By Bruce Fein

President Clinton says NATO's stratospheric bombing war against Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic is to save Kosovar Albanians from ethnic cleansing and genocide and to deter any would-be imitators anywhere in the world.

But don't you believe it any more than Woodrow Wilson's preachy proclamation that World War I was the war to end wars. Don't hold your breath for any war crimes or genocide prosecution of Milosevic before an international tribunal despite the mountain of incriminating evidence. When real-politik grapples with international humanitarian law, the latter invariably capitulates.

Students of ethnic conflict in the eastern Mediterranean will tell you. We have been here before. Consider the parallels between Kosovo and the crisis in Cyprus during the Johnson administration. Overwhelming evidence of Greek and Greek-Cypriot genocide of Turkish Cypriots during 1963-64 left the United States and the U.N. Security Council thoroughly unmoved. Proof of guilt would have been easy.

Greek Cypriot leader Archbishop Makarios launched a campaign to exterminate the 120.000 Turkish Cypriots on the island on the pretense that they balked at 13 amendments to the 1960 Constitution of the Republic of Cyprus that would have reduced them to serfdom. Tens of thousands were slaughtered, plundered and driven from their homes into tiny defensive enclaves. More than 100 villages and mosques were destroyed. And listen to the arresting words from the memoirs of U.S. undersecretary of state George Ball, who had been dispatched to Cyprus on a peacekeeping mission "as Makarios and I walked out of the meeting together on the second day, I said to him sharply that such beastly actions had to stop...Your Beatitude I said, I've been trying for the last two days to make the simple point that this is not the Middle Ages but the latter part of the 20th century. The world's not going to stand idly by and let you turn this beautiful island into your private abattoir."

No less a personage than former Greek Prime Minister Constantionas Mitsotakis confessed in May of this year: "The attempt by Makarios to abrogate the very agreements he had signed was a crime. Because from that point on the situation dragged Cyprus into bloody events and led to crimes committed by the Greek-Cypriot side against the Turkish-cypriot side which we cannot deny". Further, the genocide plot was set forth in chilling detail in the later published "Akritas plan", a first cousin of Adolp Hitler's Metn Kamp and the "Final Solution".

Ball's belief that the world would not stomach Makarios' private abattoir proved naive. The United states adamantly opposed Turkish intervention to stop the genocide, and the U.N. Security Council in 1964 recognized Makarios as the legitimate government over the Turkish Cypriots contrary to both international law and the fact on the ground.

Then there is the genocide in Cambodia perpetrated by Pol Pot and his Khmer Rouge thugs - as indisputable as the shape of the Earth. Pol Pot now is dead, but several of his coconspirators walk ungisturbed by the Cambodian government on the streets of phnom penh. China wants no genuine genocide prosecunons, and Clinton is especielly solicitous of Chinese good will to promote trade and a military modus vivendi in Asia.

Clinton has stumbled into a war without purpose and brought the United States with him. The Kosovar Albanians, NATO and human rights will prove to be the chief losers in the enterprise, while the chief winners will feature Milosevic and his understudies. Could anything be more dreadful.