Such questions are being posed by a variety of groups. For the great minds of geopolitics, Kosovo has already spawned a substantial literature on the concept of “humanitarian intervention”–the idea that outside forces can wage war against a sovereign state if the authorities of that state treat some of their own people repugnantly. Scholars of European studies ask what Kosovo has taught us about the limits of European cooperation on defense; theorists of war debate whether Kosovo was the shape of things to come–the first occasion when the victorious side in an armed struggle limited itself to the projection of force from the air.

Many of those debates were hashed out in a recent TV series on Kosovo for Britain’s Channel 4. (A different version of the series will shortly be shown on America’s PBS program “Frontline”; I wrote the script for the British films.) The films shed light on one important question in particular: in a war, what are the proper roles of the military and political command structures?

For European and American politicians, Kosovo was one more act–the final one, they hoped–in the Wars of the Yugoslav Succession. And the principal lesson they had learned from those wars was that Serb leader Slobodan Milosevic backed down when faced with a display of force. On this analysis, NATO’s short, sharp, bombing campaign against Serbia in the summer of 1995 hastened Milosevic’s willingness to cut a deal at the talks in Dayton that ended the Bosnian war. By the politicians’ logic, a brief, contained bombing campaign against Milosevic in 1999 would force the Serbs to renew talks on the autonomy of Kosovo. Moreover, the politicians knew the importance of public support. “Belgrade,” Javier Solana, then secretary-general of NATO, has said, “is a city of Europe.” If NATO had bombed the daylights out of Serbia at the outset of the war, Western Europe would have erupted in demonstrations for peace. The consequence was a bombing campaign which, it was anticipated, would last only a few days, and which had relatively few targets–only around 90–in its sights. According to U.S. Air Force Lt. Gen. Mike Short, who ran the air war for NATO, as early as the third night of the campaign, commanders had to cancel planned attacks because all the approved targets had already been hit.

Trouble was, Milosevic did not back down; and NATO’s bombing, which was gradually escalated in its intensity, had to continue for more than three months. That has led some of the men in uniform to question whether NATO’s tactics were the right ones. Left to their own devices, commanders like Short would have gone for “the head of the snake”–in other words, deployed a much broader campaign, against many more targets, all designed to cripple Milosevic’s infrastructure. The weight of a bombing campaign, says Short, “has to make an incredible impression on the adversary, to such a degree that he is stunned and shocked and his people are immediately asking: why in the world are we doing this?” But every time the brass suggested such an approach in the run-up to Kosovo–the sort of campaign that the U.S.-led coalition used against Baghdad in the gulf war–it was turned down. The solidarity of NATO’s membership, the planners were told, would not survive such a brutal attack.

Are the soldiers and airmen right? Should NATO have used overwhelming force at the outset of the Kosovo war? It’s tempting to think so, if only because the war lasted so much longer than almost any of its architects expected. Wars are fought by soldiers; it’s not a bad principle to take their advice on how they should be waged.

But there’s an alternative view. The Kosovo war pitted a collection of 19 democracies–the members of NATO–against a dictatorship. A democracy is an inherently messy political system; its leaders are (or should be) necessarily sensitive to the needs and demands of a variety of constituencies, and if they are wise, have an ear tuned to the mystic chords of memory. Those who live in the nations of Europe, as NATO Supreme Commander Gen. Wesley Clark has noted, have very good reasons for recoiling from the idea of a massive blitz on a major city–from bitter personal experience, they know the price paid in terror and loss. (NATO may not have known how to kill the head of the snake, but the Nazi Luftwaffe sure did; in April 1941, German bombers killed 17,000 people in Belgrade in a single night.) It is natural for politicians to weigh such considerations against the professional advice they receive from the men and women in their armed forces.

Perhaps (and I should stress this is my own view, not one heard from anyone in the TV films) it is easier for Americans than Europeans to accept that, in wartime, warriors know what they’re talking about. Modern Americans–lucky for them–have never seen the consequences of a war fought on their own territory. Europeans have. Europe’s leaders are almost bound to tiptoe into war, and to hope against hope that hostilities can be ended quickly, with a minimum amount of bloodshed. Such attitudes, doubtless, do not make things easy for those paid to serve in the colors. But they are the consequence of democratic habits and the necessary homage that today pays to the memory of the day before yesterday. There is no shame in that.