NOTHING SUCCEEDS LIKE FAILURE

By Charles Krauthammer

NEVER IN THE HISTORY OF NEGOTIATIONS HAS THE host-mediator had a greater stake in failure. The tripartite peace talks on Bosnia being presided over by the U.S. at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Dayton, Ohio, have received the most fervently expressed hopes for success from the Clinton Administration. "We must persevere," Secretary of State Warren Christopher intoned solemnly at the opening session, "until an agreement is reached and the promise of this hopeful moment is fulfilled."

Sounds pious and unassailable. What could be wrong with an agreement? For the U.S., everything. An agreement means that following President Clinton's commitment, 20,000 or so American troops will soon be on their way to police a quagmire. Dayton will probably produce a "peace" that is unstable, unenforceable and divisive. Not just divisive at home, where Congress, reflecting a widespread public wariness, is resoundingly opposed to such a deployment, but divisive too for the Western alliance.

Of course, the single most powerful argument in favor of deployment invokes NATO: to renege on this promise of American relief for our NATO allies already trapped in Bosnia in a fruitless "peacekeeping" mission would be the worst blow Clinton has yet dealt to NATO cohesion. Whatever the strategic folly of having our troops in Bosnia, the argument goes, our NATO allies want us take the lead on the ground (surprise!), and we promised.

True, reneging would be a blow. But actually sending troops would be worse. No good outcome for such a deployment is foreseeable. Either it ends, after our first major losses and rising demands at home to get out, in humiliating retreat a la Somalia--in which case our allies are left high and dry and betrayed. Or it lingers painfully: we persist in a thankless, unwinnable and costly operation, a source of constant recrimination and resentment among the allies--against them for getting us in, against us for keeping them there--that erodes and finally exhausts the alliance's 50-year store of solidarity.

There is no good way out. Therefore, better to finesse the dilemma entirely by having the Dayton peace talks fail. No agreement, no need to honor--or renege on--Clinton's supremely foolish commitment of 20,000 ground troops.

Let me put the case for failure a bit less cynically. Yes, we could tolerate a negotiating success, but only a very specific and quite unlikely one. If we want real success in Dayton--and not just a paper one--it cannot consist of just any agreement, any lowest-common-denominator "peace" plan that commands three grudging, resentful signatures from unreconciled parties.

There will be a powerful temptation in Dayton to settle for just such an agreement. It will be full of artful ambiguity and tentativeness, like the current Israel-P.L.O. agreements, in which the circles remain unsquared, the unresolvable is put off and peace becomes a work in progress.

If the three Bosnian parties want an agreement of that sort, fine. But they should not expect us to police it. Imagine American troops interposed today on the West Bank as the Israelis and Palestinians work things out. Unimaginable. So should an American interposition into an unfolding Bosnian "peace process" be.

We should instead raise the negotiating bar exceedingly high. We should offer the parties two choices: 1) They all three give one another ironclad commitments to a full and permanent cease-fire, a very wide zone of separation between combatants and a build-down of forces, with every detail of every map and timetable firmly and finally agreed on--an agreement so airtight (here's the rub) that it is self-enforcing, without need for outside "implementers"; or 2) we declare the parties insufficiently committed to peace, walk away and wash our hands of it.

We must, in other words, demand a peace agreement of the Camp David variety: firm, fixed, accepted without reservation by all sides. At Camp David, the issues were resolved, the lines were hard, the timetables were clear. There was no papering over--and no need for anything resembling the massive ground forces promised by Clinton to implement a Bosnian agreement. Sinai needed nothing more than a token force of binocular-toting observers. It is this kind of treaty--and this kind only--that we should be aiming for at Dayton.

If we get such a peace, then we might agree to send a similarly token NATO observer force, easily deployed and easily withdrawn. If the Bosnians want a few Americans with a flag and fatigues to lend symbolic legitimacy to the agreement, as in Sinai today--fine again. But no "implementation force," heavily armed and ready for combat. That is an invitation to disaster.

Such a strategy does not just satisfy American national interests. It is simple logic. If the parties to the Bosnian conflict are ready to live with one another, they will enforce their own peace. If they are not, not even our troops will suffice to do the job.

We raise the bar and hope they jump it. If they do, they get peace. If they don't, well, we will have tried. It is not our war. We want to help them end it. But we must not allow ourselves to become its arbiter, and ultimately its victim.