When doves cry: wars without ends.

• Author: Postrel, Virginia
• Position: US policy towards the war in Kosovo, Yugoslavia - Editorial

In Washington, they are calling the fight over Kosovo "Albright's war." The secretary of state's biography, it's said, is the reason NATO has gone to war with Serbia. Madeleine Albright was born in Czechoslovakia, the child of a diplomat stationed in Belgrade before and after World War II; the family twice had to flee the continent, to England to escape the Nazis and to America to escape the communists. Albright calls herself"a product of Central Europe" and says she has seen what happens "when you don't stand up to evil early."

Unlike Nazi Germany, however, Serbia is not an expansionist power trying to conquer Europe. It is a barbaric and oppressive state operating within its own borders, which makes opposing it much more difficult both militarily and politically. "Standing up to evil" does not, in this case, provide an obvious military objective, such as repelling or deterring an invasion. What, then, is the goal of the confrontation? How do you know when you've won?

Like Vietnam, this is a peculiar, post-World War II war, conducted by an administration with little interest in foreign policy and way too much belief in its own ability to create reality. The Clinton administration fell into war with Serbia because policy makers overestimated the fear that threatening words would inspire in the enemy (a word they rarely use, lest war seem a matter of us vs. them).

"As we contemplated the use of force over the past 14 months, we constructed four different models," a senior official told The Washington Post. "One was that the whiff of gunpowder, just the threat of force, would make [Slobodan Milosevic] back down. Another was that he needed to take some hit to justify acquiescence. Another was that he was a playground bully who would fight but back off after a punch in the nose. And the fourth was that he would react like Saddam Hussein," fighting back and maintaining power.

These "four" models are actually two: The enemy quickly capitulates, or he fights back for real. The war is a minor confrontation, or a long struggle. Treating the first scenario as though it were three different ones skews the debate. It makes the outlier appear less likely than it is.

Policy makers, to be fair, were misled by their Bosnia experience, when air strikes (combined with effective ground actions by Croat and Bosnian Muslim forces) did make Milosevic come to terms. But the administration seems to have been willfully blind to the differences: The struggle over...