A GOOD SEASON FOR WAR

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The likely prospect: years more of fighting, with time shifting the balance toward the Bosnian Muslim army, which has the advantage in manpower and has, its commanders claim, thrown off the remnants of recycled Soviet military doctrine to become a nimble fighting force with smaller units organized along nato lines. In the midst of the fighting, in all likelihood, will remain the U.N. troops. Removing them is dangerous, and besides, they provide the major powers with the ideal excuse for avoiding the use of force and relying on diplomacy instead: force would put the peacekeepers at risk. For that reason the peacekeepers arguably also guarantee that diplomacy will fail. As Warren Zimmermann, the last American ambassador to Belgrade, says, "Diplomacy without force against an adversary without scruples is useless."

It is worth remembering why the Balkan wars once caused so much outrage: the ethnic cleansing, the deliberate targeting of civilians and the trans-border aggression against Bosnia's internationally recognized sovereignty. At the Hague last month, the Bosnian Serbs' leader, Radovan Karadzic, their military commander, Ratko Mladic, and the former political head of their special police, Mico Stanisic, were formally placed under investigation as potential war criminals. Ex-cafa owner Dusan Tadic, a Bosnian Serb accused of murder and torture, was brought to the first such trial since Nuremberg and Tokyo. A gesture for the cause of civilization. But how much will it deter a future aggressor who has watched the world's stumbling response to Bosnia? --With reporting by Massimo Calabresi/Zagreb and J.F.O. McAllister/ Washington, with other bureaus