Bosnia without illusions.

SERBIA'S CRIMES-or, to be more precise, the crimes of the former Communist apparatchiks who have adopted an extreme nationalism to give themselves some shred of legitimacy--cry out to Heaven for vengeance. To their wars of territorial expansion are now added crimes against humanity: concentration camps, torture, mass killings of innocents, and "ethnic cleansing," a euphemism for driving people from their homes in order to create a Greater Serbia. The

historical analogies are all too obvious. We might expect, therefore, that international reaction would be driven by a gnawing guilt that, on earlier such occasions, the world's indifference and failure to act allowed both the Holocaust and Stalin's murder of whole nations. If so, we would be disappointed.

Two reports alleging atrocities in Serbian prison camps were actually suppressed by the UN High Commissioner for Refugees for several weeks, presumably because they would have aroused pressure for a military intervention which the great powers wished to avoid. Only when Western journalists sent back horrifying reports and pictures of Moslem prisoners, plainly suffering terrible privation at Serb hands, did pressures mount to halt these war crimes. Calls for military intervention now multiply, not only from Governor Clinton, but also from such disinterested figures as Richard Lugar on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, and the former British Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher, writing in the New York Times.

But conservatives--while sharing the moral outrage that has prompted such calls--must persist in raising some hard questions before we plunge in. Does the U.S. have an interest in restoring some semblance of peace to what was once Yugoslavia? Of what kind? And if so, what intervention could best discharge it?

The moral argument for intervening to halt aggression and suppress barbarity applies equally to all nations. If the U.S. has a special responsibility by virtue of its greater power, that is limited to giving leadership to a coalition of European powers (which have a special responsibility by virtue of their proximity). Both the U.S. and Europe incurred additional responsibility last year, however, when they opposed the dissolution of Yugoslavia and in effect encouraged the Serbs to resist it. That helped transform a constitutional dispute into a military conflict that has since spread from Slovenia to Croatia to Bosnia and threatens to spread further.

And therein lies the strategic interest of the U.S. (again shared with Europe) in stopping the conflict. If it continues unchecked with further massacres of Bosnian Moslems, it may directly draw in other Balkan nations, including Turkey and Greece NATO allies likely here to oppose each other--and indirectly prompt "copycat" ethnic wars in the former Soviet Union. Are a stable Europe and a united NATO American strategic interests? We think so.

But what intervention is feasible? Military intervention to protect "humanitarian" aid, which the Administration is apparently hammering out at the UN, actually combines the maximum of risk with the minimum of point. Convoying food and medicine to Sarajevo and the liberated camps would require a considerable force of ground troops. That risks another Lebanon, where a feeble "humanitarian" force found itself trapped and the target of brutal attacks. And to what end? Most victims of this war have died not in concentration camps, but in the artillery bombardment of cities and in massacres. Keeping them fed between bombardments or until the next massacre is a very marginal addition to their welfare. But since "humanitarian" intervention does not seek to end the fighting, that would be all it could achieve. It looks increasingly like a cynical camouflage for a policy of hoping that the Serbs will win a quick victory, seize half of Bosnia, and magnanimously agree at the forthcoming London conference not to seize the remaining half, thus ending the crisis to the satisfaction of the State Department and the British Foreign Office.

The outright invasion and occupation of Serbia would doubtless end the fighting in Bosnia. But that would require a larger force and more draconian methods than either the U.S. or Europe contemplates. And insofar as it encouraged the Bosnians to rely entirely on our protection, we would then face the dilemma of either staying permanently or seeing the bloodshed resume. This option, we suspect, is generally proposed by those who want to discredit the idea of any intervention at all.

That leaves the combination of measures suggested, at different times, by NATIONAL REVIEW and Mrs. Thatcher. These are: the lifting of the arms embargo on Bosnia; the supply of weapons to the Bosnians; and the use of NATO air power to destroy Serbian artillery in Bosnia, to disrupt Serbian supplies, and to inflict damage on military installations within Serbia itself. Such measures would have two aims: to alter the balance of military advantage between Bosnian defenders and Serb aggressors, and to raise the cost of aggression to Serbia's military and political leadership. Would they succeed? No one can be certain of that, but their chance of success is far greater than that of "humanitarian" intervention. And if additional force were required to break the back of Serbian military power, we see no reason why it should involve ground troops when we have at our disposal the kind of destructive air power we employed to such effect in Iraq.

What we cannot risk is a repetition of Vietnam, where we initially had the right idea of "going to the source" (North Vietnam) but did so in an incremental, hesitant way that conveyed not our determination, but our doubts. The Joint Chiefs of Staff are wary of unthought-out "political" uses of military power--and they are right to be wary. But the President is also entitled to know what decisive options may be available against Serbia itself. If we are to involve ourselves, we have no choice but to be prepared in the end to threaten (and, if necessary, inflict) an overwhelming, decapitating, knockout blow against Serbia from the air. Anything more looks unnecessary; nothing less will do.