Well, one reason would be, the only way to protect those Kosovo Albanian villagers from Milosevic's death squads - that, ostensibly, is our purpose here - is to put riflemen on the ground between the villagers and the thugs. You can't protect unarmed civilians from 30,000 feet, not even when the bomber you've flown round the globe is worth three times its weight in gold. So where are the ground troops? What military commander starts out an attack with the intent to lose? Anybody with any sense would have been able to predict, the minute the first cruise missile landed in Serbia, Milosevic would start massacring Albanians as fast as he could. And so he has, at least according to the U.S. news media, which I'll admit could be fabricating the whole tale (about the Serb soldiers wearing facemasks on a killing spree) but I doubt it.
We're deliberately sacrificing the Kosovar Albanians for some mysterious kind of domestic political considerations. Yoshie's got a post down the list which offers four plausible long-term motives. My first reaction when I read it was to say, "wow-ee, this is so paranoid!" and then I came to my senses and remembered the motives behind the U.S. destruction of Vietnam; now I'll go with her theory until someone disproves it or shows me a better one.
Yours WDK - WKiernan at concentric.net