CLINTON ARRIVES IN TUZLA\President praises 'warriors for peace'.

Byline: Alison Mitchell The New York Times

With Apache attack helicopters patrolling the slate-gray skies overhead, President Clinton stood Saturday before rows of U.S. soldiers he had sent to Bosnia and thanked them for being "warriors for peace."

On a chill and barren airfield whose nearby roadways were mired in thick mud, President Clinton gazed at 500 soldiers standing at attention in camouflage gear and told them they represented the American ideal.

"Around the world people look to America, not just because of our size and strength but because of what we stand for and what we're willing to stand against," the president said, speaking from a makeshift wooden podium piled with sandbags.

"We can't be everywhere, and even you can't do everything," he said. "But where we can make a difference, where our values and our interests are at stake, we must act."

Underscoring the importance he places on peacekeeping missions, Clinton announced that he had signed an executive order creating a new campaign medal, the Armed Forces Service Medal, for those who serve their nation in "significant, non-combat military missions."

He said all the participants in the Bosnia operation would receive it.

Before Clinton spoke, he visited Checkpoint Lima, a sandbag bunker on the perimeter of the airfield, and talked to the troops about their living conditions.

Dressed in a brown leather bomber jacket and tan khakis, he also presided over a brief promotion ceremony for five enlisted men. Outside the bunker, a crude cardboard sign declared the address as "Sniper Street."

It took Clinton two tries Saturday to make it into Tuzla, the headquarters of the U.S. forces in Bosnia, who will eventually number 20,000 of the 60,000 NATO-led peacekeepers.

Early Saturday morning, the C-17 military transport plane carrying Clinton, his aides and a bipartisan congressional delegation was diverted because of fog to the next stop on the president's itinerary - a U.S. staging base in Taszar, Hungary. Despite this delay of several hours, the president's entourage was upbeat.

Clinton's aggressive diplomacy, which led to a U.S.-brokered peace plan to end the four-year-old Balkan conflict, and his decision to send U.S. troops on an unpopular mission to enforce that peace have demonstrated decisiveness that contrasts sharply with the president's earlier reputation for wavering in the face of difficult foreign policy decisions.

The deployment of U.S. troops to Bosnia and their success at keeping the peace could prove crucial during this election year. The president has acknowledged to interviewers that if the mission goes awry and brings substantial casualties, it could very well cost him re-election.

But Saturday, Clinton's appearance among the troops in Tuzla and Taszar and at the Aviano air base in Italy underscored his role as commander in chief and set him apart from his antagonists in the budget squabble in Washington. Traveling with the president was Gen. John Shalikashvili, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

Sen. Bob Dole, the leading contender for the Republican presidential nomination, had wanted to visit the troops over Christmas. But he canceled his plans after Defense Secretary William Perry said NATO and U.S. military commanders in Europe wanted to avoid distractions as the troops began arriving in Bosnia.

Clinton has begun pointing to U.S. peacemaking efforts in Haiti, Northern Ireland, the Middle East and Bosnia as models of the foreign policy the United States should support in the post-Cold War world.

"We have a profound interest in seeing the United States be the world's leading source of energy for peace and freedom and democracy," he told assembly-line workers at a truck-making plant in Nashville, Tenn., on Friday shortly before he set off for the whirlwind tour that was scheduled to keep him in the Balkan area for about 18 hours before he returns to Washington early today.

Clinton's trip was characterized by heavy security. His precise itinerary was closely guarded, and Secret Service sharpshooters followed him in Tuzla, where he stayed inside the grounds of the air field, seeing nothing of the war's effects on the town.

A senior official in his entourage said the president's visit to Bosnia had "more logistical, security and weather variables" than the official had ever encountered before.

Clinton took off from Tuzla about two and a half hours after his arrival as fog rolled in, under Secret Service orders to leave before dark.

At Taszar airfield in Hungary, the forward staging area for U.S. troops moving by land through Croatia into Bosnia, the side of the tarmac was littered with broken-down Soviet MiG fighter planes, a reminder of the Cold War.

"Just six years ago, Hungary was still part of the Warsaw Pact, and now it's home to the largest American military operation in Europe since World War II," the president told hundreds of men and women in combat fatigues, many with cameras, who crammed into a makeshift mess hall to see him and take snapshots.

Green tents lined the air field that, like Tuzla's, was such a sea of thick mud that Clinton described it in his radio address back home. "In Tuzla, the headquarters for our troops in Bosnia, the weather report is pretty much the same every day: mud, mud and more mud," the president said.

Despite the primitive conditions, the soldiers greeted Clinton with applause and repeated guttural shouts of "Hoo-aa," pep-rally style. This was in marked contrast to the early days of his presidency, when he was heckled at the Vietnam Veterans Memorial as someone who had avoid military conscription and was joked about by sailors while visiting the aircraft carrier Theodore Roosevelt.

With many of the nearly 7,000 troops in Taszar heading on to Bosnia, Clinton told them, "I'd like to be able to report that when you get there, you will find deluxe accommodations.

"I'd like to be able to do that," he said, to swelling laughter. "But even for a political leader, that's stretching the truth a little more than people dare."

Despite the living conditions, some of the troops expressed support for the Bosnian mission and delight at seeing the president.

"It's great, great, real great for him to help us out," said Specialist Doris Splunge, 31, who sets out to Bosnia on Monday. Another 30-year-old soldier, who would not give his name, said: "I appreciate him coming here. Misery loves company."

Clinton also fit in time for diplomacy. In Tuzla he assembled an unusual delegation of religious and civic leaders of Bosnia, including Tarik Kupusovic, the Muslim mayor of Sarajevo, and Nedejlko Prstojevic, the mayor of Ilidza, a Serbian suburb of Sarajevo.

Clinton also met with President Alija Izetbegovic of Bosnia in Tuzla and then with President Franjo Tudjman of Croatia in a brief stopover in Zagreb.