The capacity to rain inexhaustible quantities of ordnance on a small country cannot by any stretch of the imagination be equated with victory. After 45 days of their mindless punitive action, what stands exposed once again in contemporary history is the limit to American power. NATO's cowardly inability to commit ground troops has resulted in Kosovo being emptied of its Kosovars. If this is the consequence of American sympathy for the Kosovars, what worse results could have been possible if the Americans were on the other side? With such friends, who needs enemies?

The American ambassador clambering onto the last helicopter flying out of Saigon (now Ho Chi Minh City) or the bodies of 18 American soldiersbeing dragged through the streets of Mogadishu are frightening images. But alas, that is the sort of thing that can happen if you engage wholeheartedly, ground troops et al. If you do not commit ground troops, you have images of hundreds of thousands of Kosovars, men women and children, uprooted from their homes, streaming into Albania, Macedonia and Montenegro. I suppose the superior American conscience can live with horrible images of the latter variety.

Civilised Europe, which created the Holocaust, continues to give us more of the same in driblets and this time, ironically, in the guise of promoting freedom and human rights.

We are being told that NATO strikes will continue until Slobodan Milosevic accepts all the conditions laid down by the West. ``We shall not rest until every Kosovar has been restored to his home in Kosovo.'' But thousands are already being settled in Europe and the US. Will they be pulled out of their new homes and expected to trek back into the devastated landscape that Kosovowill certainly be once peace descends. Surely these war aims are lies or utter nonsense.

A senior official in one of the better informed western foreign offices said this to me: ``The whole thing is a mess. There is no exit strategy. Heaven knows where all of this is going to end.'' Indeed, where is it going to end, this misplaced effort by the West to march into the next millennium, looking triumphant and muscular?

It would be delicious if some journalist dug out files from the British foreign office where the very same Milosevic was condoned for all he did in Croatia and Bosnia because the ``Serbs were allies'' during World War II.

During the Bosnian crisis, Europe and the US had different, sometimes divergent, aims. I remember a senior official in the French foreign office explaining European inaction in Bosnia in these words: ``The balance of power shifted against the Christians in Lebanon; it is shifting against the Muslims in Bosnia.''

The US looked at the larger picture which dictated twoconflicting approaches. In those days, Boris Yeltsin was America's pet project. One way to keep him buoyant was not to bruise pan-Slavic sentiment by punishing the Serbs.

On the other hand, the brutalisation of Bosnian Muslims, day after day, for years was regular fare on global TV, including in the Arab World. Arab dictators, seen to be seated in the American lap, faced a groundswell of popular resentment because these leaders were transparently ineffective in persuading the Americans to stop the genocide in Bosnia. Finally the Americans calculated that Yeltsin could be managed. It was American bombing that ended the Bosnian conflict.

After the collapse of the Soviet Union and Francis Fukuyama's End of History, the Americans thought the days of the Security Council veto were behind them. Lack of French, Russian and Chinese endorsement for Operation Desert Fox accelerated their search for a global order, outside the UN's collective security parameters, preferably before NATO celebrated its 50thanniversary. The mess in Kosovo is the consequence.

Now G-8 foreign ministers are meeting in Bonn to toss the game back to the UN. At least that is the Russian expectation.

Will NATO accept this loss of face? I doubt it, even though in the long run the UN will be brought into play because no US peacekeepers will be required, those whose lives are expendable, to move into a depopulated charnel house.

Meanwhile, European war aims will have changed. To counter the threat of three Muslim States in Europe -- Bosnia, Kosovo and Albania -- the following strategy will be seriously considered. Draw a line through

Bosnia-Herzegovina, merging the two halves with Croatia and Serbia. Northern Kosovo to be merged with Serbia, the southern part with Albania. Montenegro to become independent. This is what is being discussed, furtively, in western foreign policy enclaves. The stated war aim of returning Kosovars to Kosovo, my foot.