Compounding everything was the need for the media to carry the message and present the correct images without any overt censorship or any evidence that pressure was being applied to them to manipulate public opinion. The illusion of a free press had to be preserved. A daunting challenge indeed for the propagandists. It turned even worse when the early bombing, which was supposed to settle the matter in days, didn't work and it became obvious that this war could not be won from a safe distance in the air with no risk of U.S. lives. At the point where we decided to intervene in Yugoslavia a civil war of modest proportions was already accompanying the break-up of the Yugoslav Republic.
Civil Wars are brutal affairs.
Visual images of the killing of innocent civilians and the burning of villages and fleeing refugees are very powerful. If, as in this case, the spotlight is beamed exclusively on one faction and all the others are un-photographed and unreported, the results are predictable. Earlier atrocities visited on the perpetrators aren't shown. Anti Serb propaganda filled the pages of our newspapers and the airwaves of the electronic media. Unmentioned was that the Serbs had been our loyal allies in World War 2 and had sustained as brutal a treatment at the hands of the Nazis as any holocaust victims.