WASHINGTON -- Never will so many nations inflict so much destruction with so little relish.

Because outrage is absent and the public's war spirit is lacking; because few in NATO want to see the collateral damage sure to be inflicted as bombs go astray; and because foreign policy is so foreign to our economy-fixated discourse, Americans are asking as we go in: What national interest impels us to intervene to stop an independence movement from losing?Four categories of answers, the first three of them unhappy:

1. THE SIMPLIFIERS: President Clinton painfully gives the reason designed to stir emotion and rally popular support: "President Milosevic . . . has again chosen aggression over peace." Serbian forces are "burning down Kosovar Albanian villages and murdering civilians."

2. THE THOUGHTFUL INTERNATIONALISTS: Senators like Richard Lugar, R-Ind., and John McCain, R-Ariz., are reluctant to see us lurch into combat commitment with no end in sight. They find themselves forced to support the bombing of the Serbs because to do otherwise after all our threatening would be to reveal the alliance of Western nations as a pitiful, helpless giant.

3. THE ANTI-WILSONIANS: Henry Kissinger exhibits "great unease" at NATO's decision to intervene; his conceptual framework holds Woodrow Wilson's principle of self-determination to be unduly idealistic and destabilizing. He stops short of saying we should not join the bombing because he does not want to disestablish the foreign policy Establishment.

4. THE AMERICA FIRSTERS AND THE QUAGMIRE-AVOIDERS: Now that the McGovernite left has fallen silent about taking sides in a civil war, anti-war voices are mainly from the Republican right, and they alone are unconflicted. They condemn the multilateral intervention, arguing: If Serbia refuses to allow a province coveted by neighboring Albania to secede, outsiders have no right to label such defense of its national borders "aggression" and to support the rebels. Russia agrees: If NATO can help the Kosovars break away from Serbia, then it can help the Chechens break away from Russia. That's why Yevgeny Primakov had to turn around and go home.

I'm in a separate school with Wilson, who was three generations ahead of his time. Wilson was an arrogant idealist, a troublemaking rearranger of national borders who summed up his vision thus: "Every people has a right to choose the sovereignty under which they shall live." (Great principle; bad sentence structure.)

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If the repressing country is powerful, the sovereignty does not change; too bad for now, Tibet.

If the villainous sovereign is relatively weak and the potential bloodshed is horrendous, then in we go (with bombs, not troops) to save the Kosovars.

Consistent and principled? Not quite. But the trend at century's end is toward self-determination, propelled by a world audience humanely averse to seeing casualties up close.

New York Times News Service

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