MISSOURI COMMENTARY: BOSNIA: DAYS DOWN TO A PRECIOUS FEW

Srebenica has fallen. Sooner than we may want to believe, the United States is going to confront an agonizing decision: whether to honor the solemn pledge (made by Presidents Bush and Clinton) never to send soldiers to Bosnia. These prior statements notwithstanding, we must decide whether to send ground troops to Bosnia if needed to help evacuate our European allies, the British, French, Dutch and others. Once on the ground in Bosnia, American forces will be at risk. Some will die.

The go/no go decision will be made by President Bill Clinton -- acting alone. It is, to say the least, a difficult question. War is glorious if you defeat a villainous enemy: Hitler of Tojo, for example, War is haunting ghost if you are defeated (Vietnam) or come in for complex, risky salvage operation after all is lost (Bosnia). But Clinton will make the call.

Most in Congress will publicly fulminate about whatever Clinton does and how he does it. But they will breathe a secret sigh of relief that they were not called upon to approve this concluding act of failure in the Balkans.

Our Founding Fathers would be troubled by this notion of unilateral war-making by a president. At the Constitutional Convention they paid some attention to this war-making business. No more of this King George, one-man rule.

Henceforth, the Congress, with its collective judgment, would "declare war" and the president, as commander-in-chief, would wage it. The president, of course, could act alone in the nation's self-defense, but when time allowed for forces to be deployed abroad where high risks were at stake, there was to be an orderly process in which there would be full opportunity for public deliberation would be given full play. That's how Madison and Hamilton set it up.

It pretty much worked that way during the 19th century. One additional refinement emerged in that era: where American citizens were in danger abroad, the president could act on his own to deal with the threat. Repeat: American citizens.

In the 20th century, president made war-making their private preserve. Except for the big ones, World Wars I and II, the sending of troops was left mostly to president fiat. Lyndon Johnson obtained the Gulf of Tonkin resolution to support his efforts in Vietnam. George Bush had authorization for the Persian Gulf War, although he claimed he would have sent the troops even if Congress had said no.

There exists a useless appendage called the War Powers Act which some dreamers felt could make war-making a shared power between the Congress and the president. It became so convoluted in the process of be in enacted that it was absolutely worthless in practical effect.

So now Clinton edges toward deploying perhaps 25,000 American ground troops into Bosnia. He never contemplated that the situation would deteriorate so that American troops would be needed to save the U.N. peacekeepers. When Clinton became president, no one in his wildest dreams would have imagined that a peacekeeping mission would collapse to the point where the peacekeepers themselves are in grave danger.

Clinton has no choice. The Serbs command the game in most of Bosnia and the 24,000 U.N. peacekeepers are but pawns. Having been on the sidelines while Britain, France, the Netherlands and others put their troops at risk, the United States cannot sit by and let its NATO allies be bloodied in evacuating Bosnia. If we were, passively, to let them suffer a debacle, it would be the end of the great post-World War II alliance.

The Founding Fathers notwithstanding, Clinton will have to act alone. A few weeks ago, the Senate majority leader, Bob Dole, circulated a draft bill that proposed to: (1) end U.S. participation in the Bosnia arms embargo in event of U.N. withdrawal, or (2) end the arms embargo no later than 12 weeks after the Bosnian government requested same, and (3) authorize the president to assist militarily in withdrawing the U.N. forces. Item 3 has been deleted. Many senators of both parties did not want their fingerprints on landing American ground forces in Bosnia. The political risks are too high. When the Capitol Hill smoke clears, Clinton can at best hope that Speaker Newt Gingrich and Dole will not have tied his hands.

Bosnia has taken a dreadful toll, not only in the torture and slaughter, but in the serious weakening of the United Nations and of the NATO alliance. The fall of communism has not ushered in a benign, peaceful utopia. The risk of nuclear incineration is all but gone (at least for now), but we face a host of almost endless other burdens for which the post-Cold War world is insufficiently prepared.

~Tom Eagleton is a former U.S. senator from Missouri and a columnist for Pulitzer Publishing Co.