Banal and Dubious.

• Author: Bacevich, Andrew J.
• Position: Review

Ivo H. Daalder and Michael E. O'Hanlon, Winning Ugly: NATO's War to Save Kosovo (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press, 2000), 343 pp., $26.95.

Michael Ignatieff, Virtual War: Kosovo and Beyond (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2000), 246 pp., $23.

EVEN BAD books can serve salutary purposes. Unpacking the conventional wisdom of the day and expounding on it respectfully and at length, they unwittingly expose its defects. (Think of Frances FitzGerald on Vietnam, Jonathan Schell on nuclear war, or Paul Kennedy on American decline.) For such efforts, the conscientious student of world affairs, bending under a continuous assault of finely spun "news", may be grateful. The two books reviewed here offer a case in point. They are deeply flawed, but their defects imbue them with a certain estimable, if inadvertent, value. Offering two very different perspectives on Kosovo, they show the extent to which the prevailing understanding of this war that was not a war, fought for human rights and won by air power, is fraudulent.

Winning Ugly is a quintessential Washington think tank product: thoroughly researched, welt organized, timely, judicious and utterly unoriginal. Ivo Daalder and Michael O'Hanlon, senior fellows at the Brookings Institution, situate the war for Kosovo in a framework identical to that advanced by the Clinton administration and NATO and then replay the arguments vented during the war by the administration's many critics. The authors offer the equivalent of one of those comprehensive recapitulation/critiques that the Washington Post or New York Times publishes a month or six weeks after a major crisis--except that Winning Ugly appears a year late and is a couple hundred pages too long.

The book's main argument is that "NATO's cause was worthy but that the strategy it chose to pursue that cause was deeply flawed." The flaws for which the authors take NATO and the United States to task include the following: a tendency to issue threats without the means or the will to back them up; a preference for political expediency over military efficacy, manifested above all in the decision to renounce a ground option at the outset of the conflict; a theory of "coercive diplomacy" based on the employment of air power largely for demonstrative purposes; and the inexplicable failure to have on hand a robust "Plan B" when expectations that "a bit of bombing would do the trick" proved mistaken.

Fair enough. But when Messrs. Daalder and O'Hanlon venture beyond the obvious, the results are either banal or highly dubious. A concluding chapter that purports to identify the larger "lessons" of...