CLINTON: `WE ACT TO PREVENT A WIDER WAR'.

Byline: John M. Broder The New York Times

President Clinton said on Wednesday night that his decision to authorize military strikes against Yugoslavia derived from a single calculation: That acting now would be less risky and costly than further delay.

``I am convinced that the dangers of acting are far outweighed by the dangers of not acting,'' Clinton said in a televised address from the Oval Office on Wednesday night.

He said that he had been reluctant to commit U.S. forces to the Balkan conflict and that he acted only when he was certain that President Slobodan Milosevic of Yugoslavia would respond to nothing less than a forceful military action that struck at the heart of his machinery of oppression.

Clinton, in a 13-minute address, said that the NATO attacks on Yugoslav targets were designed both to avert a humanitarian disaster and to serve American geopolitical interests. He conjured up images of Balkan concentration camps and killing fields that offend American moral sensibilities and threaten American values and interests.

``If we and our allies allow this war to continue without response, President Milosevic would read our hesitation as a license to kill,'' Clinton said. But he added that American and NATO credibility were at stake, and even alluded to an American economic interest in a stable and prosperous Europe.

Clinton gave the American people a selective lesson in history and geography, using colorful maps to locate Kosovo and to dramatize its historical role as the powderkeg of Europe.

Conflict in Kosovo, a province of Serbia, will not be contained within its borders, Clinton warned.

``Let a fire burn here in this area,'' the president said, ``and the flames will spread.''

Clinton reviewed the tragic history of Yugoslavia after the country spun apart in 1989. He said that the West should not repeat the mistakes it made in Bosnia from 1992 to 1995, allowing a bloodthirsty campaign of ``ethnic cleansing'' to rage for almost three years without outside intervention. Clinton, as a presidential candidate in 1992, criticized President George Bush for failing to act in Bosnia. But once in office, Clinton did not approve a military response to Serbian slaughter of Bosnian Muslims until 1995.

Milosevic only sat down at the peace table after American-led NATO forces delivered punishing attacks on his forces in Bosnia.

``We must apply the same lessons in Kosovo before what happens in Bosnia happens there, too,'' Clinton said.

``All the ingredients for a major war are there: Ancient grievances, struggling democracies, and in the center of it all, a dictator in Serbia who has done nothing since the Cold War ended but start new wars and pour gasoline on the flames of ethnic and religious division,'' he warned.

The president glossed over important differences between Bosnia and Kosovo. Bosnia was an independent republic with a mixed Muslim and Serbian population that invited Western intervention to halt Milosevic's effort to drive the Muslims out.

Kosovo is a province of Serbia, which along with the republic of Montenegro, are all that remain of the Yugoslav nation that existed before 1989. Although Kosovo has a large ethnic Albanian majority and was stripped of its autonomy, it has remained a part of Serbia.

Milosevic - and President Boris Yeltsin of Russia, who angrily denounced Wednesday's airstrikes - contend that the United States and its allies are intervening in a civil war against the wishes of a sovereign state, Yugoslavia.

Sandy Berger, the national security adviser, said on Wednesday evening that Clinton had been presented with a range of unpalatable choices, from doing nothing to introducing American ground troops into Kosovo. The alternative he chose - a limited air campaign - carries significant risks and only modest prospects of success, but was better than all the other choices, Berger said.

``The president has been very clear that this is the only choice among a series of imperfect choices,'' Berger said. ``We came to an end-state that is not perfect, but compare it to an end-state of not acting. There would be chaos and catastrophe of both a human and a strategic kind.''

Neither Berger nor the president directly addressed the question of what guideposts they had set for measuring the success of the operation or what NATO and the United States would do if the air raids did not halt Milosevic's campaign against ethnic Albanian separatists in Kosovo.

Sen. Joseph Lieberman, D-Conn., said that Clinton was compelled to act because American and NATO threats had begun to ring hollow after months of inaction.

``Once you threaten,'' Lieberman said in an interview, ``and the person you're threatening repeatedly does exactly what you've told him not to do, then you better act on your threat or you will have dissipated your own strength. Nobody, not just in the Balkans, but around the world, will take you seriously. That's the situation we were in.''

CAPTION(S):

photo

Photo: (color) Clinton