There has been widespread unhappiness at the bombing of Yugoslavia as a tactic to force Milosevic to withdraw his forces from Kosovo so as to permit the return of almost one million Albanians to their homeland.
Qualms about this approach were intensified by the repeated fatal errors in targeting from a safe height, including the Chinese embassy in Belgrade because of the incredible lack of an up-to-date street map of that city.
But to oppose the strategy because of such qualms was always difficult to justify, for lack of any better alternative to the bombing. Those who denounced the bombing failed to offer any convincing alternative that would have provided a realistic prospect of halting and reversing Milosevic's ethnic cleansing of the province. And, faced with a choice between complicity in ethnic cleansing through inaction and this clumsy alternative, there was really no moral choice.
As so often happens in such matters, the choice was not a morally straightforward one between good and evil but rather, agonisingly, between two alternative evils. And, compared to complicity in massive ethnic cleansing, bombing was rightly seen to be the lesser evil.
Of course, those who argued that it would have been much more effective to have backed the bombing from the outset with a credible threat of intervention by ground forces, were right - in principle. That would almost certainly have shortened the agony. And the fact that Milosevic has caved in as soon as NATO showed serious signs of mobilising ground forces for an invasion strengthens this argument.
But the trouble with this is that at the outset democratic opinion in NATO countries was not prepared to support such a policy, and that ruled it out as a practical option. For the trouble with democracy is that governments have to have regard for the wishes of their peoples, and to denounce governments for not ignoring the views and wishes of their electorates is not a very convincing moral position.
Nor is it very convincing to argue - as many with a legalistic turn of mind have done - that ethnic cleansing must be allowed to happen if the Russians and Chinese refuse to support action against in the UN Security Council.
For the abuse of the veto by permanent members of the council cannot absolve other European states of their moral obligation to act against an appalling violation of the human rights of an entire people within our own continent. Nor can the past failures to act elsewhere be adduced as grounds for inaction: employing that excuse for doing nothing would be to make vice its own reward.
However, it has to be said that many in Ireland who have traditionally been hostile to the United States and to NATO, as well as others who have a moral attachment to what is loosely described as "neutrality", have recognised the weakness of these arguments against the action taken by NATO, and have refused to allow their feelings to blind them to the fundamental moral issue involved in the Kosovo tragedy. In this instance, what is loosely called "the left" in Ireland has been deeply divided.
Moreover all political parties, except of course the Greens and Sinn Fein, have supported the action taken by NATO, rejecting the populist course of playing a "neutralist" game.
All that said, it is nevertheless the case that making a threat of bombing and subsequently implementing that threat in the face of Milosevic's persistence with ethnic cleansing was always a high-risk strategy.
First of all, at least in the very short run, it was always bound to strengthen Milosevic's position within the Serbian remnant of Yugoslavia. And there was the risk that this would enable him to hang on in power long enough for divisions among the NATO allies to grow to the point of preventing the emergence of a consensus in favour of ground troops.
If that had happened, the decision to bomb Yugoslavia would in hindsight have been adjudged a disastrous failure, achieving nothing but the discrediting of NATO. In the event, however - at this moment at any rate - it has to be seen to have been a success, albeit one flawed by tragic episodes of military incompetence.
But this, I am afraid, is what politics is often about: taking decisions the outcome of which is often uncertain and ultimately beyond the control of their authors, in the full knowledge that their merits, and even perhaps their morality, will eventually be judged by others, often harshly, with the hindsight that is denied to those who had to take them. Of course, we are not yet at the end of the road with the Kosovo crisis. Restoring peace and order, returning and rehousing its million refugees, and, most difficult of all, creating conditions in which those of its Serb minority who may be innocent of murder, rape and ethnic cleansing, can once again live peaceably side by side with their returned Albanian neighbours: all these are huge tasks.
It may, indeed, prove to be the case that they will exceed the capacity, and overtax the will and generosity, of the European Union and the NATO countries, acting together under UN auspices.
The remainder of Yugoslavia, the Serbian part, also has to be rebuilt. And this process will have to be financed by aid from the states whose air power has just destroyed so much of its infrastructure.
This is necessary not only for reasons of humanity but also because the roads, railways and bridges of Serbian Yugoslavia are key arteries of our continent, through which in times of peace a vast volume of trade flows between western and northern Europe and south-eastern European countries such as Greece, Bulgaria, and Turkey, and indeed parts of the Middle East.
These tragic events also have implications for us in western Europe. The degree to which our ability to maintain peace in our small continent and to protect the human rights of our fellow Europeans has come to depend upon the goodwill and military resources of the United States has been brought home to us most forcefully, finally creating the will to reduce this dependence.
The need for a radical rethink of European defence capacity came home to me five years ago, when the combined forces of western Europe in Bosnia proved militarily incapable of relieving an isolated town because they lacked the capacity to airlift 1,000 troops a distance of 100 miles, and because at that time the United States was not prepared to risk the lives of its helicopter pilots on such a mission.
That was a horrifying revelation of European military incapacity. Some time later I asked someone with a knowledge of NATO how, if Europe couldn't airlift such a small number of soldiers such a short distance, it had ever hoped to resist a Soviet invasion? He replied, with a more or less straight face, that in the face a Soviet invasion the western European forces would have been retreating, and so would not need helicopters to bring troops forward.
What is remarkable, and thoroughly depressing, is that it is only now, almost 10 years after the fall of the Iron Curtain and five years after that bitter Bosnian experience, that these lacunae in Europe's military capacity are belatedly being addressed. As I am not a military expert I may have missed something, but it is only in the last couple of months that I have seen any reference to this compelling need to improve Europe's own logistic capacity.
And it was only at the start of this year that, in talks with France at St Malo, Britain finally dropped its opposition to the development of a European defence component, linked to but capable of acting separately from NATO.
These major shifts in the western European approach to defence pose new challenges for Ireland. While there remains a reluctance here to enter into the kind of binding obligations to mutual defence which at present unite the members both of the North Atlantic Alliance and of WEU, there is clearly a new mood abroad in Ireland, in the Labour Party as elsewhere, on the issue of voluntary co-operation in European defence.
The lessons of Yugoslavia are slowly being learnt by all of us in western Europe, as we face up to our moral obligations to secure the preservation of peace and the protection of human rights on our continent.