In Italy, criticism of the NATO bombing of Serbian targets has come from every side. Some of this reflects judgments of the situation, but much of the criticism reflects the history of relations between the U.S. and Italy over the last 60 years -- and this suggests that it's time for the U.S. to reconsider its role in Europe. PNS correspondent Jeff Israely, a former staff reporter at the Oakland Tribune, is a freelance writer based in Rome.

ROME -- In many everyday situations here, the conversation turns quickly and fiercely to Kosovo.

As NATO jets and missiles take off from Italian military bases, the eastern shores of Italy brace for the spillover of refugees from the Balkans -- and even for a possible military strike from Serbia. Prime Minister Massimo D'Alema's ruling majority is facing major cracks from the left and calls for its collapse from the right.

Jacopo, a 29-year-old native of Rome, thinks the attacks on Yugoslavia are justified.

"It's not the United States, it's NATO -- NA-TO! That's Italy, England, Spain, France, Greece," he says, his voice rising as he counts off, "including the United States"

But not a single one of his Italian buddies is swayed. For them, for many here of all political persuasions, NATO is the United States. And memories of American involvement in Italian affairs includes 35 years of lock-step Christian Democrat support for U.S. policy -- and the acquittal two weeks ago of the marine pilot in the Cermis ski lift disaster.

And this latest U.S. push into Europe, perhaps the deepest in 50 years, prompts questions --

What is really motivating the American military to flex its muscle, here and now?

What's left of the United Nations after yet another U.S.-led military operation without U.N. consent?

Why challenge Serbia and allow NATO-member Turkey, for example, to decimate a Kurdish population making its own bid for self-determination?

Such questions have their roots in a Cold War that has ended, but hardly disappeared. Every night, Italians watch video clips of Yugoslavia-bound U.S. planes that were designed to fight their Russian counterparts, taking off from bases built in Italy to guard against the Iron Curtain.

It's a New World Order with one foot in the old.

But Cold War thinking has the power to blind both sides of the debate. The arguments that the U.S. sees the situation in the Balkans as merely a strategic territorial issue, or an opportunity to intimidate Russia, are not only cynical, but outdated; and Wall Street inevitably loses its nerve after a couple of days of fighting.

A more relevant perspective on Kosovo comes from Europe, before the Berlin Wall came down -- before it was ever built.

It is the not-so-distant memory of World War II, and its story of appeasement and atrocities, that puts Jacopo at odds with his friends. America was needed then, and it is needed now, to put an end to a cruelty that Europe simply cannot live with. U.S. participation is, nevertheless, unfortunate, skewing not only the justifications, but perhaps the military objectives as well.

American leadership, in itself, doesn't make the war wrong. The problem comes in holding together support on both sides of the Atlantic. In the U.S., that means weighing the cost of American lives and asking, Where is Kosovo anyway?

Here in Europe, an American-led war in 1999 conjures up images of Hanoi and Beirut rather than Normandy and Sicily; and it's hard to imagine, whatever the outcome, American policy not being less popular by the time the fighting is over.

This leaves U.S. leaders with more work to do than simply calling heads of state and telling them to hold firm. Washington must show real interest in the creation of a Europe-wide political and security structure to match the continent's growing economic union. And with each step that a united Europe takes forward on this front, the U.S. should take two steps back -- any American who sees this as a threat would be hard pressed to blame the protesters outside the various U.S. embassies.