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Military officials suggested they supported Christopher's promise to help police a peace settlement because they do not believe such an agreement will be reached. "This is the biggest facade since Potemkin took Catherine the Great for a ride," said an Administration official. The likely size of an effective army of peacekeepers is also a sticking point. Vance and Owen estimate it will take 20,000 troops to patrol the 10-division patchwork. European defense ministries and NATO headquarters put the figure at 60,000 -- and that assumes an uneasy peace in which everyone stops fighting. If they do not, the requirement would rise to 200,000 or more. The European allies are insisting that at least one-third of any such force must be American.
Clinton has committed the U.S. to the Vance-Owen premise of dividing Bosnia into ethnic cantons. He might pay heed to the last plan that Vance negotiated in Croatia in January 1992: it provides an object lesson for anyone contemplating a similar solution for Bosnia. In spite of a formal truce between Serbs and Croats and the presence of 14,000 U.N. peacekeepers, a new round of warfare exploded in Croatia last month. Rival militias have rearmed, refugees who were supposed to be allowed to return are still far from their homes, and ethnic cleansing continues.
Serbian forces were to be cleared from large parts of Croatia: they still illegally occupy hundreds of square miles. Last month Croatian-army assault troops attacked them at strategic points in Dalmatia, and Serbian units brushed aside U.N. peacekeepers who were guarding stores of heavy weapons to retrieve their howitzers and other artillery pieces. Serb-Croat skirmishes have been going on in Croatia almost constantly ever since.
The lesson to be drawn for Bosnia, says a U.N. representative in Croatia, is, "You cannot have peacekeeping without peacemaking." Little can be done without the threat of force. But the U.S. and the U.N. have ruled that out in favor of renewed negotiation. "We will march down this trail as strongly as we can," says a senior U.S. official. "If it's not successful, we will have to see what else is available." The answer next time may be the same: not much.