A Fog that Descends from Above - Clinton administration's role in the NATO strike against Yugoslavia

Mr. Helprin, a novelist, served in the Israeli army and Air Force and is a contributing editor of the Wall Street Journal.

Though the fog of war usually rises from the field of battle, sometimes it descends from the top. Like many in his generation, President Clinton refused to study war and held all things military in contempt. He arrived in the Oval Office purposely ignorant of the most important challenge of any presidency, a tremendously difficult subject that can baffle the greatest statesmen. Even among generals only a small minority have war in their bones; the rest are bureaucrats.

Seldom has a president been so preternaturally unprepared, and seldom has his unpreparedness shone so brightly. In his promiscuity he has extended, to the Ukraine, guarantees of which it is hard to judge which is greater, their dangerousness or their meaninglessness. And in his confusion he has established the principle of directing our shrinking military capacity always to where it is needed least, as in nation- building in Mogadishu, the counting of endangered animals, or the destruction of African pharmaceutical factories.

He accomplished the groundwork for the present failure by simultaneously reducing NATO's military capacity to approximately 40 percent of what he had inherited, while expanding its geographical range and its roster of missions, and changing its orientation from that of a barely manageable defensive alliance to a proactive instrument of gargantuan size and spread. For half a century the brilliance of NATO has been its massive power held in reserve for essential application-but no longer.

This may seem a heartless pronouncement in the face of hundreds of thousands of refugees driven from Kosovo, of mass executions, and of old people and babies dying of exposure in the inhospitable severities of early spring, but none of it would have happened absent American support for ethnic Albanian separatism. Always uncertain of cause and effect, and deeply in love with the lie, the administration pretends otherwise. But its stated aims for bombing Serbia were to force upon it the terms of Rambouillet, and the president's representatives were warned that such a course might unleash an attack against civilians. When the administration seeks to remove itself as a cause it says it knew that what has happened was going to happen anyway, but when it maintains that it didn't go against the advice of its generals it says that it had no idea that what has happened was going to happen at all.

We made this war. Without our intervention the Serbs would not have felt the need to visit their atrocities upon the Albanians, and they would not have. If an ethnic Albanian refugee states a similar view he is brought into line by the KLA. If an American does, Madeleine Albright will pigeon-puff. Nonetheless, it is true.

Had the administration not made the United States the instrument of radical ethnic Albanian separatism (as the French might say, comment?), Kosovo would have remained, as it had been since the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire, a restive and unhappy province like so many other areas of the world in which populations are oppressed or yearn for political unity with an adjoining state. Is it the policy of the United States to support irredentism, separatism, and secession wherever they may be close to ignition and war?

The administration's answer is that the Balkans are "in the heart of Europe." The Balkans, of course, are not in the heart of Europe. They are a backwater separated from the European heartland by mountain ranges and salt water, they are entirely unastride the major routes of communication or axes of invasion, and they are strategically and economically inessential. In citing them as the origins of the First and (incorrectly) the Second World Wars, and therefore as justification for his policy of internationalizing their conflicts, President Clinton seems not to comprehend that one of the reasons for the First World War was that the great powers of the time stupidly, mistakenly, and fatally internationalized the conflicts there.

Shall we join with the Basques in their struggle, or the Catalans, the Chechens, the Armenians, and Azerbaijanis? Which shall we support in Northern Ireland, the IRA or the RUC? Do not forget persecuted Russians in the Baltic, and the huge and irredentist Russian minority in the Ukraine. If these do not suffice, Germanophones of the Alto-Adige would like very much to reattach themselves to Austria. And what about the balance of Huguenots and Walloons in Belgium? Has that been attended to of late, or the plight of ethnic Germans in Poland? And in regard to the question of secession, is the president carrying secretly in his breast pocket the-in some quarters-long-awaited apology to the South?

INCONSISTENT AIMS

The policy of the United States has generally and sensibly been not to support irredentism (as in the case of the Sudeten Germans) or separatism (as in the case of Quebec) except in very special circumstances. We bombed the Bosnian Serbs to indicate our opposition to their drive to merge a crescent of predominately ethnically Serbian territory with adjacent Serbia, and at the same time armed and supported the Croats in their successful effort (complete with atrocities) to rid their Krajina region of the bulk of its inhabitants, 300,000 Krajina Serbs. These aims and actions, which we call humane and just, are precisely the opposite of our present policy, in which the ethnic Albanian drive for independence and eventual union with adjacent Albania is deemed worthy of our urgent support, and in which the expulsion of an ethnic minority from its geographical territory is seen not, as in the case of the Krajina Serbs, as a desideratum, but, rightly of course, as a war crime.