It seems perfectly fitting that such a president is presiding over a military campaign crippled by its refusal to deploy the ground forces necessary to achieve its objectives. It is further apt that his national security advisor is Sandy Berger, who launched his own political career as an anti-war activist in the McGovern presidential campaign under the slogan "Bring America Home."

It was actually in the McGovern anti-war campaign that the two leaders of our current military engagement met and formed their political alliance. In the seven years they have been in charge of the nation's security, they have authorized over 28 deployments of America's military forces. To put this into historical perspective, that is an 18-fold increase over the frequency of military deployments (10) ordered by seven American presidents during the 45 years of the Cold War between 1945 and 1990.

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Some of the Clinton deployments have been of the "wag-the-dog" type in Afghanistan and the Sudan (now officially admitted to have been a "mistake"). Some have been attempted intimidation-by-air-strikes against Iraq, or the failed attempt to restore democracy to Haiti. But most have been for so-called "humanitarian purposes," including hurricane, famine, flood and riot relief.

The current Serbian adventure is justified by Clinton mainly on humanitarian grounds. "When we see slaughter or ethnic cleansing abroad," the president announced three weeks after launching the Balkan raids, "we should remember that we defeat these things by teaching and by practicing a different way of life, and by reacting vigorously when they occur within our own midst. That's what this is about."

The phrase "when they occur within our own midst" was obviously inserted to justify this "humanitarian" response to Milosevic's killing of 2,000 ethnic Albanians (the toll before the NATO attack), as opposed to the slaughter of more than one million Tutsis in Rwanda -- an atrocity the administration studiously ignores. NATO's air attacks have been described by England's Tony Blair as "the first progressive war." Presumably, this is because the objectives of the war, as described by its authors, are not explicitly self-interested. Perhaps Blair forgot about Woodrow Wilson, the reluctant liberal warrior who justified his own European intervention as "a war to make the world safe for democracy."

Remembering Wilson can be a sobering exercise. In an attempt to redeem the bloodshed of World War I by insisting on self-determination for the subjects of the conquered Austro-Hungarian empire, Wilson helped destroy the Balkan peace the Habsburgs and their empire had secured. In redrawing the map of Central Europe, Wilson therefore sowed the seeds of the current conflict.

Lack of clarity about national purpose, discomfort with military means, and utopian expectations for the postwar future are all hallmarks of the soft-headed leftism which informs the political views of both the Clinton White House and its principal NATO allies (with the exception of the French). Ironically, these are the same political views that led us into the last American quagmire, also under a Democratic president, in Vietnam. Again, we are intruding into a civil war, again we are applying "coercive diplomacy" ineffectively, trying to bring a nationalist adversary to the negotiating table. As in Vietnam, gradual escalation and reliance on air power has only strengthened the adversary's resolve, in the present instance solidifying Serbians behind a man who is -- however cynical and ruthless -- their elected leader.

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