Nato

WASHINGTON -- Political language can infuse its own logic into events. President Clinton says Serbian atrocities in Kosovo constitute "genocide."If so, then what can realistically be said to remain of the premise on which NATO went to war?: The appropriate conclusion of this crisis would leave Serbia diminished and chastened, but retaining sovereignty over Kosovo.Serbia's atrocities are not genocide -- a campaign to exterminate an entire category of people -- but they are patent war crimes intended to terrorize a people into flight.

Washington -- SECRETARY of State Dean Acheson, in his memoir "Present at the Creation," tells the story of the day in 1949 when the founding countries of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization gathered in Washington to sign the NATO treaty, obligating them to come to one another's defense if attacked by the Soviets. Even as he initialed the treaty, though, Acheson wondered whether the allies' willingness to sign in Washington would be matched with a willingness to fight together in Europe.

LUXEMBOURG -- The impending election in Russia has tempered, for the moment, NATO's campaign to expand, but has not checked its enthusiasm to do so, an enthusiasm which in my view is likely to end badly.The Russian government's opposition to NATO expansion has automatically reinforced the alliance's -- and the American government's -- determination that expansion take place, since to change policy now would be ''to yield to Russian blackmail.''Naturally Russia does not like a development obviously directed against it. There would be no interest in NATO's expansion if Russia was not thought to be a possible future threat to the countries which want to become NATO's new members.

AT A TIME when the United States and our coalition partners need its help the most in Iraq, NATO is missing in action. If its members don't want it to become a mere historical curiosity and a paper army, they have to get serious about NATO becoming a relevant collective security organization ready to respond to today's challenges. NATO must immediately move to commit forces under its own flag to the stabilization and reconstruction of Iraq. For years, NATO has fretted over its need for a new identity, and it has only recently begun taking serious steps to make itself relevant in a world of global terrorism and security threats beyond Europe's borders.

WASHINGTON -- NATO's decision, which borders on the bizarre, to proceed with its 50th anniversary celebration is a metaphor for the war that NATO began imprudently, is waging peculiarly and is losing. The celebration, like the war, will proceed pretty much according to plan because there is no plan other than to pretend that things are going as planned.Within a week, the war begun to "avert a humanitarian disaster" (Prime Minister Tony Blair) was cast by President Clinton as psychotherapy for Kosovars: "NATO's military action has at least given [them]

Now that the Warsaw Pact has officially dissolved as a military organization, the dithering over the future of NATO must come to a halt. The Persian Gulf war demonstrated that while West Europeans are incapable of coherent collective action in a crisis outside their own continent, the NATO roster also produced a number of allies -- Britain foremost.This says little, however, about the North Atlantic Treaty Organization in the post-Cold War world. The U.S. was able to deploy 90,000 of its 300,000 NATO-based troops to the gulf war theater, thus achieving a measure of mobility that would have been denied if all U.S. forces had to be moved from the American mainland.

THE NATO ultimatum to Serbian forces around Sarajevo could be, at long last, a first step toward ending the bloodiest aggression in Europe in 50 years. Or it could be an empty gesture by politicians trying only to escape embarrassment.On the encouraging side, the allies seem to be serious about using air strikes if the Serbian aggressors resume shelling civilians in Sarajevo or fail to move their heavy weapons back 12 miles in the next 10 days. Previous NATO threats have been jokes, and quickly seen as such by the Serbs.

Paris. -- NATO is on its way toward a crash, as renewal of the Yugoslav war comes closer. Washington seems to underestimate the danger, its policy apparently a divided one, offering nominal support to the Contact Group's doomed effort to get a settlement with Belgrade, while giving new encouragement to the Bosnian and Croatian governments who have lost lands to recover.Many in Europe and in the U.N. Protection Force in ex-Yugoslavia are convinced that the United States is also secretly arming the Bosnian army to renew the war this spring.

WASHINGTON -- "NATO enlargement is on track and it will happen,'' Secretary of State Warren Christopher told delegates of 12 former Soviet-bloc countries now interested in joining NATO. The statement was short and clear, but still not quite persuasive to new democracies that have been knocking on NATO's door since their liberation from the Soviet Union, and have watched the Clinton administration defer their applications for membership ever since.The early applicants for membership in NATO -- Poland, the Czech Republic, Hungary -- have waited patiently.

BRUSSELS -- It seems like only yesterday that the French were the enfants terribles of NATO, carrying on in the dissident spirit of President Charles de Gaulle, who pulled his army out of the alliance in 1966 and pressed the organization headquarters out of Paris.Only two years ago, Paris was aggressively campaigning for a strictly European defense capability, independent of the United States.But this week's NATO summit in Brussels found the French to be a cornerstone of a strong NATO and a champion of a powerful U.S. military presence in Europe.