"Usually one does not like to confess to error," he wrote in the paper's lead editorial headlined, So the bomber got through to Milosevic after all. "In this case, I am delighted to recognise that I was, almost until the last moment, wrong and I reproach myself for not having seen the light sooner."

And that was only the beginning. Reversing 72 days of comment decrying Nato air strikes, Britain's leading armchair general called the peace deal a triumph for the New World Order.

For more than 10 weeks, "weekend warriors" (as the Internet magazine, Slate, calls Kosovo commentators) have pounded the public consciousness in Britain and the United States with the idea that the air war was "futile", "timid", an all-out "failure".

"Bombing did not break the spirit of London, Dresden or Vietnam. It alone will not succeed in Serbia" screamed a headline for an April editorial in the Daily Mail. "Futile bombing" accused a William Raspberry column in the Washington Post just last week.

The bombing, they said, only exacerbated the humanitarian crisis and would never succeed in changing the basic military equation on the ground.

How could so many of the pundits have been wrong? The answer is that they were not wrong - or at least not entirely.

It was not the bombing alone that brought Mr Milosevic to sign the deal.

It was the Kosovo Liberation Army's offensive that forced Yugoslav troops out of their hiding places. As they organised themselves to combat the KLA they became easy targets for Nato warplanes.

Or at least that's what the analysts are telling us today.

The problem is not the analysis but the arrogance with which it is written. Leader writers love black and white, polar opposites, triumphant successes and humiliating defeat. The "commentariat" make their living off soundbites. And so they continue.

"Victory? It's hardly a victory," Balkan expert Tim Judah, a frequent guest on BBC programmes and on the leader pages on both sides of the Atlantic, said in an interview on Friday. "It took a large sledgehammer to crack a really small nut."

But while the commentators may not have learned their lessons, they say that the political and military establishment has.