The NATO campaign in Kosovo is the third U.S.-led military mission undertaken for humanitarian, as much as for strategic, purposes.

After U.S. forces chased his troops from Kuwait and began their own withdrawal from Iraq, Saddam Hussein started driving Kurds and Shi'ites into the mountains in rain and freezing temperatures.

At that time, the U.N. Security Council passed Resolution 688, which defined massive human-rights violations as a serious threat to peace and security. Under that mandate, the United States and others engaged in large-scale supply airlifts and protected the threatened areas through establishing no-fly zones that kept the Iraqi military at bay.

Since then, humanitarian crises have been seen as sufficient cause for military intervention. The next instance was in Somalia, when, at the end of his term, President George Bush ordered in the Marines to prevent widespread starvation. At that moment, 82 percent of the American public strongly favored sending U.S. forces.

Somalia turned out, as engagements of force frequently do, to be more militarily challenging than anticipated. America suffered casualties in Mogadishu, and President Clinton withdrew our forces.

Nonetheless, the Iraqi-Kurdish precedent had been affirmed. For most Americans, myself included, deploying the U.S. military for humanitarian reasons ranks equally with its deployment for strategic reasons. This is something new in history for any great military power and its alliances.

Significantly, NATO launched its campaign against ethnic cleansing in Kosovo without the approval of the Security Council. This is also an important precedent of the post-Cold War period in which there has been a lot of sentimental, sloppy thinking about the broad role the United Nations could play.

As I know, from having sat for four years in the Security Council, council votes are directly dependent on power politics and always reflect the views of nations - such as China and sometimes Russia -that have very different humanitarian values than we do in the West.

It is unreasonable to consider the Security Council as some ultimate, legitimizing institution - as if the legitimacy of any international action depends on a vote of the Security Council. In the case of Kosovo, that would have made intervention dependent upon the approval of a one-party dictatorship in China that regularly represses its own citizens.

Our world cannot resolve moral issues by submitting them to the judgment of dictators. The legitimacy of a military action must be judged by the morality of the situation, not by the Security Council. The U.N. is not the keeper of either legitimacy or international law. I, for one, don't want to sacrifice the lives of innocent men, women and children in Kosovo to the political vagaries of one body of the United Nations.

The first objective now, as when the bombing began, is to stop the ethnic cleansing in Kosovo by the troops of Slobodan Milosevic. That means doing whatever it takes to stop the drive to empty Kosovo of most of its people. This is a bestial policy reminiscent of Pol Pot's emptying of Phnom Penh after the victory of the Khmer Rouge in the mid-1970s.

The second objective is to repatriate - as soon as possible - the refugees who have been driven from Kosovo, and to create a secure environment in which they can resume their lives.

To achieve these ends, the Serb troops must leave Kosovo. This must be the central requirement for a NATO cease-fire now, even though it was not a stated goal at the beginning of the NATO military campaign. Mr. Milosevic has made this central by his actions. Nothing less can suffice.

In recent days, there has been talk of a "partition solution," in which parts of Northern Kosovo -including the historic shrines of the Serb nation - would remain with Yugoslavia, and the rest with the ethnic Albanians. Though the allies should not be dogmatically opposed to this option, I don't believe Kosovo is realistically susceptible to a partition plan.

To begin with, before the cleansing drive, more than 90 percent of the population was ethnic Albanian. It is of utmost importance that all these people be allowed to return home. There should not be the slightest interest in a Bosnia-type solution, in which the non-ethnic Albanians get half the country in some kind of shared governance scheme. That can't be acceptable because it would reward the aggression of Mr. Milosevic.

Moreover, it would just not be workable, after what has happened, to have Serb police engaged in any political arrangement that affects the lives of the ethnic Albanians. This whole tragedy came about because of the ease with which Mr. Milosevic moved his military and paramilitary forces into Kosovo to assume their inhumane functions. Nothing remotely similar, as any form of autonomy or power-sharing would imply, can now be acceptable.

The French philosopher Bernard-Henri Levy once said, with regard to Western inaction in Bosnia, that the Western democracies had become "a Diet-Coke Civilization" in which we want sweetness without the calories or sugar, and war without casualties of our own. This statement is not true of Americans today; and, as he himself now agrees, the guilt over Bosnia has made it less true in Europe, as well. No one in college today remembers the Vietnam War from experience, and thus does not suffer from any "syndromes" or complexes about the use of force. Most students today were mere toddlers when Ronald Reagan sent troops into Grenada.

The American public is strong enough to do what has to be done in Kosovo, including supporting the deployment of ground troops. Americans are ready to undertake significant humanitarian tasks. But that requires determined and strong presidential leadership. So far, however, that leadership has been inadequate.

Jeane Kirkpatrick is the former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations during the Reagan administration. This article was adapted from a talk last week with Global Viewpoint editor Nathan Gardels in Washington. 1999, New Perspectives Quarterly. Distributed by the Los Angeles Times Syndicate.