The last wars we won.

• Author: Glastris, Paul
• Position: Editor's Note - Editorial

When I was a kid during Vietnam, I remember hearing some of my father's friends--like him, World War II vets who voted Republican--scornfully declare that they had served during "the last war we won." It was a not-too-subtle swipe at the Democrats for failing to achieve victory in a war they had started.

These days, as we watch the United States stumble through another slow-motion defeat, I find myself incredulous that the Democrats don't regularly invoke the last wars America did, in fact, win: Bosnia and Kosovo.

Most Americans probably don't remember the precise outcomes of--much less the circumstances leading up to-those small Balkan conflicts. But I can't forget them. I covered the end of the war in Bosnia as a reporter and was a speechwriter in the Clinton White House during Kosovo. In both cases it was clear, at least to me and my Balkan-obsessed friends, that Serbian strongman Slobodan Milosevic was engineering ethnic slaughter for his own political ends; that both conflicts, happening in the same country that sparked World War I, could spill over into neighboring states; and that Europe, by itself, was incapable of ending the violence.

America, in my opinion, had no option but to get involved militarily. But much of the national security establishment wasn't so sure, because the prospects for success seemed so grim. Religious and ethnic enmities in Yugoslavia were, if anything, worse than those in Iraq (at least until recently). At home, Clinton faced a far tougher political environment than Bush later would on the eve of the Iraq War: a hostile Congress controlled by the opposite party; a military that deeply distrusted him; and a pre-9/11 voting public that did not feel that the security of the nation was threatened in any direct way. The administration compounded these problems with a series of mistakes--from its initial half-hearted effort to sell the Europeans on a military strategy for Bosnia to underestimating Milosevic's resolve to hold on to Kosovo.

And yet both conflicts ended with impressive military victories. In Bosnia in the summer of 1995, Croat and Muslim ground troops, armed (and, in the case of the Croats, trained) with tacit U.S. government support, routed the Serbs in southern Croatia and eastern Bosnia, while U.S.-led NATO air and naval forces pounded Bosnian Serb military positions with smart bombs and Tomahawk missiles. That one-two punch forced Milosevic to sue for peace at the Dayton Accords. Then, in March...