Second paragraph of third chapter:

Surveying the sight, Ambassador William Walker, a seasoned American diplomat who had witnessed his share of atrocities while serving in Central America and who now headed the KVM, described what he had seen: [gory details redacted]

A good full-throated defence of the NATO conflict with Serbia over Kosovo in 1999, written shortly after the event, and coinciding largely with my own views: the conflict was a deliberate, unforced choice by Slobodan Milošević, and western policy rather floundered into NATO participation, but once a ground invasion was seriously being discussed, the Serbian leadership folded and the conflict ended with NATO and the UN, and of course the Kosovars, taking control.

It was written so soon after the conflict that a lot of important later developments are missing because they had not happened yet: the 2001 Macedonia conflict, the 2004 Kosovo riots, the 2006-08 independence process. This last, the future status of Kosovo, is the one point that the authors are a bit mealy-mouthed about, as the Western policy community had not quite got to the stage of comprehending that it was only going in one direction. (I am glad to have been part of the debate pushing that comprehension.)

But otherwise, the authors deal efficiently with a number of counter scenarios as to how the conflict could have been averted; the fact is that the USA and the rest of the western alliance had limited scope for affecting events, and while that limited scope was not always exploited to the full, in particular in the early phase of the NATO bombing campaign, this was not the big problem; the big problem was Milošević and his policies.

You can get Winning Ugly here.

This was my top unread book about Kosovo acquired in 2022. Next on that pile is Outpost: Life on the Frontlines of American Diplomacy, by Christopher R. Hill.