Product Description

After eleven weeks of bombing in the spring of 1999, the United States and NATO ultimately won the war in Kosovo. Serbian troops were forced to withdraw, enabling an international military and political presence to take charge in the region. But was this war inevitable or was it the product of failed western diplomacy prior to the conflict? And once it became necessary to use force, did NATO adopt a sound strategy to achieve its aims of stabilizing Kosovo? In this first in-depth study of the Kosovo crisis, Ivo Daalder and Michael O'Hanlon answer these and other questions about the causes, conduct, and consequences of the war. Based on interviews with many of the key participants, they conclude that notwithstanding important diplomatic mistakes before the conflict, it would have been difficult to avoid the Kosovo war. That being the case, U.S. and NATO conduct of the war left much to be desired. For more than four weeks, the Serbs succeeded where NATO failed, forcefully changing Kosovo's ethnic balance by forcing 1.5 million Albanians from their home and more than 800,000 from the country. Had they chosen to massacre more of their victims, NATO would have been powerless to stop them. In the end, NATO won the war by increasing the scope and intensity of bombing, making serious plans for a ground invasion, and moving diplomacy into full gear in order to convince Belgrade that this was a war Serbia would never win. The Kosovo crisis is a cautionary tale for those who believe force can be used easily and in limited increments to stop genocide, mass killing, and the forceful expulsion of entire populations. Daalder and OHanlon conclude that the crisis holds important diplomatic and militarylessons that must be learned so that others in the future might avoid the mistakes that were made in this case.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #1869794 in Books
• Published on: 2005-07-11
• Original language: English
• Dimensions: 1.40 pounds
• Binding: Hardcover
• 362 pages

From Amazon.com
Winning Ugly is the first serious book to assess NATO's first war--an 11-week bombing campaign waged against Serbia to force its troops out of Kosovo in the spring of 1999. The authors, Ivo H. Daalder and Michael O'Hanlon, both of the Brookings Institution, are careful scholars, and they are generally supportive of what the United States and its allies did: "The outcome achieved in Kosovo, while hardly without its problems, represented a major improvement over what had prevailed in the region up to that point and certainly over what would have happened had NATO chosen not to intervene." Yet they are also critical of how this particular approach was formulated by policymakers, and they readily believe better results might have been achieved. In other words, the air war was a success, but a relative one; the good guys won, but--as the title implies--they won ugly.

Daalder and O'Hanlon sometimes equivocate--"Could war in Kosovo have been prevented? The answer, we believe, is maybe"--yet Winning Ugly is an excellent summary of what happened and why it happened the way it did. On the question of whether Operation Allied Force actually prevailed, something skeptics have questioned, they write: "The vast majority of Kosovars are far better off today.... [Slobodan] Milosevic unquestionably lost the war, and his defeat was overwhelming." This is a foreign-policy wonk's book, a sober analysis that tries to draw clear lessons from experience. It's not only the first book worth examining for readers interested in what happened in Kosovo; it may be the best available for some time. --John J. Miller

About the Author
Ivo H. Daalder, a senior fellow in Foreign Policy Studies at the Brookings Institution, was director of European Affairs on the National Security Council staff from 1995 to 1996. He is the author of Getting to Dayton: The Making of America's Bosnia Policy (Brookings, 2000). Michael O'Hanlon, a senior fellow in Foreign Policy Studies at the Brookings Institution, is the author of Technological Change and the Future of Warfare (Brookings, 2000).