WAR ON ALL FRONTS

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If Croatia enters the war at full throttle, the Balkan equation will change entirely. It will be a Serb vs. Croat conflict; the Bosnian Muslims will become the Croats' rivalrous junior partners; and the border between Bosnia and Croatia may all but disappear. There are six armies in the field along that border: those of the Croats, the Bosnian Croats and the Bosnian Muslims, all of whom are allied; and those of the Bosnian Serbs, the Croatian Serbs and some renegade Bosnian Muslims, all of whom are also allied. If the Serbs of Croatia and Bosnia begin to lose battles and territory, the President of Serbia, Slobodan Milosevic, may be tempted to send in yet another army--his own, the powerful remainder of former Yugoslav forces.

Given NATO's apparent resolve, why weren't the Serbs deterred, and how did all this happen? First of all, at the emergency meeting in London on the 21st, the allies simply wrote off Zepa, even though it remained in Bosnian Muslim hands. Then it became clear, despite what Washington was suggesting, that the agreement reached at the London meeting was only an outline. The NATO plan contained no specifics, and U.N. Secretary-General Boutros Boutros-Ghali had made no promise to delegate his control over air strikes until he heard the full details of what the alliance proposed.

A consensus on those details came later and after long debate. NATO's generals and ambassadors met over the weekend and into last week in Brussels, winding up with a 13-hour marathon session that ended only at 4 a.m. Wednesday. If the Serbs showed signs of massing for a full-scale attack on Gorazde, the last safe area in eastern Bosnia, NATO planes would pre-emptively attack the Serb air defenses, troop formations, armor and artillery in the area. If the Serbs still pushed on, allied fighter-bombers would range farther, taking out ammunition and fuel dumps and Serb supply lines. "Such operations," NATO Secretary-General Willy Claes warned, "once launched, will not be lightly discontinued."

But first they would have to be launched. NATO can make all the plans and decisions it wants, but as long as it affirms that the military operation in Bosnia is dedicated to peacekeeping under the authority of the U.N., then nothing can happen without the U.N.'s approval, and nothing can happen that is not in accordance with various U.N. resolutions regarding Bosnia. Air strikes, for example, have been subject to what was called the dual-key system: U.N. military commanders have had to ask for NATO warplanes to hit a specific target, and U.N. civilian representatives have had to approve the request. In the past that happened rarely and resulted in small attacks that were universally dismissed as "pinpricks."