THE RISE OF HUMANITARIAN HAWKS.

With Kosovo's formal declaration of independence from Serbia on Monday, and the United States' decision to extend recognition to the planet's newest country, the time has come for a look back on the approximately 10 years of intense U.S. involvement in that conflict. Kosovo is a tiny, seemingly worthless patch of land lacking in all natural resources, but it plays a strangely large role in our foreign-policy debates. During arguments about the Iraq War, in particular, liberal hawks had a habit of wielding the poor Kosovar Albanians as a cudgel: If you supported Bill Clinton's 1999 bombing campaign, the argument went, then surely you could support a war against Saddam Hussein.Then and now, many pro-Kosovo, anti-Iraq liberals could persuasively (Kenneth Roth's 2004 "War in Iraq: Not a Humanitarian Intervention" is my personal favorite) argue that various factors distinguish the two cases. Still, the argument was never about a strict Kosovo-implies-Iraq logic. Rather, first Bosnia and then Kosovo provided the impetus for an intellectually influential, humanitarian hawk movement aimed at advocating the use of military force to advance liberal values whose leaders, inspired by the success of Kosovo, saw Iraq as potentially continuing the momentum built up in the Balkans.