When Bosnian Serbs attacked a Sarajevo market in 1995, the recently appointed special envoy to the Balkans, Richard Holbrooke, urged his political bosses to order an attack.

RICHARD HOLBROOKE, FORMER US AMBASSADOR TO THE UN: I said, "Give us bombs for diplomacy, give us bombs for peace. We need bombing to make our diplomacy effective, and don`t hold back."

Yet hold back they did. Richard Holbrooke could talk loudly, and he did, but he carried a small stick. An extremely tough negotiator, the son of refugees from Nazi Europe, he had cut his teeth as the most junior of the American negotiators facing the North Vietnamese at the Paris peace talks in `68.

Nearly two decades later, Holbrooke took the maximalist approach to ending the Bosnian War, arguing for strong US military action to back his diplomacy, when his military chiefs - many veterans of Vietnam - wanted to do the minimum to American avoid casualties.

For four years, the world had seen images of Bosnia`s dead and displaced. Mass graves had revealed the euphemistic term "ethnic cleansing" for what it was. Then, things went in Holbrooke`s favour.

Under mounting public criticism, NATO, led by the US, finally launched a restrained air war. More importantly, on the ground, the Serbs were losing for the first time against Bosnian Croats and Muslims. Milosevic was ready to cut a deal.

Holbrooke, the architect of the Dayton peace accords, saw them as a blueprint for building a new multi-ethnic Bosnia, protecting minorities and arresting war criminals. Despite Milosevic`s part in the blood-letting of Bosnia, Holbrooke praised him as a man he could do business with. Yet today, Bosnia remains tensely divided along ethnic lines and the two most senior Bosnian Serbs indicted for war crimes, Dr Radovan Karadzic and General Ratko Miladic, are still free.

RICHARD HOLBROOKE: The NATO forces have been given the authority to arrest these people, and to leave them at large was a living, walking symbol to the people of Bosnia that the dream of separatism by the Bosnian Serbs was still alive and its leaders were still at large. And if you had done that in Germany, after 1945, a lot of German believers in Hitler would have said, "The Fuhrer is still around - let`s hedge our bets, let`s wait for him to come back."

In Kosovo, Albanians under Serb oppression felt betrayed by the Dayton accords. Holbrooke`s critics claim his failure at Dayton to deal with the potentially explosive situation in Kosovo gave rise to the guerrilla movement, the Kosovo Liberation Army.

Throughout 1988, as the ethnic cleansing of Albanians and KLA reprisals saw whole villages torched and entire extended families killed, Holbrooke again went head to head with Milosevic.

RICHARD HOLBROOKE: President Milosevic should note and note carefully that NATO is already planning contingencies.

Despite the huffing and puffing in Europe and the US, Holbrooke again carried a small stick.

RICHARD HOLBROOKE: I would be misleading you if I suggested that today`s talks resulted in any substantial, significant change in the situation.

When he was at last backed by the threat of NATO bombing in late 1998, he was told not even to suggest the possibility of US troops on the ground in Kosovo. The cease-fire agreement he negotiated lasted three months. Milosevic once again called NATO`s bluff. He had survived so many last warnings from Holbrooke, at the end, he refused to back down.

RICHARD HOLBROOKE: Accordingly, we have been instructed to go to Brussels now and report and meet with our NATO allies.

NATO justified its drawn-out air war as humanitarian intervention, but it precipitated an even greater tragedy - the mass expulsion and killing of Albanian Kosovars by Serb forces, leading to the biggest refugee crisis since World War II.

Today, Kosovo is liberated and an almighty mess. Albanians have conducted reverse ethnic cleansing of the Serbs. Milosevic has gone; Richard Holbrooke`s term as Balkans trouble-shooter is over.