I don't think your exception holds Jon W, data recently released by the US Government confirms that the decision to drop the bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki was a purely political decision by the President of the US, against the advice of his advisors, rather than a military one, and that their detonation had minimal impact on the Japanese decision to surrender.

As you say, the only way we can possibly do any good here is to deploy ground troops. It seems to me that in seeking to avoid this, Clinton is repeating his earlier claimed behaviour of "smoking but not inhaling"; you cannot fight a war without casualties no matter how much he wishes otherwise.

I still do not believe that Milosevic is another Hitler, but I do I think the Balkans and much of Europe would become inherently unstable politically if the concept of "ethnically pure" nations was allowed to take hold. Tito held a multicultural Yugoslavia together for forty years by economic means, we in NATO need to repeat this process. What in my view is potentially disastrous is to perceive this as a "Serbian" problem, its roots are economic and social and this process can and will be repeated elsewhere if NATO fails to control and remedy the situation. That is the raison d'etre of NATO: to protect Europe, in this case from an internal threat. To do so we need to deploy not only troops but economic aid designed to help the area rather than the industries of the donor country. There is no point in hand wringing over what we could have done in the past, we chose not to act for our own selfish reasons, now we will have to pay the piper in blood before we get another chance. Although military action never solved any problem, it is sometimes a necessary precursor to an effective political solution. The longer we delay effective action the harder the task becomes both militarily and politically.

An increasingly worried and despondent Pete M