This month, in a mountainous, clannish, fractious corner of Europe, where men have killed one another over blood and soil and religion since the Byzantines fought the Bulgars, Mr. Clinton has found his war. Together with his foreign policy team, which seems to float adrift in the post-Cold War world, he has chosen to stake the credibility of this country and that of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization on the outcome of an uncertain gamble ó that our high-tech arsenal of death can bring a fierce nation and their opportunistic dictator to heel.

And he is losing.

Even if a peace settlement emerges in the coming weeks (an event that seems unlikely as of this writing), the refugees in the Albanian and Macedonian camps are unlikely to see their homes anytime soon. The Kosovo Liberation Army, never more than a rag-tag band of thugs and terrorists, has been reduced to hiding in the hills from the Serb forces. And Slobodan Milosevicís hold on power is as secure as ever.

Absent an accord, there seems to be no port in sight for the ship of United States foreign policy. The Clinton Administration has managed to wed this nationís fortunes to the rebellion of a murderous group of guerrillas who are every bit as ruthless as the Serbs, albeit fewer and poorly equipped. There is no reason for us to support the independence of Kosovo ó we already have one sham of a country, Albania, filled up with Muslim fundamentalists and bandits in that part of the world. There is even less reason to expect the Serbs to accept the loss of a province that contains many of their holiest shrines and monasteries, and the location of the Field of Blackbirds, site of their 1389 defeat at the hands of the Ottoman Turks. Yet somehow, we find ourselves taking sides in a civil 
war suffering from a deplorable lack of ìgood guys.î

President Clintonís rationales for our involvement have been varied and contradictory. The current campaign has been compared to 1995, when ìwe and our allies joined with courageous Bosnians to stand up to the aggressors,î leading to a peace treaty. Such an analysis fails to note the fact that the peace settlement came about because the ìcourageousî Croats went on an offensive and ìethnically cleansedî some 150,000 Serbs in the Krajina region ó arguably the worst war crime of the entire Bosnian struggle. For Clinton, ever one to take the easy road politically, such nuances give way to blanket condemnation of Serbs as ìaggressorsî and everyone else as ìvictims.î

Or perhaps this is not 1995, but 1918. The World War I parallel has also been drawn by the President, when he declared that ìall the ingredients for a major war are [in Kosovo]. Ancient grievances, struggling democracies and in the center of it all, a dictator in Serbia who has done nothing since the Cold War ended, but start new wars and pour gasoline on the flames of ethnic and religious division.î But who, really, is pouring gasoline here? The First World War occurred because major powers staked their prestige and honor on the survival of small, bellicose states. By entering the Kosovo-Serbia conflict, all we have done is turn a minor civil war into a struggle involving the worldís only superpower and its military alliance. Our presence, thus far, has only made the violence worse, and if it spreads to Macedonia, Greece, Turkey, or even Russia, we (and not Slobodan Milosevic, whose ambitions only extend to holding what he has) will have ourselves to blame.

Finally, Mr. Clinton has invoked the ghastly spectre of ìgenocide in the heart of Europe.î Watching the crowded trains carry Albanians out of Kosovo, it was hard not to think of the railways to Auschwitz and Treblinka. But the conflation of the disorganized eviction of the Kosovars with the efficient, well-ordered murder of six million Jews is an insult to everyone who died in the hell of Hitlerís concentration. The Serbian campaign has been bloody and savage, the civilian deaths appalling, but there is no systematic, scientific evil on display here ó the horrors of Balkan warfare and ethnic hatred are not the same as genocide.

This floundering for a justification for involvement reflects the lack of coherence in American foreign policy. The downward spiral of Clintonís State Department is unpleasant to watch. Madeleine Albright, Sandy Berger, and Strobe Talbott face a world in which the threat is no longer nuclear annihilation but a death from a thousand cuts, administered by rogue states (Iraq, Iran, North Korea, Serbia) and second-tier powers (the declining Russians and the rising Chinese). Their response has been
erratic and ineffective. We bomb Iraq ó  uselessly ó and coddle the North Koreans; we select pet minorities like the Kosovars to protect and leave others (the Kurds, the Tibetans, the Hutu, the South Sudanese) to fend for themselves; we alienate the weak but dangerous Russians and get chummy with the authoritarians in China. We amass meaningless treaties, slash the military, and allow events to dictate our policy, rather than the healthier opposite.

Kosovo is the culmination of the trend. All the components of Clintonís foreign policy are there: the useless treaty, gathering dust in Rambouillet, France; the moralistic pronouncements and abuse of historical detail; the vilifying of tinpot tyrants; the touching faith in the power of air strikes. But this time, we are in a real war, like it or not. The Serbs may not be able to shoot down our planes, but they can flood our allies with refugees and bloody our nose before the world by capturing our soldiers. And we are trapped in a Vietnam-like cycle of air strikes that only lead to still more air-strikes, and so on, all the way to Al Goreís millenium.

Albright and Co. assumed that Milosevic would cave under our bombs.ÝInstead, we find ourselves with no exit strategy and a humanitarian disaster of epic proportions on our hands. Bombing, it is clear, can only be effective if it is coupled with an invasion ó which would involve the loss of American life, an unpleasantness that has no place in Clintonís poll-driven policies. And even if we do decide to use ground troops, the Balkans are not a congenial place to fight a war against a well-armed, nationalistic foe with a homeland to defend.

And yet we may have no choice. The decisions of the past month have committed us to the Kosovars, and the abandonment of that commitment would weaken NATO immeasurably ó and would be an admission that we have lost a war to a second-rate dictator. We have no business in the Balkans, and this war may be our greatest disaster since Vietnam. But we are there, and we must win, by whatever means necessary. Clintonís folly may end with us administering Kosovo as a protectorate, but the alternative of superpower defeat and alliance collapse is not to be contemplated. We have come so far that the road back is longer than the road ahead ó unless peace arrives soon, the ground troops must move in. Let us pray that our fragile Pax Americana does not die in the forests and mountains where six hundred years ago the dreams of Serbia were shattered.

Clintonís fondness for the idea of a wartime Presidency ignores the unhappy case of Lyndon Baines Johnson. LBJ, another Southern politician, was tested by the crucible of conflict and found wanting. Clinton has created his own crucible, and it remains to be seen if America or all the world will burn in it.