One might argue that Bush could never have pulled together a broad war-fighting coalition against Saddam as Clinton did against Milosevic because the situations were different. Clinton, according to this reasoning, was able to work through NATO because Kosovo is part of Europe, whereas Bush was stuck working with the U.N. And, as Bush partisans hasten to add, Clinton himself could not get U.N. backing for the Kosovo campaign. Of course, it's curious that Bush's defenders would use Clinton's failure to define the limits of the possible—especially since Bush's own father won U.N. backing for his Gulf War. And anyway, Clinton came within one vote of getting U.N. Security Council approval for Kosovo. Bush couldn't muster a simple majority for his war.

Moreover, NATO wasn't some second-tier alliance for Clinton to fall back on after he failed to get the U.N. vote. It was the primary mechanism through which his administration conceived, planned, and prosecuted the war. Indeed, it's because he had NATO that Clinton could afford not to go to the United Nations.

Nor was NATO's participation automatic. It was the result of intense diplomatic effort by members of the Clinton administration and others. The Kosovo campaign, and the previous one in Bosnia, required NATO to break with decades of precedent and operate outside of its own boundaries (the former Yugoslavia was obviously not part of NATO). Once that barrier was successfully broken, NATO countries began to see such "out-of-area" campaigns as both necessary for Western security and as a rationale for NATO's post-Cold War existence. Sure enough, the day after 9/11, NATO pledged military support for any U.S. retaliation, invoking, for the first time in 52 years, Article V of its charter, that an attack on one member nation is an attack on all.