By CHRIS HEDGES

TO END A WAR

By Richard Holbrooke.

Illustrated. 408 pp. New York:

Random House. $27.95.



he late 20th century has witnessed the resurgence of the kind of dark barbarity that characterized much of the world before the creation of the nation-state. Warlords and gangsters in Somalia, Chechnya, Afghanistan, Rwanda and a host of other forsaken corners of the globe have unleashed a grim savagery that has left the industrialized nations backing away in horror.

Bosnia, however, has turned out to be different. There are 34,000 NATO-led troops, including 8,500 Americans, deployed in Bosnia today, and they look set to remain there for some time. There is a peace agreement that, however flawed, has halted the bloodshed. There is also an investment by foreign countries of several billion dollars to make the whole thing work. Most important, there is a policy, in large part formulated by Richard Holbrooke, the American diplomat in charge of the peace negotiations in Dayton, Ohio, where before there was confusion and inertia.

Holbrooke's ''To End a War'' is an engaging, witty and dramatic account of how all this came to pass. More than that, it is an impassioned plea for Washington to use the military might at its disposal to intervene when societies break down, to take a leadership role in the world and to reject the notion that putting an end to gross human rights abuses is a goal that must inevitably differ from pragmatic, self-interested foreign policy.

The author has little stomach for the diplomats who diddled in conference halls in Geneva while over 200,000 people died in Bosnia and almost three million more became refugees. He has a deep distaste for military commanders who refuse to take risks. He is scathing when describing the self-centeredness and pettiness of the Croatian, Serbian and Muslim leaders.

Throughout the narrative stand the ghosts of three of Holbrooke's State Department colleagues -- Robert C. Frasure, Joseph Kruzel and S. Nelson Drew -- who were killed in a road accident at the beginning of the negotiations in August 1995. Their deaths, which open the book, infuse the diplomats on Holbrooke's team with a sense of mission and give them a moving kinship with the fresh graves littering the Bosnian landscape.

The strength of the book is its wealth of anecdotes and detail, which instill life into the characters who wander on and off the stage. The guile and charm of the Serbian leader Slobodan Milosevic are often a match for Holbrooke's considerable persuasiveness. ''Izetbegovic has earned Sarajevo by not abandoning it,'' Milosevic says at the Dayton talks of the Bosnian President Alija Izetbegovic. ''He's one tough guy. It's his.'' After the final map of Bosnia is drawn up, a map that hands Sarajevo, the main objective of the Bosnian Serb army during the war, to the Muslim-led Government, Milosevic is asked why the leader of the Bosnian Serb delegation has not appeared to initial it. Milosevic laughs and answers, ''Because he is in a coma after seeing the map.''

And here is Holbrooke on Izetbegovic, who appeared at the American Ambassador's residence in Paris in a beret with a Bosnian insignia, a scarf and khakis, looking ''like an aging Left Bank revolutionary.'' Holbrooke writes: ''His eyes had a cold and distant gaze; after so much suffering, they seemed dead to anyone else's pain. He was a devout Muslim, although not the Bosnian ayatollah that his enemies portrayed. But although he paid lip service to the principles of a multiethnic state, he was not the democrat that some supporters in the West saw. He reminded me a bit of Mao Zedong and other radical Chinese Communist leaders -- good at revolution, poor at governance.''

Holbrooke, whose blustering style and volcanic eruptions are legendary, left bruised egos and slighted, embittered colleagues in his wake. He cannot resist reprinting here a description that compares him to Jules Cardinal Mazarin, the crafty 17th-century prelate and statesman. ''He flatters, he lies, he humiliates: he is a sort of brutal and schizophrenic Mazarin,'' a French diplomat told Le Figaro during the Dayton talks. Perhaps, but the diplomatic bulldozing -- coupled with the belief that coercion and diplomacy must be intertwined -- ultimately worked. The United Nations peacekeeping mission in Bosnia, which was prevented by the Europeans from stopping the fighting for three years, as well as the limp effort by the European Union to negotiate an end to the Bosnian war, makes Holbrooke's style, or lack of it, forgivable.

Holbrooke writes that the Bosnian Serbs cannot be treated as ''rational people with whom one could argue, negotiate, compromise and agree. In fact, they respected only force or an unambiguous and credible threat to use it.''

If those calls for air strikes against the Serbs had been heeded in 1992, Holbrooke suggests, some two million refugees would probably today be in their homes and at least 100,000 lives might have been saved. An early and large intervention by NATO warplanes, something that did not occur until the fall of 1995, might even have accomplished what will probably never be accomplished now, the rebuilding of a viable, multiethnic Bosnian state.

But in Washington and Europe there was always a deep reluctance to get involved militarily. One reason was that the people in the Balkans were regarded as a bunch of unforgiving ethnic nationalists harboring ''ancient hatreds,'' which Holbrooke writes was ''a vague but useful term for history too complicated (or trivial) for outsiders to master,'' and which ''made it impossible (or pointless) for anyone outside the region to try and prevent the conflict.''

A second was that Yugoslavia was an artificial creation that could never hold together in a democratic system and should be permitted to dismember itself. By its logic, this argument invalidates a number of states formed after World War I.

Always harping in the background were Cassandra-like NATO commanders. They gloomily warned that any intervention meant that politicians had better be prepared to welcome back body bags from Bosnia.

All these beliefs were based on myths: the myth of the Serbian warrior who would fight to the death against overwhelming odds; the myth that Croats, Muslims and Serbs, who speak the same language and are indistinguishable, were different peoples; and the myth that Yugoslavia, a country Tito had made an important player in international affairs, had failed to give its citizens a national identity.

''Yugoslavia's tragedy was not foreordained,'' Holbrooke writes. ''It was the product of bad, even criminal, political leaders who encouraged ethnic confrontation for personal, political and financial gain. Rather than tackle the concrete problems of governance in the post-Tito era, they led their people into a war.''

Holbrooke waged a determined campaign to overcome the timidity of NATO commanders and Washington policy makers, urging the bombing of the Bosnian Serb gunners on the hills above Sarajevo as a way of breaking the back of their military. He nearly failed, and the scenes of these debates are some of the most gripping in the book.

He was handed the chance to practice his gunslinger diplomacy only after the United Nations mission in Bosnia collapsed in the summer of 1995. Washington was faced with two difficult options: either send in American troops to help extract the United Nations peacekeeping forces then reeling under a Serbian advance, suffering numerous casualties in the process, or try to use heavy air strikes to bring the Serbs to the negotiating table. The latter option was chosen not out of foresight, but desperation.

Holbrooke, who takes every opportunity to lavish praise on President Clinton, nevertheless paints a picture of an Administration so inattentive and rudderless that it was often unclear what policy, if any, it had adopted toward Bosnia. The Principals' Committee, the Administration's highest decision-making body, was consistently prevented from making decisions ''because the real principals, the President and the Vice President, rarely attended them.'' The result, Holbrooke says, ''was often inaction or half-measures instead of a clear strategy.'' It was only when he reported that the President's promise to help withdraw United Nations troops had been transformed into an elaborate plan by NATO -- and that a failure to honor it would probably shatter the alliance -- that Clinton woke up to what was at stake. The President, who appeared to have forgotten ever making such a commitment, turned to then Secretary of State Warren Christopher and asked, ''Is this true?''

The results, over two years later, more than vindicate Clinton's decision to intervene. NATO commanders, who had allowed themselves to be manipulated and humiliated by a bunch of Bosnian Serb thugs from 1992 to 1995, have not lost a single soldier from attacks against their troops. Following the Dayton accords, America's leadership in world affairs and the Western alliance is undisputed.

The end of the fighting has not meant the creation of a viable and united Bosnian state. Nearly all the displaced have yet to go back to their homes. The few who do are often met with bricks and firebombs. The country remains firmly partitioned into three ethnic enclaves. The distrust and the hatred, along with a severe shortage of available housing, mean that Bosnia will probably stay partitioned for a long time to come. Sarajevo, once a symbol of multiethnicity, is now a predominantly Muslim city and likely to remain so. NATO commanders, however, have lately shed some of their reticence about getting involved, intervening to sideline the militant Bosnian Serbs in the mountain stronghold of Pale, helping to prop up a more moderate Bosnian Serb government in Banja Luka and arresting some indicted war criminals.

Had NATO intervention come earlier, it might have rid Bosnia of the nefarious influence of Radovan Karadzic, the Bosnian Serb wartime leader and an indicted war criminal, as well as the other ethnic nationalist leaders. Holbrooke admits that as long as Karadzic remains at large, it is ''certain to mean Dayton deferred or defeated.'' Writing of the NATO-led United Nations forces, known as IFOR, he says, ''Had I known then how reluctant IFOR would be to use its 'authority,' I would have fought harder for a stronger mission statement, although I would probably have lost.''

Nonetheless, the failure of the peace agreement to create a united state does not mean that intervention was wrong, nor should it diminish Holbrooke's impressive accomplishments. Critics of his policy can use such failures, as they did with Somalia and the Kurds in northern Iraq, to argue that Western intervention does not work. Better to say that it almost always fails to achieve the lofty, often utopian, goals spun out to sell such interventions to the public.

A widespread famine was averted in Somalia, despite the eventual withdrawal of Western forces, and the Iraqi Kurds, even amid their internecine warfare, were able to go back to their homes. As for the Bosnians, they are living, if not normal, then at least relatively peaceful lives today in a country that has experienced the worst ground war in Europe since the end of World War II. Holbrooke can look in the faces of the Bosnians -- as well as those of the widows and children of his three lost colleagues -- without shame.