US troops enter Bosnia - 15 December 1995

After nearly three weeks of delicious weather in San Francisco, we're back here to piercing cold Manhattan, which in the old innocent days of nothing but newspapers to show us the city's life, used to print photographs of children tossing snowballs at each other in Central Park. But these days and nights with television as unavoidable as wallpaper, they illustrate the weather with perishing shots of arctic landscapes in Minnesota, tractors wobbling in whirling winds, and in the New York evening news, heartbreaking pictures of half frozen street people and the police deciding to skip their daily chore of prodding the homeless out of Grand Central Station.

But now there's another even grimmer staple of the nightly weather news: pictures of the first American soldiers arriving in Bosnia in driving snow bundled up the eyebrows, just as if many of them must think they are back home in Iowa, Nebraska, Montana or anywhere across the prairie and the roaring winds. Pictures that quietly reinforce the warning, which the president mentioned in his speech to the nation two weeks ago, that while the troops were not to expect or look for an enemy, one sure enemy during their mission would be the Bosnian winter.

The other hazard that has had the military planners awake at night for many moons is the invisible land mine. They've conservatively calculated that over the whole terrain the Nato troops will have to patrol, there could be closer to three million mines than two. This is a hazard of war that has been there since the end of the First World War, though it's rarely brought up.

I remember reading – and saying to myself, fancy that! – a passage in General Eisenhower's memoir of the Second War in which he was discussing with his opposite chieftain, the Russian Marshal Zhukov, the various techniques of attacking through mine fields. Eisenhower went on about the ingenious technical devices, mostly invented by the British, and I suppose, casually threw in that if the order for attack was urgent and the pathway narrow, it was the allied custom to let packs of dogs go first.

"A new marshal, Marshal Zhukov gave me," wrote the general "a matter of fact statement, quote: 'When we come to a mine field, our infantry attacks exactly as if the mine field were not there. The losses we get from personnel mines we consider only equal to those we would have suffered from machine guns and artillery if the Germans had chosen to defend that field.'" Eisenhower's only comment: "I had a vivid picture of what would happen to any American or British commander and an even more vivid picture of what the men in our divisions would have said about the matter if the allies had followed this normal Russian practice".

Do you remember the television series that John Hawkesworth – the brainwave behind Upstairs Downstairs – the series he made out of a little red book by the late Major A.B. Hartley entitled, Danger UXB, a phrase, which after the autumn of 1940, Britons in and near London, came to know and to dread. Way back in the First War, the Germans had used delayed action bombs. In the Second War they improved on then.

In 1940 the bomb detachment squad, usually small detachments of the Royal Engineers, at first dealt with unexploded bombs. They could neutralise by unscrewing the locking ring and sliding out the fuse. Then the Nazis invented a bomb on which the very act of defusing, triggered a spring designator and eventually a bomb especially designed to dispose of the man who was clever enough to learn the trick of disarming it. It was a murderous speciality. The life expectancy of a bomb disposal officer was 10 weeks. The military historians have not paid excessive attention to the men who had to defuse these bombs, but when the war was over Churchill made up for this omission by writing. Some very few survived the ordeal of their training, others ran 20 even 30 courses before they met their fate. In writing about our hard times, we are apt to overuse the word 'grim'. It should have been reserved for the UXB disposal squads.

This preoccupation with land mine disasters is, I ought to say, not at the forefront of any minds I've read, except in the Pentagon. In the House and the Senate I heard lots of threats and warnings about the risks of being a soldier or, as every single speaker put it, putting our men in harm's way – usually spoken angrily by congressman absolutely against the president's decision to send 20,000 American men and women into Bosnia.

In the last week or two, people have written to me to ask about a puzzle, which is implicit in two seemingly contradictory facts: one, that the president has the constitutional authority, he says, to recruit and deploy troops, but Congress has the sole constitutional right to declare a war.

On Wednesday, all through the day and into the night, both houses were going on at it with seriousness and intelligence, much eloquence and, I'm happy to say, by comparison with some other legislative bodies I can think off, it had the sight and sound of a true debate: much eloquence, some passion but no berating of opponents, no applause, no boos, no mocking laughter. The puzzle, the bit about the president's constitutional authority, well the questioners are quite right it is a puzzle. The Constitution says plainly that the president shall be commander in chief of the army and navy of the United States and of the militias of the several states, which don't exist anymore. That's as far as the Constitution goes in sanctioning any act of a president to mobilise troops for action anywhere. On the other hand, the Constitution is very specific about the powers of Congress that affect the military. The Congress shall have the power to declare war, to raise and support armies, to provide and maintain a navy, to make rules for the government and regulation of the land, the naval forces.

No doubt in the meetings at the White House recently in which congressional leaders were briefed, no doubt some hot young congressman read out these particular powers of the Congress, to which the president could truthfully reply that he is not pre-empting the Congress's right to declare a war, he's raising something the Constitution never thought of: a peacekeeping force. What I'm sure he didn't say, but what everybody knows, is that the Congress's right as the sole body that can declare war, has been so flagrantly flouted in the – past wait for it – 54 years that the last time the Congress declared war was on the 11th of December 1941 against Italy. Since then, every president, no matter which party, has raised troops, sent them into action – defensive peacekeeping of course. The last big defensive act was done by half a million Americans defending the rulers of Kuwait and putting them back on the throne and quite sensibly protecting the Middle Eastern oil wells.

The declaration of war clause was written in an age when nations tossed ultimatums at each other and then declared war and then ordered the attack at dawn. Somehow, and nobody has ever satisfactorily explained to me, the president, all the presidents for 50 years have been able to duck the Constitution and raise a force to send overseas, and bypass the Congress with the assertion, unproved, that he had a constitutional right unspecified to raise armies provided he doesn't swipe Congress's right to declare war.

So on Wednesday, from morn to midnight both houses debated and voted on several resolutions. One, easily defeated in the Senate, condemned and opposed sending any troops to Bosnia, another in the House tried to uphold its right not to pay for the troops, defeated. In the end, both Houses passed very wobbly resolutions backing the mission.

The Senate on the cagey initiative of Senator Dole, the leading Republican candidate for president, insisted on putting in a phrase committing the president to equalise the opposing forces in Bosnia, by training and rearming the Bosnian Muslims, a condition which many in both houses and throughout the country, felt was fatal to the preservation of America's new charity, a condition not allowed in the peace treaty and one likely to fire the Serbs with the contention that the treaty has been violated and the war could start up again.

But now the treaty is signed, the troops of 29 nations are on their way and the president has told his men and women that they're not soldiers, they're not policeman, they're not nation builders they are running interference between two warring sides. They are a cooling-off force but must be ready to respond to an attack with all the fire power that they command. In other words, among the Americans, there are going to be some very edgy troops, off on a precarious mission, which could crown or shatter Mr Clinton's presidency.

The last picture I saw of the embarking troops sounded a very bizarre, very 1995 note. A good looking young woman in combat uniform was hoisting her pack on her shoulder and waving as she climbed aboard the plane. How did she feel about it? The standard fatuous question of all television interviewers facing usually, the mother of a dead baby. "Well," she said. "It's our job but it's a little tough I just got married and I hate to leave my daughter".

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