The Remnants of War. By John Mueller. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2004. 272p. $29.95.

Rarely does a cover convey with such accuracy a book's central argument as in John Mueller's The Remnants of War. Shot by Ron Haviv, maybe the most iconic photographer of the Yugoslav wars of the 1990s, the cover picture shows a Serb soldier celebrating the fall of the town of Vukovar. The middle-aged soldier is drunk as he downs a bottle of liquor with the town's ruins in the background. In fact, he looks more like a homeless man in any European or American city than anything we would associate with the modern military profession—an observation that summarizes Mueller's four-tiered argument.