[an error occurred while processing this directive] A Times Editorial

A credibility chasm

While we are seeing stunning gaps between talk and reality in the Balkans conflict, time grows short for achieving a diplomatic settlement.

The "credibility gap" is a term coined during the Vietnam War to describe the distance between the Johnson and Nixon administrations' blandly optimistic pronouncements about the course of the war and the horrific reality on the ground in Southeast Asia. For millions of patriotic Americans who came to oppose our government's involvement in Vietnam, the credibility gap epitomized the calamity that can result when our government wages a war by half-measures, without the informed consent of the American people.

As a college student, Bill Clinton protested against the Vietnam War and went to great trouble to avoid fighting in it, but he apparently did not absorb the war's lessons as well as he led us to believe. Otherwise, he and other members of his administration would not have created what amounts to a credibility chasm that has hindered their conduct of the war in the Balkans.

That chasm widened over the weekend with the publication of a column under President Clinton's name in the New York Times. As pundit George Will pointed out, the article's misstatements begin with the very first words: "We are in Kosovo with our allies . . ."

In fact, the United States and NATO are not in Kosovo. Alliance planes have flown hundreds of sorties over Kosovo and Serbia proper, but no U.S. or NATO troops have been in Kosovo. Even friends of the Clinton administration now acknowledge that the decision to publicly rule out the use of ground forces before the war began was a tragic error. That decision has had predictable military and diplomatic consequences. With no threat of NATO ground troops, Slobodan Milosevic was emboldened to reject NATO's prewar demands. Since then, the course of the war has revealed once again the limits of even the most sustained air campaign.

The reliance on air warfare also has had an effect on NATO's credibility. Relying on air power made the war safer for NATO -- but much more dangerous for civilians on the ground. U.S. and NATO spokesmen too often have been slow and grudging to take responsibility for the inevitable accidents of long-range bombing: the hospitals and embassies, the buses of civilians and convoys of refugees. As in Vietnam, where it became necessary to destroy villages in order to save them, the antiseptic talk of "collateral damage" does a disservice to the human beings on the receiving end of NATO's misdirected bombs.

President Clinton went on to write that "60 days into the air campaign, NATO is more unified on Kosovo than it was at the beginning." Then what explains the growing clamor for a bombing moratorium from Italy and Greece? Or the open split between Britain and Germany on the issue of ground troops? Or the obvious divisions within our own government?

Let us hope the president is trying only to deceive the American public and the rest of the world, and not himself. If administration officials have deluded themselves into believing the American public and the NATO alliance are solidly supportive of the course of the war so far, they may fail to take advantage of opportunities to bring the war to an honorable diplomatic end. The two sides have not been far apart for the past two weeks. Only the largely semantic issue of the constitution of an international peacekeeping force in Kosovo stands in the way of a settlement that could return Kosovo's ethnic Albanians to secure homes before the onset of winter.

There is little time left for a diplomatic agreement that can avert an even greater humanitarian disaster throughout the Balkans. Yet the Clinton administration, at least for public consumption, is talking instead of an incremental escalation of the war -- as if determined to repeat another disastrous mistake from Vietnam.

Incredibly, the president now claims he never ruled out the deployment of ground forces in Kosovo, and Secretary of State Madeleine Albright talks of injecting 50,000 NATO troops into a "non-permissive environment." Perhaps this is another bluff intended to win further concession from Milosevic, but NATO's previous bluffs have backfired.

The deployment of ground troops, or at least the threat of troops, might have made sense months ago, when there was still a civilization in Kosovo to defend. However, Serb forces already have won the war on the ground. Two months after NATO went to war, hundreds of thousands of Kosovars are less safe, several Balkan governments are less stable, NATO's future is less certain and U.S. foreign policy is less credible. For those reasons, Washington should be at least as eager as Belgrade to reach a diplomatic agreement that can begin to salvage whatever is left of Kosovo -- and of this administration's credibility.

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