Now compare this with what another fine orator and perhaps a more flawed man said at the Whiteman air base at Missouri, also on Friday, when praising B-2 pilots for their role in getting the Slobodan Milosevic to accept defeat: ``Make no mistake about it, (your example) is even more powerful than the power of our bombs.

The example that you set is a stern rebuke on a daily basis to ethnic cleansing and a reaffirmation of the moral worth and the sheer joy of working together as equal human beings for a good cause.''

Despite Monica Lewinsky anddespite the fact that it took Bill Clinton six years since he first promised a tough line against Serbian aggression in Bosnia to actually act, only a consummate virtual realist can get away with this rhetoric. But then that is what politics is all about -- the art of communication, the science of getting ideas across, even if they do not always reflect the truth. Great politicians have it, ordinary ones don't.

Our guys don't. When they react, they do so late. Listen to how Vajpayee described the Kargil crisis in the famously delayed message: ``The whole operation has been thrust upon us.'' Compare this what Clinton said about Kosovo, a part of Europe most Americans surely don't know how to spell. The air strikes were to make the world safe for democracy, he said, not to distract from a certain series of semi-recumbent encounters. The 79 days of bombing were not to save his presidency from shame but to end the century ``not with helpless indignation over such unspeakable cruelty, but its opposite: a ringingaffirmation by free people of human dignity''.

Yet in India, our so-called statesmen find it hard to justify to the nation a defence of their own realm. They do not find time, in all their offers of safe passage and their abuse of savage neighbours, to think of the Kashmiris, the people whose state they are ostensibly protecting.

Sure, it's a part of India, but given that we all know what Pakistan is angling for, would it not have helped if Vajpayee had spared a thought for what the state must be undergoing? Even Clinton in his bitter critique of Milosevic at Whiteman remembered the Serbian Americans. ``This is not about you,'' he told all those who had gathered at Missouri and were listening to him on national networks. ``It is about tyranny.''

Whatever else we say about America, it has a remarkable sense of its own nationhood. Its politicians have mythologised it and its people have revelled in it. Its presidents have upheld it. We, on the other hand, despite being led by a party which has piggybackedon the concept of a new resurgent India for over two de-cades have still to acquire the aggressive self-respect which makes us speak without prompting. Even when we finally display evidence of Pakistan's perfidy to the world, our Government can only ``share'' the sense of national outrage. Why can it not trigger it? Why does a government which went nuclear as a sign of its national pride need to be so mealy-mouthed about ousting intruders from its own land?

Can you imagine what would happen in America if Pakistan Army regulars occupied part of Seattle or New Mexico? Would Clinton go on TV to say the war had been forced upon him? Or would he just go out there, after the troops and ca-meras, finger-wagging, crowd-pumping and all? True, our politicians, like the British, do not run for office like the Americans, they stand. They do not rule like the British, they serve. They also believe the sophisticated soundbite on TV has replaced the grand gesture of emotion.

They'd do well to look to America, the mostnetworked nation on the globe, where presidents cry when soldiers return in coffins -- here it takes two weeks for the conflict to brew before a defence minister thinks it is time to lay a wreath. Winning the war in people's minds is as important as getting it right on the ground. The media-savvy BJP should know.