year-old girls on sleds now being murdered by half-witted gunmen will not be saved by relief convoys that bring them food so they can later be shot. They will not be saved by dreams of rolling Serbia out of Bosnia. They will only be saved by peace. And if we've learned anything from Cyprus and India and Palestine, it is that the best way to bring peace is to separate the combatants and let them live apart.

The Vance plan would let the Bosnians do that within a largely ceremonial and insubstantial Bosnian state. Yet there is much grumbling in the U.S. about Vance. Those who worshipped him when his State Department was negotiating away American control of the Panama Canal now find him insufficiently zealous in ; defending Muslim interests in Bosnia.

The grumblers object that the Vance plan gives the Serbs too much territory. They make up only 31% of the Bosnian population and would end up with 42% of the territory. But that overlooks the fact that the Serbs are the most rural people in Bosnia. They owned or occupied about 60% of the country before the war (up to 70% now). Vance would have them give up about a third of their holdings -- which is the reason the Serbs are so reluctant to sign on.