Here is an article by Reuters which I think addresses some of the issues raised in the list recently about the outcome of the aggression against Yugoslavia.
elias
By Paul Taylor, Diplomatic Editor
LONDON, Aug 4 (Reuters) - Less than two months after NATO ended its air campaign against Yugoslavia, a new war over Kosovo has erupted among strategists and intellectuals in Europe and North America.
The debate raging in think-tanks and scholarly journals may influence whether Kosovo becomes a model for future interventions by Western democracies to prevent human rights abuses, or remains a one-off operation seen in hindsight at worst as an aberration and at best as a ``lucky escape.''
That in turn may well hinge on whether Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic clings to power or is toppled by his own people in the coming months.
But without waiting for a final act revisionists are already questioning the key assumptions proclaimed of allied leaders.
Was it really a humanitarian intervention at all or a failed attempt at 19th century-style gunboat diplomacy?
In other words, did NATO take offensive action against a sovereign state for the first time in its 50-year history to save lives or to save face?
``We are in danger or over-interpreting this war: it did not start out as a new model war, or a humanitarian war. It started out as an exercise in coercive diplomacy which went wrong,'' Timothy Garton Ash, a British writer on Central Europe, said in a debate in Prospect magazine.
NATO threatened air strikes in an effort to force Milosevic, at peace talks in France, to grant autonomy to Kosovo's ethnic Albanian majority and accept a NATO-led peacekeeping force in the Serbian province.
When he refused, Western leaders felt obliged to use force to safeguard the credibility of NATO, as the White House put it.
The other grounds cited by President Bill Clinton were to prevent a humanitarian disaster and to stop the spread of wider instability in the Balkans that could ultimately have pitted NATO members Greece and Turkey against each other.
Many U.S. strategic thinkers discard this ``domino theory'' as improbable and argue that there was no vital American interest at stake in Kosovo.
While most believe Clinton was right to take military action in support of his European NATO allies, some question the rationale behind so-called humanitarian wars.
In the starkest challenge, military thinker Edward Luttwak of Washington's Centre for Strategic and International Studies has argued that well-intentioned interference in ethnic strife often only prolongs conflicts instead of bringing peace.
He also contends that the West's reluctance to take any casualties undermined its avowed moral purpose.
``In the calculus of the NATO democracies, the immediate possibility of saving thousands of Albanians from massacre and hundreds of thousands from deportation was obviously not worth the lives of a few pilots,'' Luttwak wrote in Foreign Affairs quarterly.
``That may reflect unavoidable political reality, but it demonstrates how even a large-scale disinterested intervention can fail to achieve its ostensibly humanitarian aim,'' he said in an article provocatively titled ``Give War a Chance.''
Another much-debated question is whether the outcome of the Kosovo conflict was a triumph, or a disaster narrowly averted.
Western leaders say the return of hundreds of thousands of ethnic Albanian refugees and the launch of a wider initiative to stabilise and rebuild the Balkans vindicates their strategy.
British Prime Minister Tony Blair and U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, the war's most resolute proponents, have been feted as heroes in the streets of Pristina, although Albright was also jeered by some Kosovo Serbs.
The discovery of mass graves in which U.N. administrator Bernard Kouchner says 11,000 ethnic Albanians killed during the war lie buried may have buttressed the case for intervention.
But revenge attacks committed under the noses of NATO troops by ethnic Albanians against the dwindling minorities of Serbs and Gypsies in the province have begun to tarnish the image of a military operation launched in the name of human rights.
Senior U.S. officials have sought to shift responsibility for the failure to protect Serb lives and property in Kosovo to the United Nations, accusing it of taking too long to establish an international police force.
Disclosures about in-fighting among NATO military commanders and between soldiers and politicians over the conduct of the war have also dented the heroic pose of Kosovo's victors.
The Clinton administration's decision to replace the soldier who ran the Kosovo campaign, General Wesley Clark, three months early next April as supreme commander of allied forces in Europe has fuelled controversy about his role.
Clark fought behind-the-scenes battles with the Pentagon to obtain greater resources to wage the war and with some European allies to be allowed to widen the target list for bombing.
Despite NATO's public emphasis on hitting military targets, it has emerged that allied warplanes destroyed relatively little Yugoslav army equipment in Kosovo and that the air war became more effective only when they struck civilian infrastructure such as the Serbian electricity grid.
Exactly why Milosevic yielded when he did is a matter for conjecture, but Russia's refusal to help him and the first rumblings of preparations for a possible NATO ground offensive may have been more influential than air power alone.
A Newsweek report that Clark ordered an airborne assault to take Pristina airfield before Russian troops could get there at the end of the war has cast doubt on his judgment.
The magazine said a potential military confrontation with Russia was averted only because the British commander of the Kosovo peacekeeping force then in Macedonia, General Mike Jackson, refused Clark's orders.
``I'm not going to start World War III for you,'' Newsweek quoted Jackson as telling Clark.
British defence analyst Jonathan Eyal said the incident highlighted what might have happened if NATO had launched a ground offensive in Kosovo and Russia had responded by sending a token force into the province at Belgrade's request.
``That could have forced the partition of Kosovo,'' he said.
In retrospect, even the British government, which was the most enthusiastic supporter of the Kosovo campaign, considered that the outcome had been ``a lucky escape,'' Eyal said.
NATO governments were spared the divisive and risky land war they had tried so hard to avoid. Macedonia and Albania did not collapse or get sucked into the fighting.
Two weeks of negotiations ended the standoff with the Russians at Pristina airport. Kosovo was not partitioned.
``By blinking, Milosevic saved us from ourselves,'' Eyal said.