Reports on Wednesday evening that the Clinton administration may be looking for a way out of the mess by suspending bombing in exchange for the Serbs withdrawing from Kosovo were belied following the episode involving US soldiers.

US officials here said the soldiers were abducted by Serb forces while on a routine peacekeeping patrol in Macedonia, which borders the Kosovo region. Yugoslavia claimed the soldiers were captured while they were in Yugoslav territory.

Pictures of the soldiers --apparently beaten and bruised -- shown on Serb television and rebroadcast on CNN further inflamed the rhetoric US officials warned Yugoslavia to pay heed to the rules of war, and said they would hold Yugoslav President Slobodon Milosevic personally responsible for the fate of the three soldiers.

Wedon't like the way they have been treated and we have a long memory about this things, NATO commander Wesley Clark said in a transparent threat to the Serbs.

Meanwhile, it now transpires that Clinton and his ABC team (Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, National Security Adviser Sandy Berger, and Secretary of Defence William Cohen) ignored advice from the CIA and the US military that air power alone would not be enough to bring Milosevic to the negotiating table and accede to their terms.

Analysts within the administration however maintained that Clinton did consider the possibility but was left with no option. Under a Hobsons choice scenario outlined by US officials, if Washington considered the ground troops options, then it would have to organise 75,000 troops to capture and hold Kosovo, or 200,000 troops to take all of Yugoslavia.

This would have meant a greater and messier involvement. The idea of troops had no traction, one official was quoted as saying, on the other hand, if Washington did notact then it would have been accused of not fulfilling its responsibility, officials suggested.

Nine days after the US-led NATO attacks began, there is now plenty of recrimination and second guessing going on in Washington as Clinton aides scramble to defend their strategy.

According to one account, Clinton's principles -- the ABC team -- who pushed for the air campaign is now crestfallen that it has not worked to plan. The President himself had to give them a pep talk in a meeting on Tuesday.

Clinton meanwhile said in a CBS interview last night that NATO allies and the American public need to show resolve with the air campaign against Yugoslavia. `This air campaign is not a 30-second ad. It's only been going on a few days. ... And I'd like to see us keep working on this and not have our attention diverted by other things,'' he said, even as the American public appeared to be restive about a war the administration has not been able to fully justify.

Administration officials were red-faced aboutpictures showing Clinton playing golf on Tuesday while Belgrade was being bombed. They said the President was trying to relax to beat the stress.

But the pictures seemed to reinforce the image of a President, himself accused of being a draftdodger, who has casually led the country into a war not backed by the people. Critics immediately dubbed the Balkan conflict a golf war.

Because the war is not being endorsed by the public, the US President also appeared to reject the demand from some quarters to induct ground troops, saying the thing that bothers me about introducing ground troops into a hostile situationinto Kosovo and into the Balkansis the prospect of never being able to get them out.

But in the political circuit, there was a gathering momentum for inducting ground troops to salvage the situation. Officials were closely watching the public reaction to the capture of US soldiers since it could decide the matter one way or the other. Public sentiment could shift rapidly to getting involved on theground. Or it could go completely the other way.