US rejects criticism of policy on Bosnia

DEEPLY embarrassed by the resignation of his senior specialist on Yugoslavia, the acting Secretary of State, Lawrence Eagleburger, yesterday hotly rejected accusations that Washington's policy in Bosnia was ineffectual and hypocritical, and warned that full-scale military involvement could lead the US into another Vietnam.

It was all very well for a comparatively lowly official to strike a high moral tone, Mr Eagleburger said of the walk-out last weekend of George Kenney, the acting chief of Yugoslav affairs at the State Department. The Bush administration, had to weigh every aspect of a decision to use force, 'including things like the lives of American GIs', he added.

Mr Eagleburger made his remarks in London, where he is attending the international peace conference on the fighting in what once was Yugoslavia.

In a stinging valedictory outburst this week, Mr Kenney claimed that Mr Eagleburger was deliberately holding back, preferring to 'wait until they exhaust themselves, and then move in'.

But yesterday his former boss struck back. Mr Eagleburger said that although he had a great deal of sympathy for an officer who had to deal with a 'terrible and messy situation', it was hard for him, too. 'I spent seven years of my life in Yugoslavia . . . a lot of the people who are now at risk or some who may have died are people who I know, so it's a personal problem for me as well.'

Adding to his discomfort was a barrage of press criticism prompted by Mr Kenney's resignation. The London conference was 'a deadly farce', wrote the senior foreign affairs commentator of the New York Times, while an editorial lambasted the 'sham' of US policy towards Bosnia.

The Times said that, contrary to the assertions of the Bush administration, the Western allies did have military options short of full-scale involvement in a ground war. They included, it said, an end to the arms embargo on Bosnia, and selective bombing of Serbian positions around Sarajevo and military bases and plants in Serbia itself. It said troops could also be used to dismantle concentration camps, protect relief convoys and establish Kurdish-style safe havens for refugees from the fighting.

It was far too easy to talk about 'some surgical strike', Mr Eagleburger declared. 'If it doesn't work, what do you do next? That, without exaggerating the comparison, is to some extent what led us into Vietnam.'

Later, Brent Scowcroft, President Bush's national security adviser, laid out the same realpolitik arguments. In Bosnia an occupation force was not the answer. Civil war and the 'ethnic melange' of former Yugoslavia made it 'very, very difficult to figure a military solution to the problem'.