Last week, the foreign ministers of the Group of Seven nations and Russia agreed upon an outline for a "political solution to the Kosovo crisis." The plan is intentionally vague and ambiguous on a number of very important issues.

On its face the plan appears to call for the withdrawal of Serb forces from Kosovo, the deployment of an international peacekeeping force, the safe return of all refugees, self-government for Kosovo under the sovereignty of Yugoslavia and the disarming of the Kosovo Liberation Army.

NATO's Clinton-led strategy (because it's too squirrelly to have been concocted by anyone other than Clinton) is to use Russia as its negotiating intermediary with Slobo. But Clinton's prideful refusal to negotiate directly with Slobo carries a heavy price tag. While administration officials boast Russia's mediating role as an important lever against Slobo, in reality it is a major NATO liability.

Before Russia was willing to carry NATO's water into the negotiations, it had to be satisfied with the proposed terms of the settlement, which explains Russia's anomalous involvement with the G-7 nations and certain NATO concessions that appear in the proposal.

There are a number of ambiguous provisions in the proposal, all of which were designed to pacify the Russians. The plan provides that there shall be "withdrawal from Kosovo of military, police and paramilitary forces."

NATO tried and failed (over Russian objection) to insert the word "all" in that provision to signify that all Serbian forces would be removed from Kosovo. Russia argued that Slobo would never accede to total withdrawal because it would be inconsistent with Yugoslavia's continued sovereignty over Kosovo, as contemplated by the plan.

An even more problematic element of the plan is that it confers broad authority for the settlement on the United Nations rather than NATO. Until now we have been hearing incessant assertions about the importance of maintaining the credibility and integrity of NATO.

The provision for the establishment of an interim government for Kosovo is to be decided by the U.N. Security Council, a body in which Russia and China hold vetoes. Also, the peacekeeping forces must be "endorsed and adopted by the United Nations." There is no mention of NATO as being the designated peacekeeping force. Slobo has indicated that he will not agree to the peacekeeping force including soldiers from any NATO nation that participated in the air attack against Serbia, which leaves such military powerhouses as Greece and Canada.

Since the "peace proposal" was outlined, Madeliene Albright has been running around frantically protesting that "all" Serbian forces must be withdrawn from Kosovo and that NATO must be the peacekeeping force -- even though NATO consciously settled for ambiguity on those points in the plan. Albright may discover that to the rest of the literate world, words mean things. Clinton and NATO violated a cardinal rule of negotiation: You never concede any ground on points that are non-negotiable, as Albright claims these points to be.

Because NATO's authorized agents agreed to ambiguity, rather than plain language in the document, it may have a difficult time reinstituting its points. The bottom line is that credibility is an essential component of effective negotiation and you cannot maintain credibility when you have already given ground on a point you later insist is nonnegotiable. Clinton's ordinary domestic modus operandi of pretending to concede points only to later renege and repair through spin, will not be as easy in the foreign arena with Russia, China and Yugoslavia.

While NATO nations are busy congratulating themselves for having entered into a unilateral peacekeeping settlement with themselves and Russia, a nonparticipant in the conflict, we better understand that neither Slobo nor the KLA has agreed to the plan. The KLA has indicated opposition to the plan because it does not include Kosovo's ultimate independence.

It is clear that the peace plan is inconsistent with NATO's stated war aims. Long ago (three or four weeks ago), when NATO was smugly strutting its stuff and promising imminent victory, everyone was saying that Rambouillet was a dead letter, presumably meaning that Slobo's ethnic cleansing campaign ensured that Kosovo could never again live under the sovereign rule of Serbia.

That the United States and NATO have conceded major points and accepted ambiguity on others before the negotiations have even begun with Slobo means, in a nutshell, that in terms of achieving our political objectives through military means, we have lost this war. Perhaps we should give Bill Clinton a Purple Heart on behalf of NATO and the United States for having presided over the wounding of NATO and the U.S. military in his deplorable mishandling of this "campaign."

~David Limbaugh of Cape Girardeau is a columnist for Creators Syndicate.