The proposed NATO occupation of Kosovo moved a step closer to reality Tuesday, when Kosovo’s Albanian representative Rambouillet, France, tentatively agreed to a peace proposal.

The plan would grant the Albanians three years of autonomous rule over Kosovo, a province of Serbia. A plebiscite on independence would then follow. NATO troops would keep the peace in the meantime. That’s a sticking pint for their ethnic rivals, the Serbs who still haven’t backed the plan.

US involvement in the NATO force is also a sticking point with many American foreign affairs specialists.

"Kosovo isn’t Bosnia, it’s worse," wrote a senior army officer in Defending America, an online newsletter edited by retired Army Col. David Hackworth. "This is a nightmare waiting to happen," the officer wrote. "Let’s sit this one out."

President Clinton has already promised 4,000 U.S. troops to implement the plan, as part of a NATO force of 28,000. Yet there is even less support for the occupation of Kosovo than there was for occupation of Bosnia.

Many critics think the peace deal being brokered won’t hold – in part because countries trying to force a pact are intervening in a civil war. They also say such a deal isn’t surprising. The state of international law is so unsettled today that bodies like NATO and the United Nations can justify almost any intervention.

Former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger condoned the Dayton agreement, which set up the U.S. occupation of Bosnia. But in Monday’s Washington Post, Kissinger warned that the administration’s open-ended commitment to Kosovo lacked ‘strategic purposes" and an exit strategy.

"The proposed deployment to Kosovo does not deal with any threat to American security as traditionally conceived." Kissinger wrote, Kosovo is no more a threat to America than Haiti to Europe – and we never asked for NATO support there."

Many also worry that the Clinton administration’s foreign policy is unfocussed and ad hoc. They say it lacks a clear connection to U.S. interests and realistic measures of success. And some fear what they call the administration’s disregard of age-old principles of international law and constitutional prerogative.

Last week, a bipartisan group of 29 lawmakers signed a letter warning President Clinton to not rush to action in Kosovo.

The letter circulated by Reps. Tom Campbell, R-Calif., and Barney Frank, D-Mass., advised Clinton that "the constitution requires you to obtain authority from Congress before taking military action against Yugoslavia."

It was the third such letter sent to the White House in the past six months.

Still Congress probably won’t make too much of a fuss about the administration’s use of military force.

Congress reasserted its constitutional authority to declare war when it passed the War Powers Resolution Act in 1974. Other than that, though lawmakers have typically avoided taking responsibility for military action.

"I think there is a consensus that the War Powers Resolution is dead," said Robert Turner, professor of constitutional and international law at the University of Virginia Law School. "It’s not legally dead, but I get the sense that the players treat it as dead."

Similarly, the old international laws protecting sovereign nations from outside interference may also no longer apply. In the view of many, sovereignty can be trumped by the will of the United Nations, which has assumed the right to intervene in almost dispute in the name of protecting human rights.

Even aggression seems to be condoned by the international community as long as its intent is to establish peace and justice.

Yugoslavia, of which Serbia is a part objects that NATO occupation of Kosovo would violate its sovereignty, which is supposedly guaranteed by the United Nations.

Article 2 of the U.N. Charter states: "All Members shall refrain in their international relations from the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any state.

The same principle was incorporated in the Helsinki Final Act o 1975. This requires participating states to "respect the territorial integrity of each of the participating states" and "refrain from any action … against the territorial integrity, political independence, or the unity of any participating states."

Yugoslavia participated in Helsinki. So did the U.S. and most NATO nations. But times have changed.

If the U.N. Security Council members approve a resolution, Turner said, "they have the power to authorize force anytime they conclude there’s is a threat to peace."

Turner says Helsinki’s noninterference provision was a ploy to get the Soviets to acknowledge the existence of universal human rights. Since then, he says, concern for human rights has been used to justify many types of intervention.

Few would argue against intervening to stop the grossest abuses of human rights. So why pick Kosovo over other conflicts in other parts of the world that haven’t gotten as much attention?

"If you compare Kosovo with Kashmir or Kurdistan or the case of Tamils of Sri Lanka, in any of these places, the human rights violations are much worse," said Raju G.C. Thomas, professor of political science at Marquette University.

The Kosovo Albanians say a year of fighting has taken the lives of 2,000 people on both sides. Other analysts put the figure closer to 1,200, less than the 1,300 estimated to have been killed by Operation Desert Fox – the US and British airstrikes on Iraq before Christmas.

In contrast, 60,000 people have been killed in Sri Lanka and between 30,000 and 60,000 in Kashmir, Thomas says.

Fighting between Turks and Kurds has taken 30,000 lives, he says. Yet the U.S. and NATO turn a blind eye to Turkey’s oppression of the Kurds, while still patrolling the skies over northern Iraq to keep Saddam Hussein from oppressing them.

The U.S. even helped Turkey arrest Abdullah Ocalan, leader of the Kurdish Worker’s Party. A year ago, both the Kurdish Worker’s Party and the Kosovo Liberation Army were considered terrorist organizations by the U.S. State Department.

"I don’t believe that the international community is organized to do these interventions in a way that really could be justified by some impartial standard," said Jeremy Rabkin, a professor of international law at Cornell University.

"What’s always going to happen is that (intervention) is going to be triggered by self-interested political considerations, and it will be ham-handed in one area and totally indifferent in another area where worse things are happening," Rabkin said.

Critics say the Clinton administration largely responds to media influence. The U.S. media have been heavily anti-Serb, says Benjamin Works, executive director of Strategic Issues Research Institute of the United States.

"In the European press, some really interesting contrarian news comes out, usually after the fact," Works said. "In the U.S., though, the gulf between allegations and reality have never been wider. It’s Orwellian."

Many Serbs outside Serbia believe the fix is in against the Serbs. The only remaining question is whether Yugoslav President Slobadan Milosevic will let Kosovo get away before or after airstrikes.

"No real Serb would give up Kosovo but Milosevic will," said Srdja Trifkovic, advisor to Biljana Plavsic, who was president of the Bosnian Serb Republic until her electoral defeat last fall.

"(Milosevic) needs a convincing alibi for his long suffering domestic audience," Trifkovic said. Airstrikes would be his alibi.

"It’s like reading a mystery novel from the back to the front, said Bob -- a Serbian American businessman who lives in Arizona. "You know what the outcome is. It’s just a matter of how the crime will be committed."

Rabkin derides the idea that U.N. actions are governed by international law. "There is no system. All you’re talking about is the Security Council," he said.