President Clinton on Thursday. (AP)

By John F. Harris
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, April 2, 1999; Page A1

Ten days into the allied bombing campaign over Yugoslavia, President Clinton is a leader short on sleep and short on options. A leader with a personal distaste for confrontation, who has said often his mission in public life is to help people peacefully reconcile their differences, is suddenly a war president.

He is up late and up early, advisers say, on the line with aides getting the latest news on Kosovo, on the line with foreign leaders in an effort to keep the NATO alliance united. A politician whose early adulthood was colored by his opposition to the Vietnam War is reported by friends to be exhausted but resolute -- certain that he chose the right path in ordering an air war even as it has yet to produce the results he is seeking.

But if Clinton is unwavering, the stakes of his war -- envisioned as a limited operation with the aim of helping the embattled Albanian population of Kosovo against Serb aggressors -- are each day increasing, with consequences far beyond the Balkans.

If Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic prevails in a campaign of ethnic cleansing that Clinton has said is approaching "genocide," administration officials say the result could be the emasculation of NATO and a belittlement of American standing in Europe.

But Clinton's White House reaffirmed yesterday that it is determined to resist what a rising chorus of voices in the foreign policy establishment say is the most obvious means of avoiding this humiliation -- a dramatic escalation of the war through the introduction of ground troops.

Clinton and his senior foreign policy aides crossed that option off the list last fall, but sources said White House meetings have returned to the issue anew in recent days as leading voices, such as Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) and Henry A. Kissinger, have said ground troops must be considered. But the new conversations, sources said, have not altered the old conclusions: Having troops invade Kosovo would lead to a dangerous and open-ended commitment that is not in the U.S. interest.

Vice President Gore, one of the most ardent voices in favor of bombing Yugoslavia, is also one of the most vehement voices in opposition to putting ground troops there, sources said. The vice president is right to be concerned, said one foreign policy adviser to Clinton. If U.S. troops go to Yugoslavia, they are certain to be bogged down there in an ambiguous mission by the time Gore seeks to succeed Clinton in the 2000 election.

Yet even Clinton's preferred method of escalation -- intensifying and expanding the bombings -- carries costs that weigh particularly heavy on this administration. One is the risk of deep new strains in the U.S. relationship with Russia. Since his opening days in office, Clinton has identified better relations with Russia as among the very top priorities on his national security agenda. Now this aim is jeopardized by the strong negative feelings in Moscow toward the NATO campaign.

The operation has also damaged the reputation and authority of the United Nations. Clinton has sought in other contexts, such as the Iraq conflict, to elevate the U.N. Security Council in prominence. But the United States insisted that no U.N. authorization was required to launch an air war in the heart of Europe.

This confluence of political and strategic dilemmas has provoked a crisis that seemed, from the vantage point of the president's political advisers, to strike with the suddenness of lightning. Just six weeks after Clinton survived his impeachment battle, some aides acknowledge their surprise at being in a confrontation that is just as stressful within the White House, and holds life-and-death consequences that were never present in the year-long burlesque show of the Monica S. Lewinsky scandal.

"He's very tired," said one presidential friend, describing Clinton's mood in the midst of crisis. "But he's very determined. He believes this was a moral duty. He knows we had to do this."

Clinton's burden, and his determination to escape the wearying clamor of the Oval Office, prompted him to impatiently brush off the warnings of aides about playing golf this week. The outing created what some worried was unfortunate symbolism: a commander in chief on the links while his pilots drop bombs an ocean away. The reality, advisers said, was the opposite: He sought the outing to sort out his thinking in the cascade of bad choices.

"There was a debate -- should he go out?" said one confidant, who said an aide was even dispatched to look up clips on George Bush's recreational habits after the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait. "He said, 'I'm exhausted and I need to clear my mind.' "

Clinton's predicament, say a variety of people who know him, is replete with ironies. Clinton grew up watching well-intentioned leaders -- including personal heroes like John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson -- sink gradually into an undefined and ultimately unwinnable war in Vietnam. This generational experience was reinforced by his early experience as president, in which he expanded a humanitarian mission in Somalia only to retreat after 18 Army Rangers were killed in a firefight.

But another set of instincts is tugging Clinton in the opposite direction. The success of the NATO peacekeeping in Bosnia, which Clinton pursued in defiance of his reputation as a politician who always follows the polls, boosted his confidence mightily in the efficacy of American power abroad. Meanwhile, missed opportunities haunt him: At an emotional appearance in Rwanda last year, he acknowledged he and other world leaders should have intervened to prevent the 1994 genocide in that African nation.

Moreover, Clinton plainly responds at a personal level to the Balkans bloodshed. Many times he has said the warring there has implications for the American experiment in cultural pluralism, and that allowing ethnic warfare to go unchecked risks letting the "21st century world" descend into "a time of chaos and madness . . . the vision of the darkest of science fiction writers," as he put it in a speech Tuesday to a group of electronics industry executives.

"You take Somalia, that's what forces you out. You take Bosnia, that's what pushes you in," said former Clinton senior adviser George Stephanopoulos, referring to the conflicting lessons his former boss apparently has learned. "It highlights how there are no good options."

Uncertain whether he belongs in a tradition of American moralists abroad that goes back at least to Woodrow Wilson, or whether to stand in an equally long line of leaders who worried most about dangerous foreign entanglements, Clinton has characteristically looked to find "a third way." In Kosovo, that translates to bombing but no troops.

But foreign policy experts say this middle-ground approach may have put more at risk than the administration bargained for, once Milosevic responded to the bombing by accelerating his assault.

"What's changed is the reputation and the honor of the administration and NATO" are now at stake, said Richard K. Betts, a foreign policy analyst at Columbia University. "We've gotten into a war, we've committed our resources and our reputation to trying to do something."

For now, the White House said it remains confident that something will be achieved from the air. "You make the cost higher and higher," said one senior administration official. "At some point, Milosevic is going to cry uncle."