April 5, 1999

ESSAY / By WILLIAM SAFIRE

The Quiet Noisemaker

ASHINGTON -- In a New Year's Eve episode of the 50's

program "Candid Camera," the interviewer Allen Funt went into

a Times Square novelty shop and asked for a noisemaker that was not

too loud. Before long, the unsuspecting salesman was earnestly

pitching

him "the quietest noisemaker on the market."

That is the NATO strategy in the Serbian war: light up the

television skies

with nighttime explosions, but exercise restraint -- fighting to

win would

be much too noisy.

Evidence of this feckless approach was in the glorious pictorial

of the

destruction of the Interior Ministry in downtown Belgrade. Our cruise

missile caused a great blaze at one o'clock in the morning.

What determined the choice of target and time of attack? Not the

weather, nor the danger of antiaircraft defenses -- the two

reasons most

often given for our ineffectual jabs. Cruise missiles are

impervious to

both.

The target site was chosen because it symbolized "infrastructure." We

knew the building's occupants, forewarned, had been evacuated a week

before. The post-midnight time was chosen to make doubly certain that

nobody directing the sweep to make Kosovo Albanian-rein was on hand

to be killed, and that flames would show up vividly against the

night sky.

That was a propaganda mission. Its target was not so much the Serbian

population, but the watching world -- to offset the pictures of

refugees in

misery by showing that a fierce NATO was really letting the war

criminals have it.

This is the Third Way in foreign policy. One way remembers the Munich

analogy, and aims to stop Milosevic in Kosovo lest internal aggression

become the way of the world. The opposite way remembers Vietnam

and avoids quagmires at all cost.

The nations of Europe, followed by Clinton, have chosen the Third Way:

neither to stop nor to ignore the aggressor, but to punish

evildoing in a

low-risk manner. NATO's military mission is to lose honorably while

making the winner pay a cost. Thus do we establish the principle of

collective insecurity.

Nobody is better equipped to sell this than Bill Clinton. He

believes he

knows something that the idealists and the hawks and the Never Again

set do not know: the American public will no longer sustain a war with

casualties. Who wants to die for the credibility of NATO? Unless the

U.S. fleet is sunk as at Pearl Harbor, avoid the use of infantry.

Armed with that lifelong insight and supported by polls that

bolster it, he

does what he does best: he positions himself at the head of public

opinion's slow-walking parade. But he knows the public needs a

sense of

sacrifice, an illusion of moral righteousness, to go with its

abdication of

global responsibility.

Hence Clinton's rhetoric about the need to stand up to a new

Hitler; his

condemnation of near-genocide; his history lesson that two World Wars

started in this region; his solemn warning that Milosevic will be held

responsible for the lives of captured Americans; his hint that

Kosovo can

now no longer be ruled by Serbia; his call for patience in

"staying the

course." By all this he assumes the posture of resolve.

But in fact he is, in Churchill's phrase, "resolved to be

irresolute." The

course we are staying is not to defeat the Serbian expulsion of a

million

human beings, but merely to "diminish the capacity" of Milosevic to do

what he has already shown himself to be quite capable of having done.

We'll make him pay, Clinton assures us; you just wait, he'll be sorry.

Rollback is not promised but modified payback is; to assuage our

conscience, we'll make the victor feel some of his victims' pain.

But the

hesitancy that seeps from such conscience, as another Hamlet said,

makes cowards of us all. One of these days, Slobo (and Saddam) may

lay hands on a half-stolen Russian nuclear missile -- and that's

the end of

retribution.

Perhaps our President awaits some change in popular opinion to

give him

cover for military action beyond telegenic punitive air strikes. If

revelations of horror make that happen; if safely silent Presidential

candidates urge rollback; if the NATO's anniversary in Washington

pushes him forward -- then we may celebrate leadership from the man

who now still seeks his quiet noisemaker.