Western involvement in Bosnia led to dashed peace deals, broken ceasefires, intensified fighting and a rising body count. US involvement created local clients, institutionalised in the Croat-Muslim federation created by Washington, and prolonged the war by encouraging the Bosnian Muslims to fight on in the hope that eventually the USA would intervene decisively on their behalf. In Kosovo, meanwhile, intervention by outside powers since 1989 has scuppered the possibility of a local solution by encouraging ethnic Albanian secessionists and feeding Serbian nationalism. The history of the past 10 years in the Balkans is above all a history of the ever-expanding role of international powers. Western intervention has included a whole gamut of activity, ranging from the political to the diplomatic to the economic to the military.
Bombing usually comes at the end of a long trail of other sorts of intervention.
Bombing Yugoslavia over Kosovo is unlikely to be the endgame of Western intervention. As long as outsiders are intervening, there is the potential for further unravelling. Autonomy or independence for Kosovo imposed by Western Cruise missiles will start a chain reaction in Montenegro, Vojvodina, Sandak, Bosnia and Macedonia, with catastrophic consequences for the entire Balkans. But then, Western intervention in the region was never driven by a concern for the fate of the peoples of the Balkans.