After five days of bombing of Yugoslavia, Operation Allied Force has a ragged look viewed from Washington.
The "humanitarian catastrophe" it was meant to avert according to President Clinton has intensified as Kosovan refugees flee Serbian atrocities in huge numbers.
The aim of forcing President Slobodan Milosevic to accept the Rambouillet peace settlement and to allow NATO troops into Kosovo as "peacekeepers" has been dropped from the revised goals of the bombing.
The downing of the vaunted F117 Stealth fighter over Yugoslavia has been a severe blow to US pride, although the rescue of the pilot has been rightfully hailed as a brilliant success.
The attacks on US embassies and anti-American demonstrations around the world call up memories of the Cold War years.
Finally, President Clinton's foreign policy is looking battered from close scrutiny by American analysts. His reliance, whenever US power is challenged, on cruise-missile strikes and high-level bombing is being dubbed "the doctrine of immaculate coercion".
While the President's wish to avoid the loss of American lives is understandable, the critics point out that it leads to constant revision of foreign policy goals as the risk-free bombing operations do not deliver results.
This happened last year in Iraq when President Clinton first announced the aim of getting rid of Saddam Hussein's arsenals of chemical and biological weapons, but as the missile and bombing attacks petered out, the aim became one of "degrading" the capability for producing and launching such weapons.
With Kosovo, the President is accused of failing to inform the American people of the US interest until the bombs started falling. Then he tailored the goals to accord with the limitations of air strikes as he insisted that he had no intention of committing US ground troops.
The only way he would agree to this would be that the troops go in as "peacekeepers" when President Milosevic accepts the peace settlement.
The US and Secretary of State, Ms Madeleine Albright, in particular are now being criticised for pushing President Milosevic into a corner from which he had no exit except to step up his "ethnic cleansing" of Kosovo. At the Rambouillet peace talks, the US backed by Britain and France, calculated that Mr Milosevic confronted with allowing NATO peacekeeping troops in a Kosovo with its autonomy restored or being bombed by NATO, would accept the former.
But he did not and now the US and its allies are being blamed for putting the Kosovans in greater peril than they were before the bombing started and of contributing to instability in the Balkans, which the NATO operation is supposed to prevent.
The goal of autonomy for Kosovo with the agreement of Mr Milsoevic now seems in tatters. If the bombing continues, Kosovo independence seems a more likely consequence and the taking of power by the Kosovo Liberation Army.
Naturally, the White House and the State Department strongly disagree with these criticisms and remind the critics that Operation Allied Force is not "a 30-second commercial". The NATO air strikes have first to cripple the Serbian air defences before they can start targeting the army and police units on the ground carrying out the ethnic cleansing, it is explained.
But in response to the intensified Serbian operations against the Kosovans, NATO, with US prodding, has moved to the second phase of the air strikes. But still there is no stomach whatever in Washington for sending in ground troops to finish what the air strikes can start but not finish, namely, protect the Kosovan population.