Whether Americans of the left or right really understand what such a war entails is open to question. Our leaders fairly openly admit they do not. On the left, those in Western Europe and North America implacably opposed to the use of force feared that the United States would respond with saturation bombing or even a nuclear strike. Many anguished opinion pieces were written bemoaning the Bush administration’s rhetoric and warning against, as the liberal cliché has it, the “spiral” of violence.

Some on the left — there are, it seems, still a few good Fanonists left — all but legitimized the attacks. Writing in the London Guardian, Dutch migration expert Saskia Sassen wrote, “The attacks are a language of last resort; the oppressed and persecuted have used many languages to reach us so far, but we seem unable to translate the message. So a few have taken the personal responsibility to speak in a language that needs no translation.” Or as Sara Pursley wrote in Salon about the Sept. 14 National Cathedral memorial ceremony: “There was not an ex-president in that church who did not have the blood of tens of thousands of Arab and Muslim civilians on his hands, and who did not commit these acts in the name of the American people.”

Admittedly this sort of exercise in depraved rationalization — the murder of more than 6,000 people as a message from the oppressed; bin Laden couldn’t have put it better himself — was the exception rather than the rule. But once again, not only in Western Europe but also, though to a somewhat lesser degree, in the United States, that by now familiar gap between leftist activists and intellectuals and artists, who tended to oppose American retaliation and called for the attack to be treated as a criminal matter (as if there were in place an international police force capable of “arresting” bin Laden), and large majorities of the population, who favored American military strikes, was exposed. By now, it is probably unbridgeable.

The left actually took a few steps away from its reflexive blame-the-U.S. pacifism during the Bosnian war and the run-up to the conflict in Kosovo, when some intellectuals and politicians actually supported military action against the Milosevic regime. But now such arguments are almost never heard. Now the left warns against “bellicism,” and insists that, in the words of the American radical Howard Zinn, people in the United States needed to “think about the resentment all over the world felt by people who have been the victims of American military action,” and to understand “how some of these people will go beyond quiet anger to acts of terrorism.” There’s a stubborn determination to inform the American people that the terrorist assault had been a response, albeit a mad and wicked one, to American power and American foreign policy.

So far, no one has updated the ’70s-era poster that circulated widely in radical circles, in which a Vietcong in a conical hat hands his Kalashnikov like a runner in a relay race to a Palestinian fighter in a keffiyeh — by having that Palestinian, perhaps, hand the rifle on to Osama bin Laden. But the question of Palestine specifically, and United States Middle Eastern policy generally, has been the unavoidable subtext of most of the calls for the need to look for the root causes of terrorism. Such a view has many attractions. Greatest among them, I think, is that it permits anyone subscribing to them to go on believing that the attacks were on the United States for what it has done and continues to do — provide arms and diplomatic support for Israel, maintain the embargo on Iraq, etc. — rather than on modernity itself. Thus there’s an imaginable way — ending those policies — to prevent such attacks in the future.

Because if the attacks, however reprehensible, are rooted in bad American actions, then it is still possible to believe that terrorism is a reactive phenomenon that would be vastly diminished if the United States started to behave differently, if it was more “even-handed” in the Israel-Palestine dispute, if it lifted the embargo against Iraq, stopped supporting emirs and sheikhs, and so on. By this account, the way for the United States to fight terrorism is to mend its ways, morally and geopolitically — and not to lash out at the terrorists, which, it is confidently asserted, will only breed more terrorists. Those holding this view tended to focus most fervently in their writings and pronouncements on the evil being done to Muslim immigrants in America, for it buttressed the case that the United States badly needed to put its own house in order.

But while grimly judgmental about America, this view is comparatively optimistic about the future, assuming, that is, that the United States starts behaving better. That is perhaps its deepest attraction. In effect, those holding it can pretend that nothing changed on Sept. 11, 2001; in other words, that the event, however tragic, was epiphenomenal. Unsurprisingly, those who believe this version of what has happened tend to talk not of the future but of the past — Sabra and Shatila, the Gulf War, the Iraqi embargo, the dirty wars in Central America. For them, the World Trade Center attack changed nothing, and they can go on as before.

The alternative view, to which I happen to subscribe, is that the destruction of the World Trade Center was one of those rare events that symbolically marks a new and much bleaker era. I oppose the embargo against Iraq (which I believe is an abomination and at least possibly a crime against humanity in the strict legal sense), and while I support the state of Israel I loathe the occupation and favor unilateral withdrawal from the West Bank and Gaza. But those issues are beside the point. Bin Laden and the rest of the Islamic fascists for whom terrorism has become the central element in their war with the West would not stop their campaign if Palestine was given statehood. They are not for a two-state solution; rather, their demand is the abolition of the Israeli state. As for Saddam Hussein, he is far too secular for their liking, and they support him (and may well be supported by him) only on the age-old principle of statecraft that says the enemy of my enemy is my friend.

One must give these people their due, not pretend, as Saskia Sassen did, that they are somehow people who are putting forward the message of the worlds oppressed, no matter where they are, what religion they practice, or what ideological beliefs they hold. Bin Laden himself has been quite categorical on the subject. He is not fighting for the oppressed. He is fighting for Islam, or, rather — and the point cannot be emphasized enough — for his primitive, barbarous version of Islam. As he put it in a speech in November 1996, “after the end of the Cold War, America escalated its campaign against the Muslim world in its entirety, aiming to get rid of Islam itself.” He added that “terrorizing the American occupiers is a religious and logical obligation.”

There is no reason not to take him at his word. There is still less reason to assume that if the United States supported Arafat, or made peace with Saddam Hussein, that the Islam bin Laden represents would be mollified. But if these are not the real root causes, then one is left with the prospect that what is actually at the root of all this is not the violence of one empire — that is, the American empire — but a war declared on the United States by another empire, that of the Islamic fascism of which bin Laden is only an emblem.

In one way, albeit perversely, those who lay the terrorists’ crimes at the door of American aggression are right. Islamic fascists believe that the United States is waging a cultural war against them. As one Palestinian textbook distributed in Hamas-run schools in Gaza put it, “Western civilizationdeprived man of his peace of mind, stability, and noble human examples … when it turned material well-being into the exemplary goal.” They believe, probably quite sincerely, that they are only defending themselves against what they call Westernization and we call modernization, which they believe will lead to the end of human stability and belief. Fascism is almost always based on the fear of pollution, and Islamic fascism is no exception. And it is that fear that not only has impelled terrorist acts but has defined the experiment in Islamic fascism that Taliban rule has become — an experiment led by Osama bin Laden who has, for some years, been a key power behind the throne in Afghanistan.

But he is not the only power.

That this movement has arisen in the Islamic world should come as no surprise. For it is in the Islamic world and sub-Saharan Africa (much of which, of course, is Muslim) where the experience of the last 10 years has been of worsening economic misery and social breakdown. The fact that in these two parts of the world, globalization was experienced quite literally as a catastrophe, whereas not just in the West, but in East Asia, Latin America and India, the new economic order seemed to hold the promise of prosperity, largely explains why retrograde and barbaric tendencies like that of a bin Laden have such authority.

People talk rightly of the attack on the World Trade Center representing a colossal failure of intelligence. But it’s a failure of intelligence in both senses of the world. Not just our spy agencies but our smarts deserted us when appraising the challenges ahead. Even more colossal is the failure of imagination that permitted us to imagine that the only resistance to modernity would come from the Jose Boves of this world, the French farmer whose crusade against genetically modified food has become a symbol of the movement against globalization. But he is a disenchanted citizen of the rich world. We took for granted that the poor nations would welcome modernity, find it irresistible, especially to those whose standards of living we thought could only rise.

Anyway, in the aftermath of the fall of communism, nothing was left to stop it. The West, its churches empty (except, curiously, in the United States itself), its women at least on the road to equality, and its culture transformed, and, perhaps despite itself, “cosmopolitized” by the multiculturalism born of the interface between commerce and the new mass migration, was leading the way. And from Lima to Tientsin, people seemed to be following along. “One World, Ready or Not,” the title of a book published on globalization some years ago, seemed to sum up where the planet was going.

Perhaps it still is. But what the World Trade Center’s destruction made clear is that the process will not be as cost-free as we believed and the resistance will be far fiercer and bloodier than we could have imagined. For unlike adjustments in American foreign policy, adjustments in the global system that would, without transforming other cultures, still bring wealth are difficult to even imagine, let alone implement. And the attacks themselves will make the rich world less rich, and, as a result, probably less inclined even than it was in the past to commit massive sums to the economic improvement of the poor world. With stock markets plummeting and resources being committed to alleviate mass unemployment, who imagines that voters will support the massive allocations needed to fight AIDS in Africa, sponsor serious development in Bangladesh, or offer debt relief to the Third World generally.

But the changes go deeper and are likely to prove more enduring than even a period of comparatively severe economic hardship in the West. The genius of the terrorists was to turn the artifacts of modernity into weapons against modernity. Civilian airliners were transformed into flying bombs; it turned out to be that simple to demonstrate that nothing, not the World Trade Center nor the Pentagon, could be protected against people with 13th century morals and 21st century technical skills. There will be a war — What else is there to do? — because there is no assuaging the anger of people like bin Laden or mitigating their resentment. The truth about the world that is to be found in both Max Scheler, who anatomized the resentments of those who felt marginalized, and the United Nations Human Development Report may, between them, explain what is going on, but offers no clue about what to do.

Odd and indeed disgusting as it is to find oneself writing that there is no alternative to war (and knowing full well how filthy and degrading that war will be), I find myself nonetheless with nothing else to suggest. Modernity, newly vulnerable, is, for all its faults, infinitely preferable to fascism. And that, I fear, is the choice that confronts us.

Last week four U.N. peacekeepers were killed in Sierra Leone, and more than 300 were taken hostage by revolutionary forces. They were part of a mission that was supposed to be a dry run for a U.N. deployment in the Congo — its outcome only shows how dangerous wishful thinking can be.

Until recently, the confusions of U.S. policy didn’t matter all that much. For all the pious talk to the contrary, the great powers and the United Nations were doing little to try to stop the fighting. Peacekeeping was correctly viewed as inappropriate in the context of African wars, where there was no peace to keep.

But now moves are afoot to deploy 500 international observers to monitor the cease-fire that was signed by most of the belligerents in Lusaka, Zambia, last year. These observers have no enforcement powers and the 5,000 U.N. soldiers who are to be deployed alongside them have, as their sole task, protecting not the Congolese people who are the victims of the war but the international observers. No Americans will be involved, but both U.S. money and U.S. logistical help will be needed if the mission is to get off the ground.

For the U.N. peacekeepers, it is the Bosnia trap all over again, although the mandate this time is actually more restrictive than it was in the Balkans in the early 1990s. In the wake of the killings in Sierra Leone, most senior officials at the United Nations are understandably terrified at the prospect of another such failure that will be laid at their door. They argue that such an ill-conceived, understaffed and unpromising operation would never have gotten off the drawing board had it not been for the dogged persistence of Richard Holbrooke, U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, architect of the Dayton agreements that ended the Bosnian war and front-runner for secretary of state should Al Gore become president.

Holbrooke’s obsession with Africa since coming to the United Nations has certainly astonished those who know his history. He has no African background, having begun his diplomatic career as an East Asia specialist. More recently, his focus has been almost entirely on the Balkans, Germany and NATO expansion. But Holbrooke has made Africa — above all, the Central African wars and the AIDS crisis — the signature issue of his tenure in New York. As competitive as he is brilliant, Holbrooke is reported on more than one occasion to have publicly contrasted the difficulties he faces with the less daunting tasks that have concerned Secretary of State Madeleine Albright.

It is hard to know how much truth there is in any of this. But the on again, off again feud between Holbrooke and Albright has been the stuff of Washington gossip for more than five years. A Beltway joke even had it that the anonymous letter denouncing Holbrooke before his confirmation hearings to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee was not written by a Republican but by an Albright loyalist. An extreme version insisted it was written by her outgoing spokesman, James Rubin. That hardly seems likely. But the bad blood is real enough, and, over Africa policy, the feud between the U.S. permanent mission to the United Nations and the State Department shows every sign of being about to boil over.

Go to the State Department and officials will tell you on background that Holbrooke is pushing a policy that they do not endorse. Secretary Albright’s protigi Susan Rice, assistant secretary of state for African affairs, has, during her tenure, staunchly supported Rwanda — one of the principal belligerents in the Congo war. Holbrooke has been less partisan. But he seems convinced that, much as he did at Dayton, he will be able by force of will to engage the various parties — Rwanda, Angola, Zimbabwe, the Congolese government and the rebel factions. This conviction seems to his detractors to be at best like the triumph of hope over experience, and at worst just grandstanding.

Holbrooke’s defenders argue that the State Department’s violently pro-Rwanda policy — one in which the U.S. has done virtually nothing to try to compel the regime in Kigali to curtail its abuses — is not just ineffective, as it was when the crisis was restricted to Rwanda and its border areas, but has become dangerous now that a general war has broken out across so much of Central Africa. Holbrooke, they insist, may not have half of Susan Rice’s background, but he at least has the wit and the vision to see that something radical needs to be done.

The problem is that despite President Clinton’s well-publicized trip to Africa, and his admirable decision to apologize to the Rwandan people for the U.S. refusal to intervene to stop the genocide, Washington is not really serious about getting involved in Africa in any way that could make a difference.

Holbrooke’s motives may well be of the best — certainly, it is hard to see how focusing on Congo will impress the hard-headed pols around Al Gore — but the initiative he is supporting for a U.N. deployment is the worst kind of symbolic politics. It may be attractive in Washington, since it will permit policymakers to say they don’t just care about suffering Kosovars, but about suffering Africans as well. But it has little or no chance of working, and it also risks confirming the cynical impression — already too common in America and Western Europe — that no matter how hard people try, there is nothing that can be done for Africa.

If the risks are small for the United States and its allies (they can all do their Bill Clinton imitations and say they feel Africa’s pain), the risk for sub-Saharan Africa is great. The last thing the continent needs is more symbolic politics, either in the U.S. or the U.N. version.

Yet, as Holbrooke readies himself to lead a U.N. delegation to the region to begin to put the planned deployment into operation, that looks to be exactly what Africa is about to get.

Albania will have a lot of competition, of course. The arrival of so many Kosovar refugees in Macedonia, for instance, has destabilized the fragile ethnic and political balance there. The destruction of the economic infrastructure of Serbia and the interdiction of vital commerce along the Danube river is already having a disastrous effect on Bulgaria and a considerable one on Romania, Greece and, as if they needed further economic bad news, Russia and Ukraine. The sense that the whole area is unsafe will gravely harm the tourist revenues expected by Croatia, whose fragile economic recovery depends on them, and even affect Greece.

As for the political effects, at a minimum the conflict will produce a radical reconfiguration of national budgets, from the United States through Western Europe to the Balkans. New moneys will certainly have to be appropriated for defense. Vast sums will have to be found for the so-called new Marshall Plan that the great powers and the international financial institutions agree will be necessary if the region is ever to recover either its political equilibrium or its economic health.

The estimates now run between $30 billion and $50 billion, but it is a foregone conclusion that the cost of stability will be far higher than that. The damage to Serbia alone runs into the hundreds of billions, and while it is unlikely that the great powers will want to repair the infrastructure they have just devoted so much time and effort to destroying, in the long run they will be obliged to do so — if only because the health of Serbia’s neighbors, including Croatia and NATO member Hungary, depends on their doing so. But after the fighting ends and the refugees begin to return to Kosovo, the first priority will be the neighboring countries that have suffered the most in the crisis and expect the most from its aftermath: Macedonia and Albania.

By comparison with Albania, the problems in Macedonia may actually prove to be manageable. Macedonia’s distress is chiefly political, and the removal of the ethnic Albania refugees, whether back to Kosovo or to third countries, combined with a sizable aid package, would probably restore at least a fragile equilibrium. The case of Albania is very different. Where Macedonia has good roads, a functioning infrastructure, and at least the first shoots of a consumer society, Albania is a pre-modern country that socially and economically resembles the poorer parts of North Africa and politically resembles those parts of the Russian Federation in which the dead hand of communism gave way, almost overnight, to the post-modern poisons of Mafia and crony capitalism. It is a country in which there is not an honest policeman to be found, a country in which even in villages that lack running water, people have satellite dishes that let them stare at Italian quiz shows.

In the course of only a few years, Albanians made the transition from the smothering totalitarianism of a state in which the Communist Party assigned everything from apartments to university places, and in which ownership of private cars was banned, to a country in which the principal engines of economic growth were financial pyramid schemes, smuggling immigrants to the West and, during the Bosnian war, sneaking banned goods into Yugoslavia. What little development aid came from Europe was badly administered and usually squandered — an outcome for which officials of the European Union, rather than the Albanians themselves, bear the brunt of the blame. The scandals that rocked the European Commission over the past year have many of their roots in these Albanian programs.

One of the great peculiarities of the Kosovo crisis is that the Kosovar refugees are actually far more prosperous than their Albanian cousins with whom they seek shelter. As one Kosovar put it to me in a refugee camp in Kukes, in northern Albania, “We come from Europe. They come from, well, Albania.”

“I was here once, before the war,” another man, a farmer named Kadri, told me. Kadri came from just outside the Kosovo city of Prizren. “I thought it was such a catastrophe in Kukes,” he said, “I swore I would never come back. Now I live here, maybe for a long time.”

The reality is that at least half a million Kosovars, and perhaps many, many more, are going to remain in Albania for years. Even assuming Milosevic eventually agrees to the essential NATO demands, it will be some time before the refugees can return safely. Meanwhile, they have taxed the infrastructure of Albania to the breaking point and beyond. This desperately impoverished country of fewer than 4 million people will need massive outside assistance to assimilate the sudden arrival of what will eventually amount to between one-fifth and one-quarter of its total population.

At the moment, the NATO powers and American and Western European aid agencies are claiming that they understand this crisis and will see to it that Albania gets the aid it needs. Albanians tend to respond warily. Their government sees in the crisis a last chance to get the aid it should have received after the downfall of communism at the beginning of the decade. But it has seen Western politicians come and go — from then-Secretary of State James Baker in 1991 to the recently deposed head of the European Commission, Jacques Santer, in 1997. None of their promises amounted to anything near Albania’s minimum requirements.

This time may be different. Some infrastructure projects are in NATO’s immediate strategic interests — like rebuilding the airport in Tirana, refurbishing the port in Durres, or rebuilding the roads north toward Kosovo and southeast in the directions that refugees being moved out of Macedonia will have to travel. And the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund are reportedly planning long-term projects.

But those who doubt that the West will follow through on rebuilding Albania need only point to the U.S. response to Hurricane Mitch last year in Central America. After the disaster struck, the United States did a great deal to help — but it did not do nearly enough, either in terms of debt relief and continued reconstruction aid or in terms of making Central America’s revival an ongoing, ‘front-burner’ concern in Washington. And the price of this complacency will this summer almost certainly be measurable in the huge increase in the number of Central American immigrants trying to cross the U.S.-Mexican border.

The sad truth is that neither the United States nor its NATO partners are good at seeing things through. For all intents and purposes, the future of Albania, and not just that of the Kosovar refugees, is now in NATO’s hands. In Albania, as in the Kosovar refugee camps, people are hoping for a NATO protectorate. But whether the great powers are willing to take on such a responsibility, and, even if they are, of discharging it conscientiously, is an open question. The problem is that for Americans, as for the French, the British and the Germans, it is a choice that will not affect them much either way. It is only for the Albanians themselves and, of course, for the Kosovars that it is a question of life and death.

Whatever Macedonian officials claim, the creation of their state in 1992 was always more of a testimony to the inability of anyone — including themselves — to come up with a viable solution for the constituent republics that had made up Yugoslavia than it was the establishment of a viable entity. Macedonia is tiny, landlocked and, economically, to the extent that its economy can still be said to exist in any modern sense, largely dependent on neighboring Serbia. In the seven short years of its existence, it has been coveted by Bulgaria (which claims that ethnic Macedonians are in fact Bulgars), undermined by Greece (which objects even to Macedonia’s name, which is why official international documents refer to FYROM, the former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia) and repudiated by the quarter of its population that is ethnically Albanian and has more interest in belonging to some ethnically homogeneous Albanian state — greater or otherwise — than in Macedonia as it currently exists.

In short, even before the current crisis, Macedonia was largely being kept together with smoke and mirrors. It existed because everyone feared the consequences of its ceasing to exist, rather than because anyone could come up with a convincing rationale for it. But though its economy was in freefall and its political institutions ramshackle to the point of incoherence, Macedonia somehow survived.

Until Operation Allied Force, that is. The war between NATO and Yugoslavia has changed all the political equations in the south Balkans. It is possible, of course, that if NATO is successful militarily and if the money is appropriated for some kind of Marshall Plan for the south Balkans that would, before all else, focus on rebuilding Kosovo and refloating Albania and Macedonia — the two neighboring states that have lost the most in the war — the conflict could actually end up being positive for Macedonia. But the odds are wildly against this.

As anyone who has visited the Macedonian refugee camps over the past six weeks can attest, the anger felt toward the refugees — not just by Macedonia’s unreformed, brutal and corrupt police forces but by ordinary Macedonians — is bitter and deep-seated.

No matter how badly stretched their small country is by the influx of more than 100,000 Kosovar Albanians, there is no denying that the Macedonians have behaved extraordinarily badly. Refugees at the border are routinely abused and sometimes horribly mistreated. People who have been raped or seen relatives killed by Serbian forces are humiliated by the Macedonian border guards in ways that suggest a policy decision, rather than a few thugs with badges who have abused their authority. When the refugees come across the border, they are frequently locked in buses for hours on end, without water or toilet facilities. More systematically, the Macedonian government has done its best to stymie efforts of NATO and international humanitarian agencies to expand the refugee camps that have been built to accommodate the tens of thousands of Kosovars who need shelter, food and medical attention.

And yet for Macedonia, the crisis is not simply a humanitarian emergency but a demographic earthquake. The refugees represent 10 percent of the Macedonian population — the equivalent of 26 million immigrants arriving in the United States in a little more than a month. Anyone who recalls the collective panic in South Florida during the 1980 Mariel boatlift of 100,000 Cubans would be hard-pressed to make the case that the Macedonian reaction is somehow inexplicable or uniquely awful. And the Cubans did not represent a tipping of the ethnic balance in the United States the way the Kosovars do to ethnic Macedonians, who rightly believe that the allegiance of the ethnic Albanian population in their country is contingent at best. It is one thing for Albania to take in as many refugees as want to come — for though they strain that country’s resources, they represent no political peril. The situation in Macedonia, however, is utterly different.

It is important to ask what Americans or Italians have done in similar situations. The United States put a picket line of ships in the Florida Strait to prevent more Haitian boat people from landing on American shores. The Italian occupation of Albania in 1997, ostensibly undertaken on humanitarian grounds, was actually designed to staunch the flow of Albanian refugees across the Adriatic. To put it starkly, refugee crises almost invariably bring out the worst in the citizens of the host country.

But the particular problem with the arrival of the Kosovar refugees in Macedonia — and it is one that threatens to completely alter the equation on which Western policy makers have based their decisions about Kosovo and about prosecuting the war against Yugoslavia — is that it is likely to have dire and almost incalculable political consequences for the region as a whole. One likely scenario has Milosevic continuing to push Kosovars into Macedonia on the assumption that, if he does so long enough, the country will explode and NATO will have to make a deal with him. Whether Milosevic is right or wrong remains to be seen. But it is not a bad bet. In any case, it is one of the cards he has left in his hand to undermine the efforts of the NATO alliance, which has consistently underestimated his ability to counter its efforts.

Support for Milosevic is already deepening in Macedonia, as it is in Greece and Russia. There are frequent pro-Milosevic rallies in Skopje, the Macedonian capital, drawing not only the country’s small Serbian minority but ordinary Macedonians in great numbers.

To watch these crowds wave the Yugoslav flag, hold up pictures of Milosevic and wave the three-fingered Serbian nationalist salute with passion and abandon is to see the face of the next stage of the crisis. Already, there have been a few attacks on foreign diplomats and aid workers, and many acts of sabotage against NATO installations — most of which have been covered up.

If NATO can end the war quickly and bring the refugee crisis to a close, then the old fears of the conflict spreading from Kosovo to Macedonia (and involving Greece, Turkey and Bulgaria) may prove to be unfounded. But the anxieties that American diplomat expressed to me half a decade ago in Sarajevo were valid then and are valid now. NATO is in a race against time, not only against Slobodan Milosevic and his criminal soldiery, but against historical tensions that have been jarred loose once more.

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.

The inescapable fact, however, no matter how much U.S. and NATO officials try to pretend otherwise, is that while the effectiveness of the air campaign in destroying large chunks of the military and economic infrastructure of Serbia has been undeniable, Operation Allied Force has so far accomplished none of its political or humanitarian objectives. That the administration acted out of decent motives is important historically. After all, less than 30 years ago a far greater massacre in Cambodia was judged a purely “internal” matter that, however hideous, was for the Khmer themselves to sort out. But on a practical level, this new ethos that insists that gross human rights violations inside a country cannot be ignored or allowed to continue unopposed — the ethos that, along with concerns about NATO’s coherence, compelled the United States and its allies to attack — has not saved a single Kosovar Albanian life.

This may have been inevitable, given the gulf between the moral claims we in Western Europe and North America routinely advance for our societies and for the standards of what we call, rather vaingloriously, the international community, and the degree of sacrifice we are willing to make. To say, as secretary-general Solana did at the beginning of the air campaign, that mass murder and ethnic cleansing were “unacceptable” in Europe at the end of the 20th century, but at the same time to insist that a ground war — the only thing that would surely prevent such atrocities — is unthinkable is, alas, an utterly incoherent position.

There may well, as administration defenders have been claiming over the past two weeks, have been no alternative to the approach the Western powers have taken. It can even be argued that it was indeed preferable to unleash a punishing air war against the Serbs on the chance, still not to be wholly excluded, that it would succeed, rather than simply to sit by and allow the worst instance of mass deportation in Europe since the aftermath of World War II to go on unopposed. But it is the height of self-delusion to confuse this with success.

Indeed, the future of the south Balkans is bleak and growing bleaker. The political and humanitarian crises are becoming impossible to separate. Humanitarian catastrophes have, along with wars in which ethnic cleansing was the principal aim of military action, punctuated the post-Cold War era in some parts of the world as surely as the advent of liberal capitalism has marked it in others. In the case of Kosovo, the dispersion of what will surely, before the crisis is over, constitute the bulk of the 1.8 million Kosovar Albanians to neighboring countries or to pitiful exile in refugee camps in places like Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, represents a profoundly destabilizing political event in an already unstable region as well as a human disaster of Biblical proportions.

The parallel with the Palestinians in their camps in the Gaza Strip after 1949 comes to mind, as do the Vietnamese boat people. Macedonia was on the brink of collapse even before the Kosovars were driven across the border; Albania, Europe’s poorest country, has only just emerged from a civil war. Now, both countries have been flooded with refugees. That fresh disasters will soon result from this is not a matter of speculation; it is almost a dead certainty.

At this point, barring some complete collapse of the Milosevic regime, the alternatives are, if anything, worse than those that confronted NATO planners before the start of Operation Allied Force. The most rational solution, a NATO occupation of the South Balkans more or less from Bosnia (remember Bosnia?) to the Greek border, may be no more feasible than a ground campaign in Kosovo. But if this is true, then the Kosovo crisis will almost certainly be succeeded by a crisis in Macedonia, in Montenegro, in Albania and, finally, in Serbia itself. These may make what is taking place in Kosovo look easy to resolve by comparison. And no amount of incantatory talk about the obligation to prevent humanitarian disaster will provide any reliable guide to coping with them.