Faced with two utterly unpalatable choices and no other realistic option, our Government, together with all other European Union governments, had to make a decision that would be unpopular in many quarters. The choices were to let Slobodan Milosevic continue the slaughter of ethnic Albanians around Kosovo or support the action by NATO aimed at stopping him.
Obviously a negotiated settlement would be the ideal solution; a settlement which would guarantee, as the Minister for Defence stated in the Dail on Thursday, "the respect of human and minority rights, international law and the inviolability of borders". But negotiation requires a degree of sincerity and flexibility on both sides. All those involved in the negotiations have indicated that the Yugoslav leadership was not interested in budging an inch. So it comes down to the use of force.
But I think we are going to have to be a little more realistic about what force can achieve, and more particularly, what aerial bombardment can achieve. Bombing has a less than sparkling history. During the first World War, it was a near-complete waste of time: artillery did a much more efficient job of churning the French and Belgian countryside into a quagmire.
Having mounted quite a successful campaign against British military targets during the second World War, the Germans switched tactics. They planned to bomb the British into submission by attacking civilian targets. The blitz had precisely the opposite effect.
Everyone bombed Germany hoping to achieve the same goal. One thousand bomber raids levelled cities, and the firestorms of Dresden baked the populace in the shelters. But it wasn't until the Russian ground troops had arrived at Berlin and Herr Hitler had topped himself that Germany finally surrendered.
It has been argued that Hiroshima and Nagasaki brought the Pacific war to an early conclusion. Possibly, by a couple of weeks, but here again the Japanese were faced with ground forces whose next stop was their homeland, an unacceptable prospect. Their surrender was inevitable.
Moving on: Vietnam, not successful at all; Iraq, not until the tanks rolled did Saddam move from Kuwait, even though the most advanced airborne weapons systems in the world were used against him.
There is also an assumption that goes with the smart weapons we are told are being used, that they can surgically remove enemy positions and "assets". But they've got two problems. One, you've got to find the right targets. Mr Clinton managed to very precisely bomb a factory out of existence in Sudan which turned out to be the wrong target.
Two, they are not that smart. During Desert Shield the Americans set up a large number of Patriot missile batteries in Israel to knock down Saddam's Scuds. We were told of their phenomenal success rates. 75 per cent to 90 per cent of Scuds destroyed.
However, later examination of the facts showed that the Patriots hadn't been quite so successful. They couldn't be sure that they'd hit any Scuds at all. The reason the Scuds had been so unsuccessful was that they were pretty lo-tech. Dodgy targeting mechanisms meant you'd be lucky to hit the right city with one, let alone a precise building.
HISTORY has taught us that bombing can be successful in bringing the opposition to its knees only if it is backed up by the deployment of ground forces. The current campaign will probably reduce Milosevic's ability to continue with the atrocities he has been perpetrating, but it will not get him back to negotiations.
And this is where NATO's key strategy weakness lies. It has indicated that it will not send in the troops. When pressed about what happens if Milosevic doesn't knuckle under, its answers get evasive.
NATO knows that attacking on land is a much more serious undertaking. First, it will mean a full-scale invasion of a sovereign country, an option that it would be far more difficult to get either legal or moral backing for from the international community.
Second, it will mean lots of NATO troops coming home in body-bags. Yugoslavia is a hilly, forested country. It is not suited to the sweeping tank manoeuvres that were so successful in Iraq. Any incursion will be a bloody and slow process carried out against troops that have been fighting, and honing their skills, in this terrain for the best part of a decade.
There is another reason I am concerned about NATO's tactics. It seems to ignore the character and history of the Balkans people. The people of this area have been kicking lumps out of each other for over a thousand years.
I spent four days in Albania last year. To give you an idea of the level of paranoia that exists there, one of the key architectural features of the country is the bunkers, reportedly around 150,000 of them, that litter the countryside. They are so plentiful you can buy models of them as a memento of your stay.
It is also rumoured that the stakes in the vineyards are capped with steel spikes to discourage paratroop landings. Albania's historic principal city, Durres, has changed hands 33 times in the last millennium.
Not surprisingly, the local population has developed a fierce nationalism in response to the number of other contingents attempting to wipe them out.
It is foolish to assume that a bombing campaign will have any effect other than to draw the Yugoslavs closer together. They haven't buckled when faced with dozens of invading armies in the past.
The bombing campaign alone will not succeed. An invasion, in order to end the reprisals that are already starting, will mean dreadful loss of life on both sides. And negotiation with a man whose understanding of a win-win outcome seems to be cutting off both his enemy's arms looks doomed.
Our own history perhaps gives us some hope. We have managed to get diametrically opposed factions to talk and to work out a mutually acceptable agreement. The efforts of a group of neutral outsiders, Americans, helped substantially.
It may be possible that the peace facilitators in this conflict could turn out to be the Russians. They have carefully distanced themselves from NATO's actions while not actually trying to prevent them. Yeltsin may yet provide us with a Balkan George Mitchell.