There is only one word to describe NATO's war on Yugoslavia: catastrophe. A catastrophe first of all for the ethnic Albanians whom the war was meant to save, a catastrophe for the hundreds of Serb civilians killed by NATO's "mistakes", and a catastrophe for the credibility of the world's most powerful military alliance, which in six weeks has not been able to prevail over a Balkan dictator.
The NATO supreme commander, Gen Wesley Clark, has said it was "entirely foreseeable" that Serb atrocities against Albanians would increase once bombardments start ed. So why did the US - and let us set aside the fiction that "NATO" represents much more than the will of Washington - initiate the bombardments in the first place? As many as 800,000 Albanians have been driven from their homes by Serb forces. Unknown numbers of women have been raped, and the Pentagon estimates that up to 4,000 Albanians have been murdered by Serb forces in Kosovo, including the April 27th massacre of some 200 men at Meja, corroborated by testimony given to Human Rights Watch and the UN High Commissioner for Refugees.
Primary responsibility for these atrocities must lie with the Serbs, but surely Washington is guilty of hatching an inadequate, ill-conceived strategy. The US and its ineffectual European allies were right to want to "do something" to stop the Serbs' mistreatment of Albanian Kosovans; they sinned in doing it so ineptly.
The Russian Prime Minister Mr Yevgeny Primakov summed it up in an interview with the French Journal du Dimanche: "There are no good chess players among NATO leaders. NATO's military intervention in Yugoslavia is a tragic error . . . before you move a pawn, you must foresee every possible response by your adversary."
This weekend's release of three US servicemen was another shrewd move by Mr Milosevic, calculated to irritate the White House, which had opposed the Rev Jesse Jackson's mission.
After threatening to put the three Americans on trial - then swearing they would never be freed before the bombing stopped - Mr Milosevic portrayed himself as the peacemaker by publicly requesting a face-to-face meeting with President Clinton. If Washington ignored the gesture, it "risks losing moral authority", Mr Jackson said - how those words must have galled his old friend Bill Clinton.
The German NATO general Klaus Naumann noted last week that air power alone has never achieved victory in any war. Surely NATO knew this before March 24th? If a ground campaign was inevitable from the beginning, why did NATO not take the time to transfer troops to the region, as western powers did between August 1990 and January 1991 before liberating Kuwait? Instead, NATO chose the coward's way out - bombing from high altitude with minimal risk.
Six weeks on, the only strategy which might prise Kosovo from Mr Milosevic's forces looks unattainable. The US Congress does not want a ground war, Germany says it would not participate, France demands a UN resolution to authorise it and Greece refuses to allow NATO to use its territory as an invasion route. The obvious solution towards which we are painfully moving is a United Nations peacekeeping force in Kosovo.
Meanwhile, NATO has moved to 24-hour bombing of Yugoslavia. If the alliance limited its attacks to Serb forces in Kosovo, it might justify the air strikes on the grounds that they punish those who are perpetrating the "ethnic cleansing" of the Serb province. But NATO has extended the range of "legitimate targets" to include Yugoslavia's economy, its roads and bridges, its factories and even the state-run television station. This strategy - like continuing economic sanctions against Iraq - amounts to the collective punishment of a nation, which is banned in international law.
Belgrade says more than 500 Serb civilians have been killed in the bombings, a credible figure. As many as 60 more civilians were killed when an F-16 jet bombed a civilian bus on the Nis-to-Pristina road at the weekend. NATO spokesmen claim their pilots did not "bomb" the bus - only the bridge it was crossing at Lujane. The bus and its passengers were merely "collateral damage".
This delicate distinction is meant to clear the alliance of responsibility for killing civilians - something it is doing with increasing frequency. More alarmingly - and without explanation - the pilot who bombed the railway bridge at Grdelica on April 12th went back to have a second go at it, after he had seen the passenger train caught in the first bombing. Similarly, a NATO aircraft returned to the scene of Saturday's Lujane bus bombing an hour later and fired on an ambulance.
Most Serbs know better than to proclaim the innocence of their forces in Kosovo. Rather, arguments centre on the West's double standards. The US was founded on the "ethnic cleansing" of the American Indians, they are quick to point out, and Israel was built upon the "ethnic cleansing" of the Palestinians. France and Britain committed terrible atrocities in their former colonies, and 20th century Germany gave rise to Hitler's democratically-elected Nazi regime.
When 170,000 Serbs were "ethnically cleansed" by the Zagreb government from Serb enclaves of Croatia in 1995, the US maintained total silence. And hasn't Turkey - a NATO member and one of Washington's best weapons customers - murdered and "ethnically cleansed" more Kurds than the Serbs have Kosovo Albanians? However true, these arguments ignore the basic fact that nothing can justify mass rape, murder and deportation of an entire people.
Many in the West believe they have found a "just" and "good" war in Yugoslavia. So a form of intellectual terrorism is practised - in which criticism of NATO is equated with support for "ethnic cleansing". Yet it is precisely because NATO countries believe they are morally superior to Mr Milosevic's regime that they are expected to behave in a morally superior way. And morality suggests that its honour can be salvaged only by diplomacy.
