So NATO, a military alliance with no status whatsoever other than the arsenal it wields, has invaded Yugoslavia.
This it does without even seeking the cosmetic approval of the United Nations.
This it does as yet another insult to Russia, whom the triumphalist West has been insulting and impoverishing remorselessly for a decade (just as we once insulted and impoverished the German people in the twenties and thirties).
This it does without articulating either realistic goals or a realistic exit strategy.
This it does against a leadership which has for years worked at draping its own atrocities in nationalist colours. Milosovic is nothing if not the spirit incarnate of 1389, the hero of Kosovo, homeland of Serbians everywhere. He can simply not back down on Kosovo. Yet the west, itself in a corner a decade in the making, seeks to budge him nevertheless.
Madness.
The West now praises the ethnically-binding constitutional arrangements it spent decades seeking to undo. The West tore it all apart, created Bosnia, appeased Milosovic, and then Tudjman, gutlessly and shamelessly all through the first half of the nineties (again, shades of '38). Hundreds of thousands of Bosnians were butchered in their own country, a country the West was happy to grant formal status, but one it was never prepared to afford strategic viability. When the Bosnians sought assistance in defending themselves and their new state, the West declined. When the West announced safe havens, it stood by when those who had believed them were taken away and shot.
Why now, when but tens of thousands are suffering under Milosovic's heel, and within Milosovic's own state at that, is there cause for killing on this scale? Surely it can not be on the grounds of atrocities committed against separatists? We can't have British soldiers shooting at Irish separatists one minute and then defending Yugoslav seperatists the next can we? Turkey is part of NATO. They shoot separatists in great numbers over there. How would they explain themselves to themselves?
Hypocricy.
And Russia, an erstwhile proud giant, brought to its knees by naive, triumphalist, opportunistic, and downright stupid Western policy, is forced to watch chaos and carnage on its very doorstep. Russia's people are economically desperate and thoroughly demoralised. But Russia could be mighty again (even if for but a week - we're entering the realm of the mushroom here). How tempting it must be for so many Russians to flex their still-powerful arms in response to all these years of provocation. How hard for the politically fragile Primakov and the ridiculed Yeltsin to resist the chance for the populist brownie points that attend a 'just war', in solidarity with Russia's Slavic brethren?
A spark in Serbia puts Russia and Germany on opposite sides within an unstable and unpredictable dynamic in which contested imperial sway, economic chaos, opportunistically constructed nationalisms and complex alliances all play their part. What a good idea for a war!
But then it's been done, hasn't it.
Best, Rob.