War In The Balkans: US Reaction - A shocked nation turns on Clinton

WITH THREE American servicemen facing trial in Yugoslavia for espionage, more than a third of the population of Kosovo in flight, and the whole Balkan region on the threshold of chaos, President Bill Clinton is facing mounting pressure to take some - any - dramatic action to stop the biggest foreign policy crisis of his administration running out of control.

But the luck that has been Bill Clinton's constant companion through the six years of his presidency seemed to have deserted him.

Yesterday, in a new attempt to convince shocked Americans that the White House is at least abreast of the refugee crisis, if not physically able to stem it, Mr Clinton received representatives of US aid organisations at the White House. The briefing seemed designed to counter the criticism that has followed Mr Clinton's decision to spend Tuesday afternoon on the golf course - just as the first reports of the refugee exodus hit American television screens.

The White House has since "explained" the President's afternoon off as reflecting his own determination to clear his head to deal with the gathering catastrophe. But talk of strain, sleepless nights, a cold and allergy attacks that the White House has also disseminated about the President in the past two days has done nothing to inspire public confidence in the leader's state of mind.

On Day 10 of what has developed into an undeclared Western war on Serbia, Mr Clinton was trapped between a multiplicity of bad options. The commander in chief who evaded call-up to Vietnam, whose relations with the military have been tense since his botched attempt to have homosexuals accepted into the armed forces and exacerbated by the perception of a double standard over the punishment of adultery, has found himself in charge of one of the biggest deployment of US forces abroad since the Gulf War.

Although Mr Clinton now carries himself like a commander at military gatherings and salutes like a seasoned professional, his reluctance to order military action is well known. It has fuelled criticism in the military that he is half-hearted about it and does not understand that if you hit, you have to hit hard.

Even as he evinces in public the certainty that this war is a just war and he has no doubts about the wisdom of prosecuting it, every decision he has made and then defended has cruelly rebounded - and every commentator in America has no hesitation in telling him so. The "moral imperative" to protect the Albanian population of Kosovo has resulted in the Kosovars' wholesale expulsion from their province at gunpoint. Rather than preventing a dangerous conflict from spreading, the Serbian assault on Kosovo threatens to destabilise Albania, Macedonia and Montenegro. The objective of preserving regional stability has opened a rift with Russia, and the credibility of Nato is in question.

While not militarily significant, the loss of a supposedly invisible plane and the capture of three servicemen threaten the Gulf War image of the US fighting machine as invulnerable.

Especially worrying for Mr Clinton must also be the fact that his domestic poll ratings that held so steady throughout the Monica Lewinsky sex scandal have started to wobble over Kosovo. Two weeks after being hailed as the most competent foreign policy President this century, approval of his handling of foreign policy has slipped from 64 per cent to 54 per cent - and that was before the three Americans were taken prisoner.

His decision to order air strikes against Yugoslavia is also proving the least popular of all his recent resorts to military force. Only 53 per cent of those polled approved, compared with 74 per cent who supported air strikes against Baghdad last December, 66 per cent who approved the retaliation against those deemed responsible for the US embassy bombings last August, and the 79 per cent who backed air attacks on Iraq at the start of the Gulf War.

Senior senators from both sides are expressing misgivings about the conduct of the military operation. Some sharp questions have been asked by the chairman of the Senate armed services committee, John Warner, about exactly why US troops were in Macedonia and under whose mandate they come.

Mr Clinton is beleaguered as at no time before in his presidency. His cool under political fire is legendary, as is his facility to escape seemingly intractable situations. But even he looks anguished this weekend.