When a profound mistake has been made, there are only two choices: deny the mistake and compound it, or admit the mistake and adapt. President Clinton and his die-hard supporters are following the denial strategy into a Balkans quagmire.

The mistake that Clinton and Secretary of State Madeleine Albright can't admit is their original belief that the war in Kosovo would be a short war, one that could be wrapped up in time to celebrate NATO's 50th birthday party. It would be "a military euro," boasted a German strategist -- an invigorating, unifying parallel to the achievement of a single European currency.

Now, instead of admitting the initial mistake, the president is escalating the war with intensified bombing raids and preparing for a ground war under the guise of sending "peacekeepers." We have returned to the familiar terrain of the credibility gap, postmarked Kosovo instead of Vietnam.

Putting the egos of politicians aside, there are ample reasons for reevaluating the Balkans war. It already is a strategic defeat, and it will take all the James Carvilles of the Western world to spin it as a victory.

The United States and NATO have failed to win a short war, but instead are being frustrated by a relatively small nation of Serbs. After the United States and NATO dropped 14,000 bombs and missiles by May 24, an eyewitness account in the Los Angeles Times described Belgraders as "stoic" and "learning to cope." The strategy of policing the new world order with high-tech, big-stick missiles has failed. Instead of intimidating would-be revolutionaries with our invincible image, the lesson is that the West couldn't defeat Slobodan Milosevic in 60 days and is highly unlikely to try extended military action elsewhere for a very long time.

Though the prewar population was 90 percent ethnic Albanian, Kosovo is the sacred place and spiritual home of Serbian identity going back to 1389. But the Albanian population of Kosovo is overwhelmingly anti-Orthodox, and the Kosovars have participated in recent "ethnic cleansing" as well. According to Foreign Affairs magazine, between 1986 and 1989, 130,000 Serbs were forced out of Kosovo because of "harassment and discrimination by the Kosovar majority." New York Times correspondent David Binder reported throughout the 1980s on Kosovar atrocities that included trying to set fire to young boys, raping Serbian girls, attacking Serbian Orthodox churches and poisoning Serbian wells, "thereby helping to fulfill a nationalist demand for an ethnically 'pure' Albanian Kosovo."

At that point Milosevic exploited the nationalism card, suspended Kosovo's autonomous status and set in motion the oppression that has spiraled to the present. As early as 1991, an Albanian-language poll showed that more than half of Kosovars favored annexation by Albania, 31 percent believed in armed struggle against the Serbs and only 7 percent "saw any point in attempting to enter into dialogue with the Serbs." Far from the Holocaust analogy, this data indicates an underlying civil war between ethnic Albanians and Serbs, rooted in irreconcilable nationalist hatreds.

The Balkan war was supposed to be about helping the Kosovars, but their suffering has been aggravated and deepened since the bombings began. When Clinton began the bombing on March 24, there were 124,000 Kosovars expelled from Kosovo. Now there are 900,000, a sevenfold increase in the number who have been uprooted. The United States is spending $13 billion on the military side of this adventure, 75 times more than the $200 million so far for humanitarian assistance. According to United Nations and CIA data, our country is next to last among 27 nations -- just above Romania -- in sheltering Kosovo refugees as a percentage of population. Tony Blair's United Kingdom is 22nd, far behind Norway, Sweden, Ireland, Canada and Australia.

The Kosovo failure undermines the U.S. strategy of shaping the post-Cold War order around NATO rather than the United Nations. As a consequence of a system intended to marginalize the Soviet Union as an international power, the United States now finds itself dependent on the Russians as mediators with Milosevic.

Far worse for humanity, the Balkans war has seriously damaged nuclear arms control talks between the United States and Russia. Analysts say START II -- the treaty slashing nuclear arsenals -- is "all but dead." In addition, the Balkans conflict has stimulated a virulent anti-U.S. sentiment in China, undermining a fragile coexistence. It is also a diversion from the domestic agenda that Democrats in particular care about. For instance, spending by the White House on Kosovo already equals three times what California receives in assistance for public schools ($3.9 billion), and more than 10 times the amount Clinton is proposing for new schoolteachers nationwide ($1 billion). The redirection of domestic dollars to defense will escalate as the war drones on.

And now the contradictory U.S. policy is to bomb Serbia into allowing 1 million traumatized Kosovars to return to their destroyed villages to live under NATO occupation as refugees inside a Yugoslavia from which they seek liberation. Are we planning to disarm the Kosovo Liberation Army and thwart their aspirations, or is the quagmire pulling us into a continuing civil war?

Ironically, NATO now finds itself on the same side as the KLA, a group that the U.S. envoy to the Balkans only last year dismissed as "terrorists." Whether by coincidence or design, the U.S.-NATO cooperation with the KLA grows by the day. "NATO's air strikes have helped the rebel effort to keep those vital [supply] lines working," the New York Times reported. In addition, the KLA guerrillas provide NATO with information on Serbian military positions.

The KLA could be the next Taliban. It receives funding, training and personnel from Islamic fundamentalists in the Persian Gulf, and ultimately seeks to include Kosovo as part of a greater fundamentalist Albania allied with the oppressive regime in Turkey.

Faced with this morass of failures and a convoluted objective, our leaders reassure themselves that they are fighting a noble war for a great moral purpose. But the moral purpose must be measured now by the immoral results after two months of bombing. In trying to degrade Serbia's military capacity, we have degraded our moral capacity.

The U.S. moral position has been that dead Serbian cleaning ladies and hospital patients are regrettable collateral damage. Worse than that, as the United States becomes more frustrated at the Serbian refusal to surrender, the American moral position is quickly deteriorating to the idea that Serbs as a race should be punished. This new moral belligerence is expressed by Thomas Friedman, columnist for the New York Times, who regularly threatens that "we are at war with the Serbian nation and anyone hanging around Belgrade needs to understand that." Further, he bellows like a gang-banger, "You want 1389 [the historic Serbian defeat at Kosovo at the hands of the Turks]? We can do 1389."

Meanwhile, Clinton, Blair and the NATO leadership act like the capricious gods of Greek mythology, basking in the heavens while delivering deadly lightning bolts to the suffering humanity below. NATO has now turned to "area" bombing, which increases the risk of civilian casualties, and is carpeting Kosovo with anti-personnel bombs, whose shards of shrapnel are difficult to remove surgically without amputation. As Friedman -- who might apply for press secretary if Clinton creates an office of policeman of the world -- writes, these Serbs need to be taught a lesson, and punitive bombing is the "cure" for their "nationalist fantasies."

Who is Friedman ranting against? Does he think increasing the amputation rates at Pristina hospital will make the Serbs feel cured of their nationalism? How about the doctors and mothers delivering babies in Belgrade's hospital with the power down? Or those children described in the Los Angeles Times as "suffering epileptic seizures," who "could not be hooked up to electronic monitors that help determine what kind of medication they need."

The most sinister aspect of the U.S. moral position today is described in New York Times headlines as a strategy to "keep the U.S. voters content." The cynicism of this strategy is that Americans somehow won't care if our government drops anti-personnel bombs in our name, if our government blows up hospitals in our name, if tens of thousands of people are killed, maimed, traumatized and displaced in our name, as long as Americans are kept "content" by spin doctors who minimize the news of civilian deaths, sanitize the ground troops as peacekeepers, and hypnotize people into complacency before they can arise from their armchairs and criticize their government.

The strategy for critics of the Balkan war, therefore, must begin by stirring up the very discontent the Clinton administration fears. This requires teach-ins and educational forums that shatter the public silence. It means a complex anti-war alliance between liberal humanitarians who think the civilian suffering is unjustified with conservative isolationists who see no strategic interest in the Balkans. If the war is prolonged, the natural course of protest will be to support political candidates who stand up against the incumbent politicians who allowed this crisis to spin out of control.

The immediate demand of war critics must be for de-escalation as an alternative to ground war by our "peacekeepers." That means a unilateral halt to the counterproductive bombing, which has caused enough damage and suffering, followed by peace talks through the United Nations and third parties to secure a cease-fire and the introduction of an international and genuine peacekeeping force in Kosovo. A partition of Kosovo will be unpopular, but is a lesser evil than cleansing, bombing and refugees. If Northern Ireland can exist with provisions for dual loyalties, so can Kosovo. The Serbs should hold their monasteries and sacred places, and the Kosovars should have a transitional homeland with guarantees of self-determination. Both the United Nations and NATO will be involved in security arrangements. Why will Milosevic accept this? Because it provides honor, dollars and an interim peace with the KLA. The Serbs should be induced with guarantees of rebuilding and investment, and the Russians with the funds that have been suspended by the International Monetary Fund.

Whether the president chooses the path of de-escalation will depend in large part on whether his constituents and allies in Congress remain "content." He is under massive pressure from the hawkish establishment to escalate the war in order to avoid an embarrassing failure. This is exactly the march to folly. The only force that can stop the president from sinking deeper into the quagmire, and thus risking even greater defeat, is an aroused public opinion in America and Europe.

The public cannot count on a Congress that went on vacation as the war began, that abdicates its own war powers responsibilities, a Congress composed of Democrats unwilling to criticize their party leader and Republicans who shun the war but gladly fund it. When our institutions fail, it is reserved for the people at large to activate the democratic process and make it work.