From Yugoslavia to Dayton, Ohio.

View this article at The Weekly Standard

The turning point for Bosnia came in August 1995 with a NATO bombing campaign. The air strikes succeeded in doing what no diplomatic effort had: persuading Serbian strongman Slobodan Milosevic to join in ending the four-year-old war over the pieces of the former Yugoslavia. Before the bombing, the aggressors in Bosnia treated international efforts with contempt, even taking hostages from the ineffectual U.N. peacekeeping force. But barely three months after the strikes began, a comprehensive peace agreement was reached at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Dayton, Ohio.

The decision to bomb for peace was controversial, to put it mildly. Most European governments found it unattractive and risky, as did NATO, the American military, and the major international organizations. Yet they were all equally mindful of the failure of diplomacy in Bosnia — and its horrible consequences in lost lives, ethnic cleansing and refugees. What to do?

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The American Spectator 

Conservatives Inside Out: Lessons Learned the Hard Way, A Personal Report by Newt Gingrich, HarperCollins / 229 pages / $25 

The Freshmen: What Happened to the Republican Revolution? by Linda Killian, Westview / 463 pages / $28 

The great national political story of the century’s closing decades is the collision of conservative ideology and political reality–that is, what happens when conservatism tries to govern. The answer has been unfolding since the election in November 1994 of a Republican Congress that, notwithstanding a Democrat in the White House, promised a “Revolution” in Washington. Almost four years later, with the GOP still in power on Capitol Hill and that same president coasting at his highest approval ratings ever, many ideological conservatives deem the result a disaster–and blame it on the failure of elected officials to fight for their principles. Most Republican officeholders, on the other hand, don’t consider themselves any less conservative now than in the exuberance of 1995; they claim incremental success in the face of extraordinary opposition and ask for patience.

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