MISSOURI COMMENTARY: PEACE IN OUR TIME FOR BOSNIA?

Bosnia-Herzegovina is a testament to the failure of the peace-making capacity of the Western world.

No one ever claimed that the United Nations was perfect. The United Nations has certainly failed to accomplish many of its assigned tasks through the years.

No one ever claimed that NATO was good at anything other than executing its fundamental mission of deterring a Russian invasion of Western Europe. When the Soviet threat evaporated, NATO was left with no successor goal. It was a formidable military alliance with no place to go.

No one ever claimed that U.S. foreign policy with respect to Bosnia was perfect. President George Bush thought that the Bosnian crisis would somehow go away if we pretended it didn't exist. President Bill Clinton thought the problem would go away if we rattled our aircraft carrier sabers in the Adriatic and rattled some rhetorical sabers in Washington.

No one ever claimed that the U.S. Congress was perfect with respect to formulating a cohesive policy on Bosnia. Free of any responsibility for executing any policy decision, Congress had dozens of Monday morning quarterbacks who knew for sure what to do.

No one ever claimed that Britain and France were pure of heart about the Bosnian tragedy. Europeans have longer historical memories than Americans. To the French and the British the Balkan nations are the crazies of Europe and an eternal spawning ground of trouble -- big trouble.

In Western Europe, the name of the game is let's get along and bury our hatreds. By and large, Western Europeans are reconciled to the notion that they are all in one big boat -- to sink or swim together from at least an economic standpoint.

In the Balkans, all the ethnic groups are in separate boats, fully prepared to sink and hate forever.

Yugoslavia was an artificial creation of the Versailles Peace Conference, a lumping together of disparate ethnic groups with nothing in common but hatred for one another. After World War II, only the charisma of Marshall Tito and the glue of Communism held Yugoslavia together. Tito, himself half Slovene and half Croat, dominated a mostly Serbian nation that had lost 1.5 million people in a horrific civil war. He had to gloss over Croatian Nazi atrocities perpetuated against Serbs, Jews and Gypsies and Serbian Chetnik atrocities against Muslims in Bosnia.

To the politicians in London and Paris, the interests of a new world order were not to be served stirring up the Balkan stew. There were too many unresolved ethnic grievances that could be incitements to bloodshed -- in Kosovo, Albania, Macedonia, Bulgaria, Greece, Turkey, Hungary and Romania.

There is no melting pot in Southwestern Europe. People are born to hate and raised to remember. No incident is too small to forget.

With respect to Bosnia, every peace-making entity involved operated at its lowest common denominator. The U.S. was fragmented. NATO had never before been called upon to do anything militarily overt. The United States wanted to do the right thing, but couldn't figure out what that was. England and France were determined not to do more than operate a glorified Salvation Army mission. Russia, the historic protector of the Serbs, suffered from an international inferiority complex.

Not every evil in the world can be neatly or quickly corrected. There are some tragedies -- Rwanda and Bosnia, for example -- that are beyond the capacity of even the brave and the bold to resolve. Today the brave and the bold are harder to find -- just as they were between the two Great Wars.

The United States now realizes that it is fruitless to urge NATO to continue air strikes where the design of the mission is to inflict as little damage as possible. One of NATO's most robust attacks on a runway produced a hole about as big as a typical New York City pothole. It is fruitless to pretend to be assisting the cause when the general in command, Sir MIchael "Second Hand" Rose, is determined to do nothing and anxiously awaits his recall.

The United States now begins to close this sad chapter. We will throw in with England and France. We will say NATO is as one again. We will go to Gen. Ratko Mladic and the other thugs and say let's make a deal. We will tell the Bosnians that they had better be ready to become a Liechtenstein or an Andorra or else Sarajevo, Gorazde and Srebrenica will become the next Bihac.

As we approach the Christmas season, we can recall Neville Chamberlain's comforting words that we will achieve "peace in our time."

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