Surely, however, you're not arguing that you start a war with another country to punish them for soemthing they did 4 years earlier.

Kosovo as a low-level counter-insurgency prior to NATO getting involved. Not an ethnic cleansing or genocide at all. In fact, one of the worst massacres (at Racak) was recently uncovered as a fraud when the head of the UN Forensics Team, Helen Ranta, came clean.

You can't start a war with someone for something they did five years prior.

The Serbs were involved in a crackdown on the KLA. In this fighting, the KLA had killed Serb civilians and the Serbs had killed Kosovo Albanians. About 1,000-1,500 had been killed in equal numbers in the years leading up to the first dropping of NATO bombs.

The American team negotiating the terms of peace was horrid. Jamie Rubin, Wesley Clark, Madeliene Albright, all had a peace agreement at Rambouillet. The Serbs agreed to total withdrawal. The KLA, Hasim Thaci, did not go along, and the Americans were forced to create a sham of an agreement (Appendix B) which everyone knew was a no-go for the Serbs. They had peace at Rambouillet, and the Americans chose war instead. It was a cowardly choice which mimicked what had been done in Bosnia in 1991-1992 when Cyrus Vance and David Owen had the three leaders agree to a plan that, in the end, looked very much like Dayton. This was BEFORE 100,000 had died in Bosnia.

The ethnic cleansing campaign by the Serbs post-bombing became a matter of controversy when it was revealed that the publicized campaign, Operation Horseshoe, was concocted by German intelligence as propaganda.

The whole war was a farce from start to finish, playing games with people's lives, and in the end accomplishing absolutely nothing.

When the true history of 1990s ex-Yugo is written, it will only be seen as a colossal debacle of diplomacy, and a cowardly war conducted by ALL sides against innocent civilians.