Do Something . . . Anything

Tears filled the eyes of the men and women who stood in the wintry spring wind at last week's dedication of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, remembering the mass murder of a half-century ago. Nobel Laureate Elie Wiesel, a survivor of the German death camps, turned from the audience to address Bill Clinton, who was sitting behind him. "Mr. President," he said, "I have been in the former Yugoslavia last fall. I cannot sleep since what I have seen. We must do something to stop the bloodshed." Wiesel almost pleaded: "Something, anything, must be done."

Standing brazenly among the honored guests, personifying the very tragedy ^ Wiesel condemned, was Croatian President Franjo Tudjman. His Croat brethren had just begun a vicious onslaught of "ethnic cleansing" in western Bosnia, burning villages and villagers in one of the cruelest campaigns of the war. "Whole valleys of people have been massacred here," a British peacekeeper on the scene reported. "It's horrendous."

After a sobering tour of Bosnia's battlefields, Senator Joe Biden came back to Washington last month and declared, "The U.S. must lead the West in a decisive response to Serbian aggression, beginning with air attacks on Serbian artillery." Senators Bob Dole and George Mitchell agreed, as did 47 Congressmen and 12 State Department officials who took the unusual step of petitioning Secretary of State Warren Christopher to back the use of military force against the Serbs. Ambassador to the U.N. Madeleine Albright sent a memorandum directly to the President in which she advocated air strikes.

The war in Bosnia is closing in on Bill Clinton. A growing number of Americans feel the same moral imperative to act that Wiesel expressed. Would that it were so simple. All week Clinton wrestled with the conflicting advice offered by his foreign-policy makers, themselves divided between the go-slow counsel of Christopher and Joint Chiefs Chairman Colin Powell and the more robust preferences of Defense Secretary Les Aspin and National Security Adviser Anthony Lake. When the President was asked at his news conference on Friday how he evaluated the options, his body language spoke volumes. He rolled his eyes, taking a deep breath and a long pause before saying he was "reluctant" to talk about them in public. But yes, he conceded, tougher steps were being considered.

Clinton pledged to announce his choices within a few days. While he wants above all to be a domestic President, he is eager to appear resolute and make a difference in Bosnia if he can. He does not want to put undue pressure on Boris Yeltsin to cooperate with the West or to endanger French and British troops on peacekeeping duty. Even so, he is casting about for more forceful actions that might end the war, or produce a cease-fire, or guarantee sanctuary somewhere for Bosnian Muslims.

All the new options, Clinton acknowledged, "have pluses and minuses," and "all have supporters and opponents in Congress." That is a large part of the President's problem. He is getting plenty of advice, but it is not consistent. He is being pulled and tugged in several directions at once in a * field -- foreign affairs -- for which he does not have his own fingertip instinctiveness. He is being asked to lead where his allies in Europe are reluctant to follow.