The Kosovo crisis started as an exercise in self re-definition. NATO used it to successfully put its cohesiveness to test. It acted sanely and its hypercomplex set of checks and balances and more checks scored an impressive success. As a result, the limited aims and means of the campaign were maintained and NATO was not dragged into either British belligerence or Italian and Greek defeatism. It was the second time in recent history (the first being another multilateral military campaign in the Gulf in 1991) - that a military move did not degenerate into full-scale insanity of carnage and bloodshed. NATO emerged as a self-restrained, well-choreographed, well co-ordinated body of professionals who go through motions and off the shelf plans with lifeless automatism. While somewhat aesthetically repulsive, this image is a great deterrent. We fear cold-blooded, impartial machines of war more than we do any hot-blooded, sword-wielding fanatic. NATO acted with the famous German industrial efficiency that gave warfare a bad name. It was "surgically precise" and civilian casualties were alchemically converted into "collateral damage". The well-practised Jamie Shea is an exceptionally chilling sight. Thus, a policeman was born to police the emerging world of international commerce, true multinationals, boundary-less flows of data and chaotic reactions to changes in local variables. This policeman is NATO and it wields an awesome club. As it chooses which criminals to discipline, it transforms the nature of previously unruly neighbourhoods. For this, at least, we should be grateful. (Article published June 6, 1999 in "The New Presence") Return NATO's Next War The real, protracted, war is about to start. NATO and the international peacekeeping force against an unholy - and, until recently, improbable - alliance. Milosevic (or post-Milosevic Serbia) and the KLA against the occupying forces. It is going to be ferocious. It is going to be bloody. And it is going to be a Somali nightmare. Why should the KLA and Serbia collaborate against NATO (I use NATO here as shorthand for "The International Peacekeeping Force - KFOR")? Serbia - because it wants to regain its lost sovereignty over at least the northern part of Kosovo. Because it virulently hates, wholeheartedly detests, voluptuously despises NATO, the "Nazi aggressor" of yester month. Serbia has no natural allies left, not even Russia, which prostituted its geopolitical favours for substantial IMF funding. Its only remaining natural ally is the KLA.