Leading article: The absurd strategy being pursued by President Clinton

THIS IS chutzpah on a grand scale. Robin Cook and Madeleine Albright have written a joint article for an American newspaper attacking the idea that the Serb dictator Slobodan Milosevic can be defeated by a campaign of "immaculate coercion", in which "no mistakes are made and no innocent casualties occur". The Foreign Secretary and the Secretary of State are quite right. Yet "immaculate coercion" is an apt description of the United States government's policy in this war. Never mind innocent civilian casualties, President Clinton seems determined to fight for the rights of the Kosovar Albanians without any risk of incurring military casualties either.

It has been pointed out endlessly that no war has ever been won from the air alone, which may or may not be true (air strikes alone were sufficient to bring Milosevic to the negotiating table at Dayton, Ohio, in 1995), although there is always, and especially in the rapidly changing techniques of warfare, a first time. The more relevant point is that there are no contingency plans, just in case bombing alone does not force Milosevic to withdraw from Kosovo. For the first six weeks of this war Tony Blair pointed out that, even if Nato was going to send in ground troops, it would not have done so yet. In the Gulf War, the bombing went on for six weeks before the troops rolled in. But we are now into week eight of the bombing in Yugoslavia, and no preparations have been made. They cannot be, of course, because Nato is a committee which must operate by agreement, and any one of its 19 member states can effectively veto the use of land forces - and even the planning for the use thereof. Worse, it is not merely Greece, or Italy, or Germany, that refuses to will the means to achieve the end of reversing "ethnic cleansing" in Kosovo. It is the US, which provides the overwhelming bulk of Nato forces.

Something strange is going on in the politics of this war, in that Mr Blair had seemed to be acting as an outrider for President Clinton, giving a lead to international and American opinion in an effort to make the deployment of troops possible. But the Prime Minister has turned out to be, as Anne McElvoy put it in these pages last week, a "hawk without wings". Mr Clinton allowed Mr Blair to become isolated, as the US reluctance to commit ground troops has hardened rather than softened and the President has followed the line of least resistance.

The result is an embarrassment, but for the US and for Nato, not for the Prime Minister, who is right to refuse to compromise in the fight against ethnic terrorism. If Mr Blair should be criticised, it should be for failing to press the case for ground forces hard enough or explicitly enough. He seems to have calculated that Britain's Nato allies are more likely to be persuaded by nudge and fudge. But no, it seems they will continue in their deluded belief in a policy of "immaculate coercion", in which Milosevic is persuaded by sanctions, blockade and pinpoint casualty- free bombing to join the Belgrade branch of Amnesty International.

Too bad. The war will just have to be fought as best it can: Britain can hardly fight it alone, despite the weekend announcement of the deployment of 2,000 Gurkhas and Paras. Although it is right that Europe should shoulder more of the burden of policing human rights in its own backyard, it is also reasonable to call on the US as co-guarantor of the doctrine of international community. Nato is running out of targets to bomb by now, and so the pressure is bound to grow for low-level flights against Serb armour; the war will creep unacknowledged towards Nato "escorts" for the returning refugees operating in a "semi-permissive" environment. But better to fight a just war with both hands tied behind the back than not at all.