Bill Clinton's Bosnia sojourn is ironically similar to Winston Churchill's description of the Soviet Union as "a riddle, inside a mystery, wrapped in an enigma." Virtually none of the questions that come to the thoughtful mind about this operation have been answered to anybody's satisfaction.

Let's start with a very basic one: why? Why is Bubba so gung-ho on sending twenty-thousand American soldiers (supported by twice that many) into somebody else's family feud? There are no vital national security interests involved. Of course, this is precisely why Mr. Clinton and his supporters are so enthralled with it; if we did have interests that were threatened, any U.S. intervention would be "selfish" and "greedy" by definition. Could it be the infamous liberal "good intentions"? That's certainly a justification being used by the Administration, especially in the oft-repeated line that U.S. soldiers are in Bosnia to "wage peace" instead of war. "Helping children" (the leftist justification for everything) was also trotted out repeatedly. The same rationale guided the Somalia fiasco and the now-falling apart crusade in neomarxist Haiti. If this were really true, though, why are our forces going in armed? Why not send the Peace Corps instead, or put Americorps under the jurisdiction of the Pentagon (Why not? Everything ELSE is.)?

Maybe we're in the Balkans to restore the balance of power between the three sides under cover of "peacekeeping." But if that were the case, why did the President veto the Senate resolution that called for an end to the arms embargo? We ARE going to be arming and training the Bosnians, not to mention the fact that we've been intermittently bombing the Serbs for months. Consequently, NATO begins its "peacekeeping" mission with no credibility to the impartiality such a role requires, quite apart from the concurrent fact that there's not much of a "peace" to keep.

Since the mission doesn't make any conventional sense, militarily or otherwise, the question recurs: why are American forces in Bosnia? The answer is the solution to every question about why Bill Clinton does anything: to help him get re-elected. If you're now totally baffled, welcome to the club.

Oh, there are aspects of the scheme that will be of superficial (i.e. short-term) political assistance. On his recent trip to Germany to see off the troops, the President strode along side them, shoulders squared, jaw thrust out. Some would say that playing Commander-in-Chief has filled the gap in his life left by the absence of all the whoopie he left behind in Arkansas, and so his chin is getting erections instead. But at least he's not Michael Dukakis. And standing firm in the face of congressional opposition wins him the plaudits of his media buddies for displaying "leadership" and "resolve." Reagan or Bush would have been denounced as a "warmonger" and "napoleon," but I digress.

Still, the long-term payoff remains elusive. All these unanswered, ill-considered contingencies and the arrogant way Mr. Clinton plopped the deployment before Congress for after-the-fact rubber-stamping is going to consume him at the first wave of casualities. All the reluctance and nervous anxiety will not take long to transform into anger and indignation, and Mr. Bill has little political capital to fall back on. And what of the revelation made last week by National Review's Peter Rodman, that in order to win Russian acquiescence to the Dayton Peace Accords, the Clinton Administration cut a secret deal delaying indefinitely the very NATO expansion it had been championing -- in effect, selling out both the former Warsaw Pact satellites AND the very NATO alliance on whose behalf Mr. Clinton insisted we had to go to Bosnia? If the point is to secure "peace in our time," just whose "peace" are we securing?

It may be that the White House is counting on its Bosnia mission going awry. With virtually no chance of winning next fall in a two-man race, Mr. Clinton has to have a third party to run interference for him. And what would make a better trifecta for Ross Perot than to put "Bosninam" alongside NAFTA and GATT, and on those three stubby legs, take his gigantic ego our for another campaign spin? And guess who benefits from such an "independent" incursion?

Liberal admonitions to conservatives to "support the troops" in the Balkans are strawmen. We all want to see them succeed in the nebulous task to which they've been sentenced, er, assigned. Nobody wants to see a single GI come home in a coffin. But the fact remains that the best view places American troops in the role of fatigue-clad, gun-toting social workers whose lives are of greatest use to the President in the furtherance of his political ambitions; and the worst makes their corpses worth even more.

For a Commander-in-Chief with no conscience, it's all in a day's work.