In fact, the bombing of Serbia has had exactly the opposite consequences from those intended.
Far from weakening Slobodan Milosevic's support in Serbia, it has united the people behind him, as John Simpson and others have reported from Belgrade. And far from ending the ethnic cleansing in Kosovo, it has greatly increased the savagery of Serbian troops and police in the area.
Although Nato governments have tried to appear united in favour of the bombing, the peoples of many allied states are strongly against it particularly those who neighbour Yugoslavia, such as Greece, Italy and Hungary.
The situation has been aggravated by the lies and confusion of Nato spokesmen, who besides their dishonesty on the bombing of civilian convoys, actually showed an old training film as an attack on a tank in Serbia!
In some ways the most dangerous consequence of the bombing has been to ruin Nato's relations with Russia, which was neither consulted nor informed in advance.
Indeed Prime Minister Yevgeniy Primakov first heard about it on the radio above the Atlantic while he was flying to Washington to discuss Kosovo with the Americans. No wonder he went straight home.
Though 500 aircraft have flown 8,000 sorties, they have destroyed only a handful of their military targets. Now Nato is beginning to hint at using ground forces. In fact it is doubtful whether the US Congress would allow American forces to fight in Yugoslavia.
America has provided 75 per cent of Nato's air effort; Nato would be lucky if America provided seven and a half per cent of any increase in its land forces.
At present, there are about 20,000 Nato ground troops in the theatre, almost all to provide humanitarian assistance in Macedonia and Albania.
To defeat the Serbs in Kosovo would require up to 10 times as many, and would take several months to assemble in the area.
Moreover, to reach Kosovo from Albania or Macedonia would mean fighting in difficult mountain country in which the Serbs, with their guerrilla skills, would find it easy to prevent Nato from using its tanks and heavy artillery.
In any case, Macedonia would probably refuse to be used as a base for offensive action; if not, its government might fall.
A far better military option would be to assemble a fully equipped Nato ground force in Hungary, which is now a Nato member. Then the objective would be to displace Milosevic, the source of all these troubles, from Belgrade, his capital.
But the Hungarian government would be most unlikely to permit this, since it would expose the large Hungarian population of the Vojvodins in northern Yugoslavia to horrific Serbian atrocities, far worse than those on the Kosovans. My own feeling is that the best, if not the only hope, would be to engage Russia in a negotiation with Yugoslavia for a peaceful settlement. Former prime minister Viktor Chernomyrdin's recent talks with Milosevic, though their result was far from satisfactory, show Russia might be willing to join such a wider negotiation.
It is in any case high time that Nato took Russia more seriously as a European power. Western indifference, combined with Russia's massive internal problems, has created a real risk that President Boris Yeltsin might be overthrown by an alliance of nationalists and Communists, which could create serious problems for the West in many parts of the world.
By treating Yeltsin as an equal partner in negotiating a peaceful settlement in Yugoslavia, Nato would strengthen his position in Moscow.
This would mean stopping the bombing, which has already proved counter-productive. The objective should be to give Kosovo some form of self-government under the protection of Nato and Russian forces.
Current Western policies are more likely to produce a gangster state controlled by the KLA, which, as the Germans have pointed out, is funded by the drug trade, and might well seek to create a Greater Albania which included Montenegro and Macedonia, posing new threats to Greece.
Meanwhile, it would be far better to spend the £40 million a day we are spending on the air war to help the 500,000 refugees from Kosovo to organise their return to their homeland and to rebuild their towns and infrastructure. That would be some recompense for the tragedies of the past four weeks.
Lord Healey is a former Labour Defence Secretary
