Not anymore. Top White House foreign-policy officials told NEWSWEEK that U.S. forces would now be sent to the Balkans only if they “absolutely would fall under the general authority of a NATO operation, and therefore under American command.”
Immediate prospects for peace in the former Yugoslavia still looked distant last week as Bosnian Muslims withdrew from the Geneva peace talks after Serbian and Croatian negotiators rejected their demand for more territory in a divided Bosnia. With Washington already playing the heavy–Clinton threatened NATO airstrikes should Serbs and Croats now renew sieges of Muslim enclaves–aides say they want to ensure that any eventual treaty won’t be rendered toothless by U.N. bureaucracy.
White House officials point to Somalia, where U.N. forces are still bedeviled by the relatively untrained and ill-equipped forces of local warlords. Facing modern armies in Bosnia, U.S. aides warn, the potential for problems for forces led by a U.N. command-by-committee is that much greater. “If an agreement is reached we’re going to look at a very substantial number of U.S. troops going in,” says a White House aide. With their lives on the line, he cautions: “We don’t want any important decisions on the ground to be filtered through different layers of U.N. officials.”
