Transformed into advocates of limited force, the likes of Bill Clinton have resurrected the just war, a concept their anti-war campaigning qualifies them uniquely to embrace.. TONY BLAIR, widely portrayed as "Nato's hawk" during the Kosovo crisis, does not mind looking tough but believes his label does not do him justice. "It is not about being a hawk - it is about being right," one of the Prime Minister's closest aides said yesterday. British cabinet ministers believe Mr Blair has come into his own during the Kosovo crisis, seeing his "just war" as a moral as well as military crusade. They see it as a foreign policy parallel to his belief in creating social justice at home, stemming from his Christian Socialist beliefs. At the same time, Mr Blair feels completely at home with Britain's armed service chiefs - unlike many of his Labour predecessors.

He struck up a good relationship with the chiefs of staff while he was Opposition leader. "He sometimes gives the impression he would like to go on the bombing raids himself," quipped one minister. For the past three months, Mr Blair has devoted most of his waking hours to Kosovo, to the surprise of Cabinet colleagues. At the same time, he had to juggle the fragile peace process in Northern Ireland and the already gruelling day-to-day grind of government.At both home and abroad, Mr Blair can expect to reap a dividend from the peace settlement. He can argue that Nato's determination to stand firm produced a deal very much on its own terms and not those of President Milosevic. The agreement will enhance Mr Blair's reputation on the world stage, helping Britain to "punch above its weight" as the Foreign Office calls it.Mr Blair will get the credit for stiffening Nato spines - including Bill Clinton's - when they threatened to "go wobbly". Mr Blair and Mr Clinton are back on good terms now, but there was a sticky patch when the US President told the Prime Minister to get a grip on aides he accused of highlighting Nato's differences by talking up the possible use of ground troops.In the event, the 10-week air campaign worked without Nato troops going in..

FIRST RESPONSES in Washington to Belgrade's reported capitulation were cautious in the extreme. President Clinton said what the alliance wanted was proof of Serbian withdrawl before the bombing stops. The US has grown too weary of Slobodan Milosevic's promises to take his word at face value. But if initial reports are borne out, and the Yugoslav parliament's vote suggests for the first time in three months that they could be, nowhere will the satisfaction be greater than at the White House.

President Clinton's war, dismissed as a "coward's war" and ridiculed as "immaculate coercion", will have been vindicated. For the three months of the Nato operation in Kosovo Mr Clinton's was a lone voice. His insistence that the conflict be conducted from the air and only from the air, and that an air war was winnable, was denounced, ever more openly, as the irresponsible reverie of a non-military man. No one, it was said, had ever won a war from the air alone and no one would do so now.The consensus against Mr Clinton was broad. The hopelessness of an air war was advanced periodically by the Pentagon, even as the military operation was in progress. It was embraced by a solid body of opposition politicians, chief among them Senator John McCain, whose credentials as a Vietnam veteran, former prisoner-of-war and survivor of torture, gave him moral and military authority.And it was argued at key junctures in political forums, from Britain, by Tony Blair.All argued that air bombardment alone would not force Yugoslav troops from Kosovo, at which point Nato would have to choose between mounting what would be, in effect, an invasion of Kosovo or conceding defeat.

With defeat not an option, either for Washington or for Nato's credibility, an invasion looked inevitable. The only question - as represented with increasing urgency by British ministers in recent weeks - was when?At the outset, the barely disguised view of US generals was that there had either to be total war, or no war at all. If Mr Clinton wanted to prevent Yugoslav leaders from evicting Kosovar Albanians - and having failed in that objective, to ensure their return - he would have to commit ground troops. The expression "ground troops" was always a code for "ground troops in a combat capacity". It was never the armed peace-keeping or peace-making force that Mr Clinton and a majority of Nato countries favoured.As recently as two weeks ago, a US magazine revealed the existence of a letter to Mr Clinton from the chiefs of staff arguing for ground troops. The letter had been written before the start of the military operation, but the timing of the leak appeared to be a calculated attempt to force Mr Clinton's hand.Colin Powell, the hugely respected chairman of the joint chiefs of staff during the Gulf War, expressed misgivings about the half-hearted nature of the war, as did former President Jimmy Carter These were supremely influential voices.