For air strikes to have any chance of preventing Milosevic's awful atrocities they needed to be, from the beginning, massive, strategic and sustained. No infrastructure targets should have been off limits. And while we all grieve over civilian casualties as well as our own losses, they are unavoidable. When nations settle their differences by force of arms a million tragedies ensue. That's why we try to avoid it.
War is a much more terrible thing than cruise missile attacks on Iraqi radar sites.
But losing a war is worse. Force should always be a part of but not a substitute for diplomacy. Whether our diplomacy in the months preceding the use of force was well conceived and well conducted we will no doubt debate at length in the future. I do believe that the threat of force is a necessary component of diplomacy when trying to affect the behavior of tyrants like Milosevic. But we've all heard reports that some administration officials believed that the threat of force alone was such a powerful incentive for Serb cooperation that the threat may have dominated other aspects of diplomacy.