Just wanted to draw a few parallels.
The Clinton administration somehow figured out, by savvy or by chance, that Milosevic, contrary to wide opinion in Western Europe, was not a mini-Franco or a mini-Hitler, but a dictator of an entirely different sort.
Five centuries of Turkish domination imbued a distinctly Middle Eastern flavor on Serbian political culture.
Milosevic wasn't a mini-Franco. He was a mini-Saddam.
As such, the Clinton administration put to work the strategies of containment and military intimidation that they had used, successfully, for the previous six years to limit Saddam Hussein's threats on neighboring countries.
They rallied the international community. They enacted sanctions. They bombed the bejeezus out of armament factories, munitions depots, bridges and other strategic targets.
The Clinton administration had a goal, which was to force Serbia to relinquish control of Albanian-populated regions of Serbia to the international community, until a government could come to power that was able to responsibly deal with the issue of national minorities. They succeeded.
Living in "war-torn" Yugoslavia in the 1990s, I was initially skeptical that the Clinton administration would be able to make sense out of the political situation in this complicated and long unhappy state. But they demonstrated that the judicious use of force, backed up by support by the international community, could bring about results that were positive for the people of the country.
Later, back in the U.S., I was frantically clicking the refresh button on my browser at work, reading the local news from Serbia on the website for the radio station B92 in Belgrade, as the Serbian student movement and opposition politicians finally brought down the bloody rule of Milosevic.
Life in Serbia these days isn't paradise. Unemployment, a sense of national despair and purposeless and an ever flowing stream of political scandals, failed elections and other government problems are the order of the day. But the prospects of the country are one thousand percent more positive than they were three or four years ago.
In this way, I think you can say that the Clinton administration intervention in Kosovo succeeded.
Looking further east ...
There are, in fact, a lot of parallels between Iraq and Serbia. Both are splinter states of the Ottoman empire. Both are multicultural and multi-religious. Both were oppressed and at the same time saved from sectarian violence by the personality of strongman dictators who relied on a network of military and corrupt bureaucrats to keep order between their various national factions.
I would like to assert that what worked in Serbia could have worked in Iraq, given more time. Yes, the suffering of the Iraqi people under Saddam Hussein was terrible. Yes, it would have been difficult to watch them endure the deprivation that embargos and airstrikes cause. But it seems to me likely that, over time, either Saddam would cave in, either to mortality or to exhaustion of the will (as did Ghadafi), and the country would rise up and rearrange itself under a new system of government.
We didn't let that happen, so, I guess we will never know.
The odd thing now is watching the Bush administration create a new Saddam, in the shape of one Ahmad Chalabi, and attempt to install him in power as the new Iraqi strongman, pretensions to democracy aside. Not having learned the lesson of Clinton's Kosovo intervention, cliques in the Bush government are rushing to recreate the mistakes of history.
Despite his lionization in the pages of the New York Times, through which a close "personal friend" Judith Miller channeled dozens of inaccurate or false claims about Iraq, Chalabi is a potential third world dictator of the kind we know so well from developing countries around the world. Intrinsically corrupt, self-dealing, with no popular support among the people, he will require propping up by the U.S. for years to come.
And when we inevitably dump him, he, like Saddam Hussein, will find new friends elsewhere. (An alternate reality, I suppose, finds al-Sistani coming into view as the anti-Chalabi.)
I have called into question the foreign affairs competence of the Bush administation on other occasions. In my mind, we may take Iraq and the Chalabi affair as flat evidence in judging whether or not Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld and Powell are prepared or willing to conduct foreign policy on a level required for our national well-being.
So far, things do not look good.