Balkan Ghosts: Mistakes of the Clinton team, mistakes of the Bush team.

In 1999, President Clinton took the United States into war confident that Slobodan Milosevic would yield in a matter of days. The Serb forces were more like gangs of roaming thugs than a real army. And as for Milosevic's regime, it was essentially a criminal enterprise, lacking real legitimacy. Who would be willing to die for such a cause?

But Clinton and his lieutenants misgauged both their adversary and the character of the war on which they had embarked. The Serbs, by husbanding their air defenses, breaking up into small units, and concealing their heavy weapons in villages, proved to be an elusive quarry. Rather than seeing the start of Operation Allied Force as a sure sign of their coming defeat, they used it as a pretext to accelerate a vicious campaign of ethnic cleansing, creating a flood of refugees that caught the U.S. and its allies flatfooted. Worse, whatever their views on Milosevic, the Serbian people turned out to feel even less kindly toward the foreigners bombing their country. Massive anti-American and anti-NATO demonstrations filled the streets of Belgrade.

With resources far exceeding those of tiny Serbia, the United States and its allies eventually prevailed. But doing so required not a limited air campaign of a few days, but eleven weeks of increasingly intense bombing. To break Serb resistance, Clinton ordered sustained attacks on Belgrade itself, producing images very much at odds with the war's proclaimed humanitarian rationale. Victory entailed the killing of several hundred Serb civilians.

In all, the war -- and the occupation of Kosovo that followed -- proved to be a far more complicated affair than had been anticipated or advertised. Though Clinton refused to acknowledge the fact, it qualified at best as something of a Pyrrhic victory, with NATO solidarity badly frayed, China up in arms over the bombing of its embassy, and the returning Kosovars launching a campaign of anti-Serb ethnic retribution.

Conservatives expected that the return of Republicans to power would change all of this. A plainspoken, no-nonsense George W. Bush took the place of the erratic, undisciplined Clinton. The national-security team that Bush recruited -- led by Colin Powell, Donald Rumsfeld, and Condoleezza Rice, and supported by deputies like Paul Wolfowitz and Richard Armitage -- came to office with gilt-edged resumes. Effective January 20, 2001, it was felt, amateur hour would come to an end.

Then came Operation Iraqi Freedom.

Let there be no mistake: Just as Clinton won his war in Kosovo, Bush will win his in Iraq. Only a lapse in political resolve could change the outcome, and President Bush shows no signs of cracking. But, no matter what the White House and Pentagon say, this administration -- like its predecessor -- seriously misjudged both its adversary and the character of the war itself. Indeed, to an embarrassing degree, its errors actually parallel those of the Clintonites in Kosovo.