Bill Clinton: “Well, first of all, Roosevelt sent those people after Pearl Harbor, after there was an attack and after Germany declared…”

“Well, first of all, Roosevelt sent those people after Pearl Harbor, after there was an attack and after Germany declared war on the United States, when the whole future of Europe was at stake. What has happened here is that European nations under the U.N. mandate have gone into Bosnia not for the purpose of ending the war but for the purpose of preserving the U.N. mission of preserving some limitation on the fighting and some humanitarian aid. We have acted in support of that in several ways. We have provided through our air power the longest humanitarian airlift in history, now longer than the Berlin airlift. We have worked hard to get our NATO allies to agree to use not only the threat but the reality of air power to stop the war in Bosnia from spreading to the air. We have shot down planes in aid of that objective to protect Sarajevo and other safe areas. And we are aggressively involved with our European allies in trying to get a peace agreement. I do not think it is an appropriate thing for the United States to send ground troops to Bosnia to become involved in the conflict itself. Now, if we reach an agreement in which NATO has a responsibility to enforce the agreement along lines agreed to by the parties, that's a different matter altogether. The United States still has troops in the Middle East enforcing the agreement reached by Israel and Egypt at the Camp David accord. I think that is a different thing. If we're talking about limiting the conflict, we have troops now in Macedonia, in the former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia, designed to limit the conflict. I think that that is the appropriate thing for us. I think the Europeans have done the right thing in putting their troops in in the U.N. mandate to try to limit the fighting. But in the end, these parties are going to have to make an agreement. Otherwise, there's a risk that they'll collapse the U.N. mission. They're going to have to decide that they cannot win, either side, by fighting and make an agreement. They reached an agreement tentatively before the terrible problems in Gorazde. And we need to get them back to the negotiating table. Mr. Esler. Your critics say that you've been inconsistent in your Bosnia policy. Some Western diplomats have said to me that on the 17th, 18th, and 19th of April you seem to have had three different Bosnian policies. You raised the possibility of discussing lifting the trade embargo on the Serbs. You talked about lifting the arms embargo on the Muslims. In any event, you didn't do any of those things. Can you see why your friends are perplexed by this because you seemed to have changed your mind?”