April 12, 1999 | Like most conservatives, even those hawkish on the current NATO military action, I look at the war unfolding in Kosovo with grim foreboding. Our commander in chief is a liar and a cheat and it shows; and will have consequences. Already President Clinton has had to avoid speaking of Serbian rapes in his official statements because of the charges that have been leveled against him personally.

More seriously, for nearly seven years Clinton has systematically gutted our military establishment and drawn down its forces. At the same time, he has surrendered decisions about the deployment of those forces to multilateral agencies like the United Nations and NATO. This has pushed us into conflicts whose relevance to America’s national interests has not always been clear, and to military objectives that are often not matched with the political will to carry them out. This, in turn, has resulted in the spectacle of American forces lobbing bombs at hostile targets like Serbia and Iraq, inflicting just enough damage to entrench their aggressive leaders further into power, while blackening our national image in the eyes of ever-larger populations across the globe.

Time and again, Clinton has attempted to assert military superiority on the political cheap, with the result that he has squandered our stockpiles and taunted our adversaries, without significantly affecting reality on the ground. After a series of mock wars against Saddam Hussein, Clinton has left the Iraqi dictator more firmly in power in his own country, still able to get on with his nuclear and chemical weapons program, but now without the annoying distraction of U.N. inspectors to hamper his progress. Saddam has even begun to advise Slobodan Milosevic in his spare time.

The NATO airstrikes in Kosovo have had a similar self-defeating impact on Milosevic and his agenda, causing the Serbian nation to rally around his leadership and accelerating the expulsion of ethnic Albanians. At the same time, the flood of refugees has already begun destabilizing the next Balkan dominoes in his path.

The bungling of the assault on Milosevic is not merely a case of political incompetence, but political malfeasance. Much as Clinton launched missiles into the Sudan without consulting his Joint Chiefs of Staff, so he authorized an air war in Kosovo that his military and intelligence advisors warned him could not accomplish the objectives he used to justify them. Now it is clear to everyone that only the introduction of ground troops can accomplish these objectives, but at much greater human cost than had they been introduced at the outset.

As Americans contemplate this prospect, however, who knows what Clinton will do next? Will there be an invasion? Clinton has said he has no intention of introducing ground troops, but what does that mean, coming from the prince of deception? Perhaps it means (as he has subsequently explained) that he would indeed introduce ground troops, but only into a "permissive environment" -- a term only Clinton could parse. Meanwhile, helicopters and support crews will soon be introduced, which is a first step down the slippery slope of ground war, in the pattern of Vietnam. And so American youth are being sent into battle, and the security and reputation of America itself are being placed on the line, under circumstances that are woefully unclear by a leader no one can trust.

But this isn't the only bad news. The dramatic images coming out of Kosovo, in fact, have diverted attention somewhat from other disturbing reports that, under different circumstances, might have blown Clinton's presidency out of the political water -- and whose import for the future of this nation’s security is alarming. In the midst of the bombing, the chief of China’s intelligence services was revealed to have been one of the illegal funders of the Clinton-Gore reelection campaign. A few days ago, the agency he heads was reported by the New York Times to have stolen the secrets of America’s neutron bomb.

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