The president will get his requested $6 billion in emergency military spending increase... maybe even more.

Our military forces are engaged in a dangerous mission, and Congress is not about to withhold the support they need.

But as part of the process of approving those funds, debate will begin over essentially two questions:

1. Are we doing the right thing in Kosovo?

2. Are we doing it right?

The answers probably won't come until after the bombs have stopped falling, but the questions are out there.

I'm amazed at the reversal of combatants on both side of the first question. "The United States cannot be the world's policeman," has been the frequent cry of liberals and antiwar protesters, joined by conservative isolationists. Conservatives who are not isolationists often argue that we must be the world's police force whenever we have a clear national interest, and whenever we can define achievable goals and commit the resources necessary to achieve them.

During the Vietnam era, hawks used humanitarian arguments for our involvement in that war, along with the domino theory. Protesters, like our future president, argued for self-determination in that region, said we had no business involving our military in what amounted to a civil war, and pointed out that our military action there was killing more people than perhaps would die if the war were allowed to follow its natural course.

During the 1992 elections, I spoke to people who were actively involved in protesting Vietnam, and they considered candidate Bill Clinton's draft-dodging a plus. We shouldn't have been in that war, and he was right to avoid it and protest against it, they said.

Where are they now?

You would think that antiwar types would be enraged. Their hero has sold them out. Now that he controls the military, he is doing exactly what he protested against.

Personally, I would be more inclined to support the president's decisions in Kosovo if he would call a press conference and say that he was wrong to have protested Vietnam, and that we were doing the right thing in Vietnam even if militarily we made the wrong decisions about how to do it.

Yugoslav Serbs are committing atrocities? The North Vietnamese loaded children up with explosives and used them as booby traps! What could be more atrocious than that? Torture, rape and murder were commonplace, though certainly not universal.

Now we have liberals and antiwar doves arguing that we must stop the atrocities and that Yugoslavia's military actions against ethnic Albanians in Kosovo threaten to spill over into other countries. Conservatives and hawks are pointing out that we have no national interest in that war, and questioning whether we should be involved in it.

On a broader scope, a national debate about our military's role in the modern world is definitely in order. If we must indeed act as the world's police force, then we are going to need more police officers.

This president, who has committed more troops than any president since Vietnam, has done so only after severely reducing the number of troops we have, cutting their budget for equipment, replacement parts and ammunition, stopping most research on new weaponry and slashing pay and benefits for our troops.

Why is he so adamant about not sending ground troops into Kosovo? Apart from the fear of getting many of them killed, captured and wounded, I really believe it's because we simply don't have enough.

The press never mentions it, but we still have troops deployed in Haiti, Bosnia, Somalia and the Middle East in addition to our usual maintenance forces in Europe, Japan, Korea and other areas. Our forces are stretched thin.

On the second question, the evidence is mounting that the administration has badly botched the Kosovo situation, starting with Secretary of State Madelleine Albright's unforgivable insults to Slobodan Milosevic at a time when we still had hopes that he would negotiate, and ending with the foolish decision not only to rule out a ground assault, but worse still to announce to the enemy that we had ruled out a ground assault.

Military experts are trying their best not to criticize too harshly while operations are still under way, but it is clear that they think we were insane not to at least plan a ground assault. Planning a campaign and bringing troops and equipment into the region would at least give Milosevic something to think about, and it would give us more options.

Now, if we decided a ground assault was needed, it would take months to get the people and equipment in place, and we would be severely hampered by the weather.

All's well that ends well, I said in this space a couple of weeks ago. That still holds true. There's still hope that Milosevic will grow tired of seeing our bombs gradually reduce his country to rubble and go along with a NATO-enforced peace.

The chances are slim, but right now that's the only hope we have that this will all end well.