In fairness, the NATO air campaign was never, even in the minds of its planners, anything more than the best of a series of terrible options. A month before Operation Allied Force was launched, the NATO secretary-general, Javier Solana, had warned President Clinton and the other Western political leaders that the Yugoslav army and police were preparing a campaign of "ethnic cleansing" in Kosovo on a level that had not been seen since Serbian forces expelled the majority of the Muslim population from northern and eastern Bosnia in 1992 and 1993. NATO military planners could only restate the obvious -- that the only way to insure that the Kosovar Albanians were not murdered or driven from their homes was a full-scale ground assault on the Serbs by NATO forces.

But since such a campaign was generally agreed to be politically impossible, not just in the United States but in Western Europe as well, the choice seemed to boil down to either prosecuting an air war, despite its minimal chance of affecting what Milosevic did on the ground in Kosovo, or doing nothing. For President Clinton and the other Western leaders, inaction was not only humiliating but dangerous to what they called the "credibility" of NATO. It was the triumph of appearance over reality. NATO had to be seen to be doing something, even if the something in question at the very least was incapable of affecting events in Kosovo and might even have made them worse.

By now, the administration has moved away from an initial claim that it was acting to prevent a humanitarian and human rights catastrophe. Its subsequent assertion -- that it knew the Kosovars would be expelled once the bombing began -- is demonstrably false. Had the claim been true, the humanitarian supplies painstakingly brought into the region over the past year would have been placed in neighboring Macedonia, Montenegro and Albania rather than in Kosovo itself, where they have now fallen into the hands of Serbian forces. And now that it is trying to cope with a far larger humanitarian operation in the region, as well as with the political and logistical nightmare of having to transport 100,000 Kosovar refugees out of the region for temporary asylum in NATO countries, the administration has moved away from its "we knew this would happen" self-defense as well.

At present, the talk in Washington and in the other NATO capitals is of "undoing" what Milosevic has wrought in Kosovo, rather as Operation Desert Storm undid Saddam Hussein's conquest of Kuwait. The fact that this was only accomplished with ground troops is passed over in silence.

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