“NATO's success in Kosovo will be the biggest deterrent to tyrants the world over and the biggest rallying call for democracy,” Blair said in a speech at Sofia University on May 17, 1999. “That is why, whatever it takes, we must succeed and the policy of brutal savagery that is ethnic cleansing must fail and be seen to fail.”

Tyrants the world over didn't get Blair's memo. A little more than two years later, the United States was attacked by radical Islamists. A month after that, the United States and its allies, in revenge, invaded Afghanistan. Less than 18 months later, the United States and its allies invaded Iraq. Apparently, the far-from-deterred Saddam Hussein had spent the previous decade developing weapons of mass destruction – this, despite 12 years of sanctions and non-stop bombing by the United States and its allies. Then, in March 2011, the United States and nato launched a “humanitarian” war against Libya, a state hitherto touted as a partner in the war on terror and as a shining exemplar of a state that had belatedly joined the ranks of the righteous out of fear of Western attack. Colonel Qaddafi, having befriended the West and given up his nuclear program, had apparently returned to the ranks of the tyrants.

Thirteen years after the Kosovo campaign, the United States and its junior nato partners are embroiled in several wars, which have cost thousands of American, British, and other allied lives, not to mention tens of thousands of non-Western lives. Then there are the U.S./NATO military campaigns that don't quite rise to the level of actual wars, including the daily bombings of countries such as Pakistan, Yemen, and Somalia. Deaths of Iraqis and Afghanis range in the hundreds of thousands. None of these wars have achieved anything that could remotely justify losses of such a magnitude.

In 2008, Samantha Power worried that “Americans will ‘overlearn’ the lessons of Iraq,” just as a generation earlier, neo-conservatives had anguished that the Vietnam syndrome might inhibit the United States from using force in the future. Power's concerns were as misplaced as those of the neo-conservatives. It was the lessons of Bosnia and Kosovo, not those of Iraq, which were “overlearned.”