Amitai Etzioni is the Director of the Institute for Communitarian Policy Studies at George Washington University. He is the author of Winning Without War, The Hard Way To Peace, and most recently The Limits of Privacy, among other books. He can be reached at etzioni@gwu.edu.

One of the main reasons we are fighting the Serbs, according to both President Clinton and Sen. John McCain (R-AZ), is to ensure that other Slobodan Milosevics will get the message that ethic cleansing does not pay. We openly acknowledge that we cannot interfere in every Rwanda or Sudan, nor do we wish to become the world's cop. But, we say, if we create a Serbia to which the Kosovars can return and live safely, we shall have made the point for all to note.

Unfortunately, unless we change the way we now plan to exit, we shall impart a rather different message. We have already let it be known that granting Kosovo independence has been dropped from our list of steps under consideration, a major option on the table during the Rambouillet negotiations. Given that Serbia considers Kosovo sacred territory, an international understanding that it will remain part of Serbia is akin to starting negotiations with Ehud Barak on the next phase of the Oslo accords with a recognition that all the West bank will remain an integral part of Israel. Such an endorsement of a Serbian Kosovo constitutes a major strategic gain for Milosevic.

Smelling like roses

Is Serbia getting what it wants?

Serbia also has accomplished four other major goals: It thinned out Kosovar male population; killed off many members of the Kosovar political, intellectual, cultural and other elites; made it rather difficult for many thousands of Kosovars to return home; and greatly weakened the Kosovo Liberation Army. Last but not least, it has gained much in national pride by showing to one and all that a small nation of 11 million people can withstand a NATO coalition of 19 countries led by the most powerful armies of the world.

The costs Serbia has absorbed so far in return for accomplishing almost all its strategic goals are relatively minor. Not to make light of the civilian casualties inadvertently inflicted on Serbia, but in the grand scale of things they are small in number. And such casualties will not deter a future tyrant, elsewhere in the world -- even if their number was considerably higher. Indeed, such indifference is a major characteristic distinguishing tyrannies from democracies.

While NATO has inflicted considerable damage on the Serbian infrastructure, our allies -- if not the United States, ourselves! -- will rush to help refurbish the Serb economy. We have all over-learned the lesson of World War I, after which our victorious coalition left Germany to suffer the agony of its defeat. This suffering was widely believed to have led to the rise of the Nazis.

Hence, after World War II America generously employed the Marshall Plan to help rebuild Germany, to good effect. Consequently, most peace negotiations now include some sort of Marshall Plan.

The difference between Nazi Germany and Serbia, though, is that the Germans suffered a great deal before World War II ended, which left them keenly committed to peace and continues to serve as a warning for others who might seek to impose themselves on the world. By comparison, the suffering of Serbia so far has been quite limited. In short, Serbia is getting almost all it wanted and is paying rather little.

Make the message clear

To send a stronger No More Genocides message, we need to improve the balance sheet. At the very least the following is required:

• Continue the economic sanctions on Serbia until it coughs up the resources needed to rebuild Kosovo, and opens itself up to a democratic government. (Democratic governments do not engage in ethnic cleansing.);

• Provide no economic assistance to rebuild Serbia. Its people, with rare exceptions, supported the Greater Serbia adventure, and many local Serbs in Kosovo helped the goons that raped and killed their neighbors and burned their houses. Let's not wait for the next Daniel Goldhagen, author of Hitler's Willing Executioners, to show that the Serbs knew what their militias were doing and cheered them on. (I am not recommending revenge, raping their wives and daughters and slaughtering their young men, but am advocating that they be allowed to share in a small amount of the economic misery they have inflicted on others.);

• While we need to deal with Milosevic to end the nightmare -- indicting him as a war criminal may well delay a settlement and thus cost more lives in Kosovo and in Serbia -- we should under no circumstances offer him the equivalent of total immunity. If, after NATO, the United Nations, or some other force is well established in Kosovo, and the International Criminal Court goes after Milosevic, we should do nothing to protect him from being apprehended (whenever he steps outside Serbia), being tried as a war criminal, and if convicted, subject to the severest punishment possible.

A message for future Milosevics

Frankly, I am not sure that even all these measures combined will suffice to make it abundantly clear that the United States does not intend to let ethnic cleansing pay. These steps, however, might be the best that we can do. Anything less makes it all too likely that future tyrants will derive the opposite lesson from that which we purported to provide: Take your chances. You may well get away with it, as the Russians did in Chechnya; if you fail, your net gains are still going to be quite considerable.

Whatever one thinks about the means we are using to fight -- Should we have bombed? Used "dumb" ammunition? Refused to put our troops in harm's way? -- our leaders still need to consider what our exit will say about us and to the future Milosevics.