Sixteen unarmed Albanians were murdered this past weekend. More than 2,000 have been slaughtered in the last year. A quarter-million have been driven from their homes. Forty thousand black-masked Serb soldiers rampage through the Kosovo countryside, burning farms, killing livestock, killing people.

The civilized world agrees this holocaust by a thousand cuts must stop. Republicans in the U.S. Senate want to see the genocide first.

With NATO united and poised to launch air strikes against Yugoslavia’s formidable air defenses, followed by the deployment of a 28,000-member peacekeeping force, including 4,000 Americans, the Senate is debating legislation by GOP leadership that would bar funds for U.S. military action without congressional approval.

Sen. Don Nickles of Oklahoma says there should be no U.S. involvement “until the Serbs really begin a very significant massacre,” without specifying a required body count. Sen. Ted Stevens of Alaska says bombing is no way to negotiate, apparently unaware that NATO has said consistently it is not interested in cutting a deal but in stopping the atrocities long enough to give peace a fighting chance. Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison of Texas says Ronald Reagan never would have involved American troops in a civil war, Lebanon and Grenada notwithstanding. Majority Leader Trent Lott, who last October trashed the Clinton administration for dragging its feet over Kosovo, now criticizes it for rushing in.

In taking these naive, self-contradictory positions, Republican leadership has placed itself in some strange and repulsive company. Their primary soulmates are Yugulavian President Slobodan Milosevec, who is more mob boss than head of state (and who, incidentally, backed off when bombed in Bosnia) and Russian Prime Minister Yevgeny Primakov, who is trying desperately to make his empty shell of a country seem as though it matters.

There are a lot of reasons any nation should be wary of getting involved in the Balkans. The region has a 600-year history of neighbor-against-neighbor bloodshed, a susceptibility to rule by madmen, a tradition of martyrdom, to name just a few. There are a lot of reasons Congress should be cautious about U.S. involvement in any foreign land, but post-impeachment resentment is not among them. There are more reasons NATO — and that includes the United States — must now force an end to the tragedy in Kosovo. Sixteen more were added just last weekend.