Was I wrong about the Wars of the Yugoslav Succession?

General Mladic has died, the butcher of Srebrenica. 

Srebrenica. was a terrible thing. I remember vividly my horror at realising a massacre was going to happen there and there being no way of stopping it.

I remember bursting into tears hearing someone telling me about it when I was in Bosnia just after the war ended.

Mladic killed 8,000 men but he spared the women, boys and men of 60 or older. It was not therefore not genocide, as the UN declared. 

I followed the Yugoslav wars with keen attention and read much about them including Noel Malcolm's history of Bosnia and many other books. 

I wanted British and European intervention to help first the Croats and then the Bosnian Muslims against the Serbs and applauded the USA for finally intervening.

A very clever American who worked for USAID told me in Pristina that the Kosovo war was the last just war. I now wonder.

The history of the last few years and a Neutrality Studies podcast I just heard with historian David Gibbs and Colonel Douglas Macgregor make me now think with sadness that there was much to be said for the Serbs and much against the Kosovars. 

However a British ambassador to Belgrade said that Milosevic was evil and this is probably right. 

Both Colonel Macgregor and Professor Gibbs think that the Yugoslav interventions were not motivated by humanitarianism but intended to justify NATO's continued existence and keep Europe following Washington. That I am sure is right.

Colonel Macgregor argued that Bosnia and Kosovo were an early laboratory for forced political and ethnic integration.

We see now that America was bent on imposing its rule on the world, refighting the Second World War and battling evil. 

That led to the wars we have today though the Trump administration has dropped the guff about fighting evil and now talks about fighting to steal other countries' possessions, such as oil. 

Yugoslavia was where the modern world began and this brave new world may lead  - may have led - to a third world war.

The Yugoslav conflicts made military intervention popular among liberals and the left.

Democracies now launched wars for values.

Nationalism was now seen as the enemy, which is wasn't before. What was St Gandhi? 

Yeltsin saw Serbia as part of Russia's sphere of influence but was powerless to do anything.

Colonel Macgregor said he heard talk before the bombing of Kosovo of NATO spreading democracy from Bosnia to Russia.

In the Yugoslav wars the media propagandised for the Bosniaks and Kosovars as now they propagandise about the current wars. 

We can believe few things we read in the mainstream media and nothing the American government says.

Colonel Macgregor says he is an isolationist. I wish America followed his lead and the UK and Romania too.