COMMANDER INTERRUPTUS

...That must not be parsed, and it deserves our best effort, not the decaffeinated, alcohol-free, sort-of-a-war-but-not-really version...

...And besides, we never put our feet on the ground, so we weren't really there, we were just flying over...

...Civilians are getting killed, Serb soldiers are on the rampage...

...Instead, we're staying well up in the skies, sincerely trying to distinguish friend from foe and regretfully calling it collateral damage when we err...

...They are now also reflected in his conduct of the Balkan war...

...And get elected...

...But Clinton has a second eccentric feature: He is able to take an incredible amount of embarrassment...

...I never want to hear the speech in which we learn that signing some wishy-washy deal is a fine outcome because after all, we never really went to war with that man, Milosevic...

...People are dying, we said we'd protect them, our military is there, we said we wouldn't fail...

...Is it conceivable that this whole enterprise might end with some halfhearted compromise...

...What we know of his personal behav-ior—and after this last year, most of us know more than we care to—indicates that some distinctive patterns shape his behavior...

...Or that it wasn't really ethnic cleansing, because the Albanians aren't an ethnic minority in the exact strict anthropological sense of the word...

...Why were ground troops ruled out as an option from the start, against the advice of military and strategic experts...

...Why take the risks if you're going to refuse the rewards...

...Someone else would have resigned rather than face that kind of humiliation...

...Not many people would have had the stamina to get through the Starr affair, the hearings, the international airing of cigar and Altoids anecdotes, and at the end of it, an impeachment...

...Many have remarked on this disconnect between what we are doing in the air and what is happening on the ground, between what we set out to do and what, it is starting to seem, we might settle for...

...Given the enormity of the human drama unfolding on the TV screens before us, and given our rhetoric, it doesn't seem possible for us to back down, or to settle for a dubious outcome...

...This man will possess and use an illegal substance, he will dally with an intern, he will risk discovery, disgrace and impeachment, but he will deliberately stop short of the usual gratifications...

...He may believe that if things go badly, we can wiggle out of our Balkans engagement with a few scrupulous redefinitions of what our goal was...

...Now let's look at Kosovo, by any measure a very strange war...

...Maybe not with Lewinsky, but with Milosevic, President Clinton may have to go all the way...

...The first striking eccentricity in Clinton's makeup is his inclination to engage in bold, risk-taking behavior but to stop just short of the customary conclusions of his acts...

...I can't speak to the military issues, but I suggest that the real explanation may lie elsewhere, namely in the inner workings of our commander-in-chief...

...Cheryl Benard is the research director of the Boltzmann Institute of Politics, a think tank based in Austria, and the author of a novel, Moghul Buffet...

...This produced enormous numbers of refugees and untold misery...

...Think about it...

...This is not the way people normally act, and on the face of it, it doesn't make sense...

...Our own soldiers are there, sort of, but they are not engaging the enemy...

...There's too much at stake: the lives of hundreds of thousands of Kosovar Albanians, the stability of Europe, the precedent of arbitrary, brutal expulsions of entire population groups, our national honor, the credibility of NATO...

...It depends on what you mean by war": That's the speech I don't want to hear...

...That brings us to the third worrisome feature in Clinton's behavior, his inclination to solve problems by taking refuge in ambiguity...

...And remain in office...

...People smoke marijuana for the high, have sex for the, well, for the sex...

...Clinton appears to have concluded that safety lies in remaining one step back from whatever dangerous act he is engaging in, because you can then wiggle out on a technicality...

...To wit: This is a man who will smoke marijuana, but not inhale...

...My hypothesis: because that is his style whenever things are dangerous, because that gives him the ambiguity he needs for comfort...

...When backed into a corner, he resorts to linguistic obfuscations...

...Our elected representatives seem willing to go further, the public appears supportive, but our president is holding firm to his limited air war...

...While we were bombing bridges many miles away, our Albanian charges were being slaughtered in massacres...

...This is an admirable trait when it comes to personal adversity but may work less well as a foreign policy stance for a superpower...

...He will have an affair, but scrupulously insist to his partner from the start that intercourse is not an option, and require much coaxing to accept other culminations...

...Ethnic cleansing not only continued but was immensely accelerated during the intervention we launched to prevent it...

...I suggest that in our commander-in-chief's categorical exclusion of ground troops—the deployment of which is the logical and customary consummation of any war previously known to humankind—we may see his selective abstemiousness transposed to matters martial...

...For Clinton, we can answer that...

...Clinton's ability to withstand punishment is, and I say this without malice, truly exceptional...

...To many people, that still doesn't make sense, but Clinton has good subjective reasons to believe it does: It has worked for him...

...He believes that refraining from the ultimate conclusion will allow him, when push comes to shove, to escape the ultimate sanction...

...I hope that I am wrong, and the president is not constrained by the idiosyncrasies of his personality...