The Iranian connection

It has been public knowledge for some time that Iran's Islamic regime supplied beleaguered Bosnian forces with arms when the West would not. But it now turns out that in 1994, while the Clinton administration was publicly defending the U.N. arms embargo against Bosnia, it secretly approved the Iranian arms shipments.

Washington's ambidextrous policy was recently disclosed by The Los Angeles Times. Its account makes clear that Washington was inconsistent not only on the embargo but on Iran itself, which the United States has long urged its allies to isolate for exporting terror. Compounding the duplicity, top administration officials concealed their decisions from Congress and the American people.

Secret diplomacy has legitimate uses, as, for example, when Henry Kissinger prepared the groundwork for President Nixon's historic journey to mainland China. But this unspoken manipulation of American policy toward Bosnia and Iran cannot be justified, even though it helped equalize the military balance and contributed to the Dayton peace agreement.

The Clinton administration, from the day it took office, favored lifting the U.N. arms embargo against Bosnia, which prevented that country from defending its cities against the siege guns donated by Serbia to the Bosnian Serbs.

But despite the urgings of Sen. Bob Dole and others in Congress, the administration publicly insisted on honoring and enforcing the embargo as long as it remained in place. Europe argued that lifting the embargo would endanger its peacekeeping forces stationed in Bosnia under U.N. command.

The administration took the narrow position that because the United States was only passively tolerating the Iranian shipments, rather than actively supporting them, the whole matter was not a covert American operation.

But if the Clinton administration thought arming the Bosnians was such a worthy objective, it should have considered other approaches that were more constitutionally straightforward and did not involve Iran.

The Clinton administration deserves considerable credit for engineering an end to four years of tragic killing in Bosnia and securing a peace agreement. Strengthening Croatian and Bosnian military forces contributed to that achievement.

But a more open approach to the arms embargo might have brought the same results without expanding Iranian influence in the region and short-circuiting American democracy.

-- The New York Times