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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
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