IT'S TOO LATE TO SAVE BOSNIA, BUT IT'S NOT TOO LATE TO STOP THE SERBS

"Bosnian Muslims must be transported like cattle in order to avoid dying like sheep."

MacNeill-Lehrer Report

Of the Serbian order to decimate Srebrenica: "I hope that their sleep is punctuated the screams of the children and the cries of their mothers."

United Nations top civilian

official in Bosnia

It's shocking, incredible and appalling. It's cruel, indecent and inhuman. It's brutal, remorseless and immoral. The Serbian savagery in Bosnia is like nothing experienced in Europe since the Nazi horrors.

But it's too late now to save Bosnia. Slobodan Milosevic looked NATO straight in the eye and said "I call your bluff. Send in your ground troops. If you don't, Bosnia is mine." The Serbian strongman won. The situation on the ground is now unalterably pro-Serbia. While the West wrung its hands at all of the mutilation and misery, it wasn't prepared to accept the casualties that a Bosnian land war would have entailed. A year ago, an extensive campaign of bombing Serbian positions and supply lines in Bosnia and selected military targets in Serbia might have deterred Belgrade. Not now.

The New World order calls for collective peacekeeping, not a Lone Ranger. The heady victory of a U.N. force in the Persian Gulf set the example of America and her allies acting in consort, not America acting alone. Collective decision-making requires consensus, meaning that the least common denominator determines where to use force and where there is no consensus, aggression goes unpunished.

Bosnia is being digested and there may well be more for Milosevic's plate. There's Macedonia and Kosovo, and lots of ethnic cleansing still to do if a pathological bully stays on his menacingly successful rampage. In the frenzied Serbian psyche, there are endless scores to settle, endless grievances to rectify. In December, President George Bush, we are told, sent a "marker" to Milosevic: if you expand your war of annihilation into Kosovo or Macedonia, you will have the United States to contend with. We'll see.

The American people, horrified by what they read and watch, are even more horrified by different image: the prospect of thousands of body bags being unloaded from American cargo planes while the military bands play Taps. A generation ago, President John Kennedy was cheered when he said he was willing to "pay any price, bear any burden" to insure freedom around the world. That was then. No such cheers today.

If we are to honor the Bush "marker", we had better now begin convincing the Europeans that Bosnia was the Sudetenland and that Kosovo or Macedonia is Poland. Our NATO allies are in varying stages of political disarray. Yet, a collective response to further Serbian evil must be agreed to in advance and in detail. It was one thing, two years ago, to persuade other nations to play a marginal supporting role in the Persian Gulf, where a common interest in Mother Oil assured solidarity. It's another thing to ask our NATO allies now to commit substantial ground units as full partners in the name of Mother Kosovo.

Bosnia was lost on Bush's watch. But the post-Bosnia dominance will fall on Clinton's watch. From here on out, it is Clinton's plan that succeeds or fails. He has an awesome selling job to do: to convince military partners and his own people that democratic nations that worship freedom must incur risks even in "a quarrel in a far-away country between people of whom we know nothing."