Chris Burford
London
"On paper, Nato's triumph in the Balkans appears complete."
<large snip to conclusion>
"Yet the biggest mistake the alliance can make is to assume that Milosevic's deafeat signifies a triumph for the strategy of air strikes, and that this policy can now be deployed against any other dictator. Air strikes were launched in order to prevent a humanitarian disaster. They were then justified as the mechanism for reversing the humanitarian disaster that NATO failed to prevent.
Milosevic caved in not because the air strikes were working, but because he realised that this bombardment became the lowest common denominator around which NATO countries maintained their consensus, and could therefore be continued indefinitely at a negligible human cost to the west. This, coupled with serious preparations for a ground offensive, forced Belgrade to accept the deal. The technique of just spraying people with bombs from the air has, therefore, not been vindicated."