Flogging that dead horse, why do you say intervention in Kosovo as it occurred was preferable to NATO having accepted Milosevic's mid-March counter-offer to Rambouillet? Serbia was willing to let NATO soldiers under the U.N. flag occupy all of Kosovo, as compared with Rambouillet, which required allowing those same NATO soldiers, this time waving a NATO banner rather than a U.N. one, to occupy all of Yugoslavia rather than just Kosovo - but the cease-fire agreement left NATO occupying only Kosovo anyway. So the difference between what Milosevic offered in March and what NATO accepted in June is just a matter of flags...that, and billions of dollars wasted, and far worse, several thousand civilians ruthlessly butchered, both by the Serbs (and now, by the KLA as well) on the ground and by NATO from the sky.
Admittedly it was NATO's threat of imminent intervention that squeezed that concession out from Belgrade. But why in God's name NATO didn't accept that counter-offer and thus forestall the obviously predictable deaths of thousands of perfectly innocent civilians, is completely beyond me. Whatever that real reason might have been, and I don't suppose any of the insiders will tell us soon, it was no mistake on Washington's part; it was intentional. Don't you remember that bloodthirsty quote by Mad. Albright before the bombing campaign started? I mean the one the American news media neglected to publish for many weeks, I forget the exact wording but it was something like "the Serbs need bombing, and now we're going to give it to them."
Yours WDK - WKiernan at concentric.net