Anyone with half a brain knew that the United States Air Force could blow away Serbia's infrastructure with little risk. We had been told that our aviators were in great danger because of Serbia's dozen planes and flak that could hit any flying object below 15,000 feet. Yet, we managed to do the job just with cruise missiles and a meager force of a thousand planes, a feat indeed. Serbia ended up without electricity, without fuel, without bridges, without television, and the delivery of cigarettes to Belgrade became a problem. It is not the destruction of his military installations that made Slobo cave in, it is the destruction of his public utilities. His army has survived practically unscathed. Alan Keyes, who has a talent for concise formulas, called the bombings for what they were, "terrorism." To be fair, hitting the Chinese embassy was the real coup of the whole operation, although NATO downplayed it with laudable humility. The amazing achievement of winning a war just by air power, a first in history, was the President's idea. He alone, against expert military advice, could achieve what the Luftwaffe could not do in 1940, and what even the USAF and RAF together could not do in 1943. It is so brilliant that we should try that one day on China, which also persecutes and kills people, grabbed Tibet, and will soon grab Taiwan. Well, on second thought, it might not work, because China is a tad bigger than Serbia, which is about the size of Ohio, and China now has nuclear weapons as good as ours, or will soon. That's too bad, because a victory over China by air power alone and for purely humanitarian and idealistic motives would have been a jolly good legacy for you know whom.

What were the idealistic and humanitarian motives of the operation? Ah yes, they were to protect the Kosovars and their possessions, to prevent the partition of Kosovo along ethnic lines, to stabilize the Yugoslav Federation, to make people live in harmony, and to punish the villains who don't worship diversity. Now, these noble goals seem well out of reach, and are likely to stay that way for the next hundred years. The NATO geniuses-including our President, the brilliant military strategist-have made everything so much worse that a lot of Albanians must long for the good old days of the civil war, when Slobo was after the KLA and no foreign intervention loomed over the horizon. So, we won the war, but we did not achieve any of its purposes. Then, why the war, and did we really win anything at all? We must find answers to these questions in Mr. Clinton's sorry record and the construction of a New Europe ruled by England, France, and Germany.

Mr. Clinton, the brilliant warrior, has a legitimate claim to unsurpassed corruption and ineptitude in the history of this country. His personal behavior has not been any better, and his appointments to cabinet posts, just dismal, with the consequences that we know. It is safe to impute the Kosovo escapade to his incompetence in foreign affairs and the bunglings of his petulant secretary of state, who believes that tantrums and ultimata are the highest forms of diplomatic finesse. Yet, Mr. Clinton relished the opportunity to win a war in the hope that claims of victory and good intentions would overshadow a blemished presidential record, regardless of the results. Besides, it also provided a great distraction from revelations about his administration's shady relations with China, embarrassing campaign contributions, and leaks of military secrets.

Meanwhile, Messrs. Blair, Jospin, and Schröder were hard at work building a New Order-a Napoleonic Europe-in a quest for the "Third Way," a form of socialism yet to be discovered that would work and could effectively challenge American capitalism. To bring European countries into the fold, they made great efforts to expand NATO to practically everyone with an undeclared option of using military power to cow the recalcitrant. The only problem was to make an example, that is, to show that they meant business. They quickly found an opportunity in the Yugoslav Federation, where the KLA had started a war of provocation some fifteen years ago. Mr. Blair, whose country had joined the New Order rather reluctantly, was particularly eager to catch up with his new partners, and perhaps surpass them in zeal. The remaining difficulty was to keep clean hands and find someone else to do the dirty work. Entered Mr. Clinton, who obligingly volunteered his army, air force, and navy, under the sanctimonious pretense that Milosevic is another Hitler, and that the worst genocide since World War II was in progress in Kosovo-pronouncements much in line with Mr. Clinton's long record of lies, poor judgment, and ignorance of history. The Rambouillet meeting contrived a pretext for aggression by presenting the Yugoslavs with conditions that they could not accept so that the pounding could start shortly.

In the aftermath of the disaster, much is made of reversing the destruction of Kosovo, but not of Serbia unless Milosevic, an elected head of state, steps down. Little choice in that matter is left to NATO which made him its straw man, but I would propose that Slobo is irrelevant to the future of Kosovo. Regardless of who presides over the Federation, the fundamental problem is still unresolved. An autonomous government of the province will make its Serbian residents even less welcome than before, and a KLA demilitarized but not disarmed will see to that. For almost twenty years, the KLA has been working at forcing independence or inclusion in a greater Albania by means of terrorism, and its recent reorganization made sure that only hard-liners were in charge. It is not difficult to imagine that in a near future KLA snipers will start plucking members of the peacekeeping forces here and there and blame the Serbs for it. The NATO Napoleons will of course go for that since they have forever designated Serbia as the villain. In any case, Kosovo will end up ever more Albanian, and it is doubtful that NATO will intervene to inhibit a declaration of independence from the Yugoslav Federation. Messrs. Blair, Clinton, Jospin, and Schröder, all good leftists, are determined to replace ethnic nations with political states and will resort to roughshod methods to implement their internationalist model, regardless of the hard realities, but they will fail.

This operation, which has depleted much of America's ordnance, keeps overtaxing our military on yet another mission that has nothing to do with national security. The splendid military force rebuilt by president Reagan is now half of what it was in numbers and quality. Recruitment and retention are a problem, and so is training, just at the time when China emerges as a serious threat, directly or by proxy. It seems that Mr. Clinton's preoccupation with legacy made him commit but another blunder, just as usual.