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Some of the Serbian paramilitary 'heroes' responsible for the mass murder of 192 Croatians in Vukovar in 1991 have been put on trial in Serbia.

This is a welcome development as not only does it brings bring these people to account, it will require Serbian society and the Serbian state to confront what really happened. In the absence of an externally imposed 'denazification' process, this could be exactly what Serbia needs and perhaps the start of a process that will de-legitimise vile creatures like Vojislav Seseji and other nationalists who do not have the widespread opprobrium they deserve within Serbia itself.

War crimes trials far off in the Hague simply cannot have the same effect as trials within Serbia itself. Forcing the painful truth to be brought out for all to see has to be a good thing as far too many people with the blood of the Balkans on their hands are still relaxing in the cafés of Belgrade. Perhaps this is the first sign that their days are numbered, but it would be premature to just assume this will be the case. Nevertheless, these trials are a very good start.

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A few days ago I wrote an article pointing to information indicating that the French government had not only agreed to not arrest General Ratko Mladic, the man who supervised the murder of 7,000 men and young boys in Srebrenica under the orders from Chetnik leader Radovan Karadzic, but were also giving the former Bosnian Serb leadership a safe haven from arrest to this day in sector of Bosnia under their military control.

So when a French serial commenter who leaves his remarks on Samizdata.net left a comments under that post saying:

VIVE LA FRANCE !
VIVE LA REPUBLIQUE !
VIVE L'EUROPE !
VIVE LA PLANETE !
VIVE LA LIBERTE !

I whish you all the merriest July 14 ever.

My first reaction was pure fury. This guy might as well have just pissed on the graves of these people, murdered just eight short years ago. In fact to remind us all of his horror which happened under the nose of humane and oh so moral 'Europe', and with the complicity of government officials who are still in office today in Paris, London and the UN in New York, just last Friday it was reported that more bodies had been found in Srebrenica, bringing the total up to about 8,000 murdered in cold blood.

I was on the verge of banning this guy and leaving an extremely hostile remark of my own. But then I thought about those remarks a bit longer and calmed down. In fact it started to dawn on me that those comments were a perfect adjunct to the article.

The storming of the Bastille on July 14, 1789 was an event more important in the mythology of the French Revolution than in the actually history of it (far from freeing imprisioned patriots, the inmates were four forgers, two lunatics, and the Marquis de Sade), but it was indeed a portent of the blood soaked egalitarian horror that was to follow.

So yes, that was the perfect comment to remind us that not only is France, like most countries, rooted in slaughter and horror in the distant historical past... but that recent outrages (giving aid and comfort to mass murderers) will just be forgotten in France and millions of French people will sing the national anthem and feel good about the people who lead them. The same people who gave Ratko Mladic and Radovan Karadzic a free pass for slaughtering thousands in Srebrenica and tens of thousands elsewhere in Bosnia-Herzegovina. Vive la France.

And yet this same commenter, like so many French people, decries the overthrow of Ba'athist Socialism in Iraq. Vive La Liberte? Not for the people of Iraq it would seem and certainly not for the slaughtered people of Srebrenica.

There are hypocrites and then there are French hypocrites. Do not let anyone ever tell you that there is nothing at which the French are truly world class.

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It has been claimed that French President Jacques Chirac negotiated de facto immunity from prosecution for the second greatest post-WWII war criminal in Europe west of the former Soviet border, Bosnian Serb General Ratko Mladic, in return for the Bosnian Serb military releasing two captured French pilots.

The claim, dismissed as "hearsay" by Paris, was contained in the transcripts of a telephone conversation between the former Yugoslav president, Zoran Lilic, and the head of the Yugoslav armed forces in Belgrade.

They described Mr Lilic explaining in December 1995 that Gen Mladic would be safe from extradition after the Dayton Accords that ended the Bosnian conflict, even though he had already been indicted for war crimes.

"He will not be delivered to anyone from the tribunal. He has got the guarantee by Chirac and Slobodan [Milosevic]," said the transcript. "Accordingly, he has to deliver these men to us, if he wants to, or he should come with us and place the men at the place of his choice."

If this is true, then Chirac is nothing less than an accessory after the fact to mass murder. The fact that both General Mladic and the former Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic have both remained at large does rather suggest this report is true. Oh... and where are these two indicted mass murderers at large? In the French controlled sector of Bosnia, of course.

Britain has its own amoral creatures like Douglas Hurd who disgracefully equated murder victims with their murderers in the Balkans, so it would be fair to say that this particular shit sandwich is large enough for much of the political class on both sides of the English Channel to take a bite... but next time your hear a member of the French establishment lecture anyone about anything on 'moral grounds', tell them to drop dead, preferably in Srebrenica.

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The assassination of Serbian Prime Minister Zoran Djindjic comes as no real surprise to me.

Serbia is now reaping the cost of failing to follow up the overthrow of Slobodan Milosevic with a systematic and ruthless process similar to the 'de-nazification' of West Germany that followed World War 2. As the new regime failed to use the opportunity to wipe out (literally) the nationalist/socialist thugs responsible for much of the calamity in the Balkans, these same thugs have retained control over chunks of Serbian society the way they always did... with violence and terror.

Zoran Djindjic will be remembered as a reformer and the man who gave up Slobodan Milosevic to the International War Crimes Tribunal in the Hague. However it has been suggested on Samizdata.net before that surrendering Milosevic for trial by foreigners was a serious error. The end of Mussolini at the hands of Italians would have been a far better model for the Serbs to have followed.

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I am referring to Harold Pinter, that well known playwright and signatory to the 'Free Slobodan Milosevic' campaign.

It seems he has avoided dying from cancer for a while, which I am sure will gladden the hearts of socialist mass murderers the length and breadth of Yugoslavia and Republica Serbska. I am sure his friends at the Tatler will be thrilled.

Vermin one and all.

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It is interesting how things are developing economically in Croatia now that people in the rest of the world have finally figured out it is safe to come here again. Plans have been afoot for some time to develop various regions with businessmen like famous Italian developer Richard Mazzucchelli prowling around Dalmatia and Istria looking for opportunities. I have long thought the best way to treat such unspoiled places was to develop them with the high end of the tourism market in mind rather than the mass tourism planned in places like Split or Dubrovnik. Never being an optimist by nature, I rather expected the truth of what would happen would result in the ghastly Disnification of Croatia's magnificent coastline and islands, with a MacDonalds dishing out vile industrial food to the great unwashed of Europe in every village.

Well it seems that in spite of my lapsed Catholicism at least a few of my prayers are being answered. Apparently Princess Caroline of Monaco is going to be investing in an exclusive development in the national park island of Brijuni. Hopefully this will just be the first of many. It is a tricky thing balancing the need for development with not destroying the very thing people would want to see, namely the extraordinary, historic and unspoiled locations that make up so much of the country. One excellent way would be to allow more foreign investment and easy land ownership restrictions for overseas investors. The Adriatic and Mediterranean are filled with low end tourist destinations with far more infrastructure and easier communications than is going to be available in Croatia for quite a while so clearly the added value this country can provide is the very fact of its unspoiled nature for more discerning (and higher spending) foreigners. Lower impact higher value markets are surely where a good portion of our future in tourism should be and it just might be working out that way. Let us welcome 'The Beautiful People'... they have lots of money!

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I was just watching CNN and saw that Wim Kok will resign along with much of the Dutch government over a damning report on the massacre of Muslim men and boys at Srebrenica by Bosnian Serbs under Ratko Mladic.

Although I am bitter regarding the role of the UN throughout Croatia and Bosnia i Herzegovina, at least the Dutch are objective enough and have the courage to face the reality of what happened just seven years ago and their part in it. The efforts of the Dutch army to cover up this dark page in their military history has been thwarted by enough fine Dutch people (including some in their army) who were determined that the truth be known and publicly faced. I am glad that blame is being taken although in truth the Dutch soldiers were placed in an invidious position,without a clear mandate on the use of force, lightly equipped and denied air support when they demanded it.

For this, although the Dutch are rightly searching their souls for being a party to the murder of 7000 men and children, I primarily blame that epitome of despicable moral relativism, Yakushi Akashi and the entire rotten edifice of the UN for which he worked, for allowing the UN 'Safe Havens' to become a lethal fiction, making them nothing more than collection centres for mass murder by Ratko Mladic and his cetnic einsatztruppen.

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...when the law you break has no moral basis.

In 1991, a crime was committed in New York. The UN imposed an arms embargo on all of the former Yugoslavia and all the national governments who voted for that resolution were parties to that crime.

At the same time as this crime against the peoples of Croatia and Bosnia i Herzegovina was happening, Argentine Economics Minister Domingo Cavallo was conspiring successfully to sell Argentine weapons to Croatia via a series of dummy companies and third parties.

Now I am under no illusions that Mr. Cavallo was motivated by any desire to right the wrong done by the UN when it tried to prevent the poorly armed Croatian and Bosnian peoples under attack by the Yugoslav Army from defending themselves. Nevertheless, that was exactly what the results of his self-serving actions were. We were able to fight and survive and eventually prevail.

Yesterday Domingo Cavallo was arrested under the orders of politically motivated judges for his part in that entirely moral series of arms sales between 1991 and 1995. Argentine congressional deputy Elisa Carrio, an independent anti-corruption campaigner, welcomed the ruling that resulted in Cavallo's arrest yesterday saying "Truth and justice will prevail". Guess what, Elisa... it already has and you would not know what either looked like if they bit you in the behind.

And so, Domingo, whatever else you may have done and deserve to be punished for, I hope you beat the rap on this one because there was no moral reason for you not to have done it and several excellent reasons to do so. And given the state of the Argentine economy, I hope you stashed your end of the proceeds in Zürich, not Buenos Aires.

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I am slightly dazed and significantly bruised from my holiday in Austria, so this is just a quick catch up post.

The Serbian Authorities in Bosnia are up to their usual tricks and are driving out Croatian civilians from Drvar and Grahovo. Of course the outrage of the international community is strangely absent. What a surprise. These poor people are all ending up in accommodation around Knin. Having been through that myself, my heart goes out to them. At least none of them were killed. I wonder if these ethno-socialist morons in Republika Srbska realise they are in effect causing the colonisation of depopulated Serbian areas around Knin with pissed off Croats who are not going to be willing to move again? Pure genius.

On a seperate note, Yugoslavia agreed to vanish, at least in name. It will probably be called The Union of Serbia and Montenegro. Good riddance. I still think that Montenegro should try to engineer a 'velvet divorce' and go it alone.

I was also going to write about the latest EU regulatory madness but I am too sleeeepy!

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And quite reasonably too I might add. Josh Marshall lays out what he meant and raises the valid point that his remarks were aimed with an American audience and context in mind.

But the Internet being what it is, one's audience can be far more diverse than a person might expect and thus the context within which the remarks will be read can be quite different. I had this brought home to me a week ago when I got a detailed and intelligent critique of my views on the EU from a man in Dakar, Senegal.

Although I suspect I do not entirely agree with all of Josh Marshall's views on the subject, for the most part I actually do. His post is measured and intelligent and in reality there is not that much daylight between his and Natalija's views either. What is more, the point that increased Natalija's blood pressure was really more a matter of how she interpreted what was being said. As she is off on a business trip I doubt she will be posting herself for a few days but I did speak to her on the telephone, repeated the article to her and she does concede that perhaps she did read a more negative spin on the original piece than was really justified. In truth the recent 'Free Slobodan Milosevic' petition and associated procession of totalitarianism's "useful idiots" has made her a tad sensitive on certain matters.

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Natalija's suspicions seem to have been correct

Both The Telegraph and The Times are reporting in their print editions that a French officer may have tipped off war criminal Radovan Karadzic about the impending operation to grab him in Bosnia.

Is anyone surprised?

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...make sure you have actually read what the person you are criticizing did, and did not say.

Matthew Yglesias called the Croatian reoccupation of Krajina 'genocide' and apparently I enjoy it. And where exactly are the mass graves of thousands of this 'genocide'? Even the much more vicious Serbian cetnic activities in Croatia, Bosnia i Herzegovina and Kosovo were not 'genocide' and I speak as someone who was personally on the receiving end of them. They were 'ethnic cleansing' to use the modern term. Mass murder for sure. Mass rapes for sure. But genocide? What happened to the Jews in Europe 1939-1945 was genocide, what happened in Rwanda was genocide. What happened in Armenia was genocide. So to call the Croatian activities in Krajina 'genocide' is both absurd and idiotarian. Mr. Yglesias' use of the term makes him Fisk-able, not me.

I never claimed that the Croatian military did not do some bad things (or more usually HOS or someHVO militia groups), merely that the re-occupation of Krajina per se was not one of those 'bad things'. I know exactly what did and did not happen to many Serbs when we retook our country. But the big difference here was that what some Croatian elements did under people like Tuta in BiH was not a systematic program of centrally directed murder and rape based ethnic displacement in the manner conducted by Arkan, Seselj etc. and backed by the Yugoslav and Bosnian Srpska authorities under Milosevic and Karadzic. The Mai Lai massacre in Vietnam was conducted by US forces and it was ghastly but it was not ordered by the US government.

Were some Croats also involved in 'bad things'? Yes, for sure. What the Croats who engaged in war crimes did (and I have no problem calling it that) was a series of isolated, not systematic, atrocities and on a tiny scale compared to what was done to us and the Bosnians. There are two Serbian families living directly across the street from my parent's house in Glina right now! They did not flee on the theory that unlike many others who had looted the homes of absent Croats, they had no reason to flee. That said I (and they) never had an unrealistic view of the Croatian Army and MUPs circa 1995-1996, particularly as many of its members were people who has suffered the loss of family and loved ones in 1991 and had scores to settle. Thus our Serbian neighbours were very glad when my parents moved back and were able to vouch for their definite non-cetnic credentials to the new 'powers that be'. I do not have a simplistic view of this. However wars in the real world are not just fought from 5000 metres up, they involve people on the ground and so bad things always happen.

Next time someone criticizes my remarks, I hope they read them in order to see what I did and did not actually say and not just attribute views to me based on their prejudices.

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Joshua Micah Marshall makes some pretty strange remarks about some recent history on his blog.

But let's go back to 1992 and '93. Back then, one of the contested areas was the part of Croatia called the Krajina. This was essentially an ethnic Serb enclave within the borders of Croatia and as you might imagine this became a volatile crisis point in the fighting between Serbs and Croats. In any case, United Nations peace-keepers were sent into the region in the beginning of 1992 to maintain the peace. And did a reasonably good, though by no means perfect, job at it. For a while, the matter was thus placed in suspense, until 1995 when then-Croatian President Franjo Tudjman gave the UN Mission an ultimatum to leave. Eventually the Croatians rolled in and retook the region with some quite ugly consequences.

Let me set him straight on a few points: The UN had nothing to do with the reduction in fighting in Croatia in 1992. The reason the fighting died down was that the Croatian National Guard (ZNG) and the Serbs had fought each other to a standstill. The front line stabilised because that was as far as the Serbs could get once Croatia's ad hoc army was able to dig in. However the Croatians, due to the criminal and immoral arms embargo that favoured the heavily armed Serbian Yugoslav Army, lacked the ability to mount offensive operations to retake Krajina...therefore stalemate. The UN was utterly irrelevant to that outcome.

Thereafter, the Serbs shifted their attention to Bosnia i Herzegovina (BiH) whilst the Croatians used whatever means they could to build up their army, now called the HV. The UN did not 'keep the peace', it just presided over the stalemated front line in Croatia while Croats armed and trained their army and Milosevic, Karadzic, Mladic, Arkan, Seselj etc. and the people who we willing to follow their orders got on with raping and murdering their way across BiH whilst the international community subjected them to grimaces and intermittent clucking sounds.

So the fact that the Croatia, subjected to the criminal arms embargo that had impaired its ability to defend us, took measures to ensure that political forces in the USA would not continue to act against our interests, is bad exactly how? I assume Joshua is equally against Israel's vast lobbying efforts in the USA as well. Does Joshua expect Croatians to accept that we were not entitled to retake Krajina? Sorry but I see it rather differently. I am from Glina and one of the 'quite ugly consequences' of the Serbian cetnic's arriving was Croats like me getting killed in their homes because they were Croats. I didn't see this on CNN or read about it in the newspapers, I saw it out of my fucking bedroom window before my family and I managed to get out of town and ended up as refugees.

So if Joshua expects us to feel bad about taking Krajina back and trying to manipulate US political forces which were originally a party to the embargo against us, he is going to be disappointed. Certain US political forces helped keep us weak so why should we not try to change that given the harm we suffered as a result? I wonder if Joshua thinks the nice Mr. Arkan and nice Mr. Seselj would have eventually admitted it was all just a big misunderstanding and let bygones be bygones if only us mean old Croats had not come back with guns blazing and tanks rolling? One of the 'quite ugly consequences' of the Croatian Army expelling the UN and then the Serbian Army from Krajina was my family and I got to go home. I take this matter a little personally. If you have a problem with that, go fuck yourself.

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Splendid blogger Ben Sheriff from Layman's Logic has produced a wonderful page called Slobogoogling for Profit and Pleasure that is a menu of juicy morsels for all self respecting anti-idiotarian bloggers to use as prey. Each of the signatories of the petition to free ethnic clenser and mass murderer Slobodan Milosevic is listed in easily Google-able form. By their own words they shall be revealed.

I have myself written that I do not think the Hague is the correct place for the Vile One to be tried (in fact I favoured his summary execution in Republic Square in Belgrade), but the people who signed this document actually think Slobo is the good guy... they are the modern Mitfords, no different from the apologists for Hitler and Stalin from the 1920's to the 1960's.

Ben is a splendid blogger and I am reliably informed that he is still agreeable company even when exceedingly drunk, which surely makes him an indispensable asset to the blogosphere!

Ben roars at Slobo at the Brit Blogger Bash

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SFOR seem rather good at raiding Croatian banks and overturning democratic election results it dislikes but it seems the NATO troops in Bosnia i Herzegovina are rather less good at capturing war criminals.

If there were any French forces involved, no doubt Karadzic was tipped off. What a disappointing waste of time.

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I have heard news on the radio that vile mass murderer from Bosnia i Herzegovina Radovan Karadzic is surrounded by troops trying to arrest him. I hope they do not take him alive. I also hope he is feeling some of what so many other people felt when they realised that armed man more powerful than themselves were surrounding where they lived.

Splendid news!

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But also kicking of 'asses' is going on, being conducted by a militia of many blogs. I was away from my computer for a while and then checked Matt Welch's wonderful blog and could not believe my eyes...he has become Slobo-Google central. The true nature of Slobodan Milosevic's vile apologists is laid open to the world. A few weeks ago their words which libeled the very dead themselves in their mass graves made me weep with helpless fury.

But Matt has shown that by their own words, they are revealed for what they are. Each of those google search links on Matt's blog is a badge of honour for the bloggers who have done them. Suddenly I don't feel so bad any more.

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It is a bit like some strange dream reading about the things Slobodan Milosevic has been saying in the Hague. In this parallel moral universe uniformed murderers are noble victims and the man who heads the government which pays the salaries of the murderers and gives them their orders, is absolved from guilt due to the fact he did not literally do it himself... whereas a couple hundred injured soldiers and civilians dragged from a hospital in Vukovar and then slaughtered by the brave Yugoslav Federal Army (not paramilitary cetniks) like animals at a nearby farm, are somehow just reduced to a shrug and 'shit happens'. Matt Welch restored some of my faith that all America had not suddenly gone collectively insane by showing that people are not buying into the revisionist lies of Milosevic and his EVIL supporters and apologists.

Also, and far more important than those human compost heaps, my e-mail address is not working properly so Perry, our Chris Patten baiting editor, will be setting me up with a proper samizdata POPmail account sometime today, instead of just a forwarder. Anyone who has sent me e-mail to my private address recently might want to send it again. [Ed: the new e-mail account is now set up as a POP mail account]

Will Vehrs of Blog Watch II cannot be accused of submitting to demands by noisy Balkan women for three-star rating of articles... he gave me four!

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Slobodan Milosevic Is the Scapegoat in a Show Trial by Marko Lopusina and Andre Huzsvai is nothing less than lies on the scale that the Nazi holocaust never happened. Marko Lopusina and Andre Huzsvai are not 'presenting an interpretation' when they make remarks like:

Were allegations of Milosevic's "war crimes" in Bosnia and Croatia true, he would have been indicted in 1995, instead of rubbing elbows with U.S. politicos at the Dayton peace talks. Were Washington serious about toppling him, it could have done so in 1996 by supporting the Serb opposition movement, Zajedno.

"War crimes" in Bosnia and Croatia? What were they then, a mass suicide? And the idea that Zajedno would have toppled Milosevic in 1996 is preposterous. Lopusina and Huzsvai are deluded fantasist apologists for a mass murderer. If they wish to sue me for defaming them I will be happy to give them my address and see these two sacks of shit in court.

Natalija was going to write a first hand account of why these two pieces of crap are wrong but was so distressed by it that she decided to just ignore these cretins. The editors of the L.A. Times should hang their heads in shame for allowing this travesty of the facts to touch the pages of their publication. Shameful and disgraceful.

The L.A. Times belongs nowhere except in the bottom of cat litter trays. Kudos to Matt Welch for heaping righteous disdain on these people and for Brian Hoffman's letter to Matt.

Coming soon to the L.A. Times: the serialisation of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion

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I will be a bit provincial today. It has been a few days of mixed news in my corner of Europe. Very good news is that filthy war criminal Rade Vrga has been arrested in Hungary, which is splendid.

Not so good news is that the idiots governing Croatia have folded under pressure from the farmers political faction and given up trying to abandon the ridiculous policy of agricultural support that takes tax money from everyone and gives it to farmers because they are, well, farmers. Are farmers the only cyclical business that they should need special treatment? Yet an idiotic coalition of HSS and other economically ignorant not-so-reformed socialists think it is perfectly alright to act like vampires on the rest of the economy.

Even worse news is that yet another agreement was signed that is crawling Croatia closer to that 'haven of fluorescent idiocy' called the European Union.

And even worse news than that is that a certain Samizdata editor has yet another picture of me for the blog. I am going to have to wear a burqa next time I see that boy!

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The Milosevic trial in the Hague is having trouble due to the fact most of the Kosovo war crimes evidence was gathered by western intelligence operatives, rather than independent investigators. However even if that part of the charges against him collapses, he will not be able to stonewall his way out of the charges relating to Croatia and Bosnia.

Nevertheless, I must say that I have never thought the Hague trials were either legitimate or, more importantly, sensible. To paraphrase Talleyrand, they are worse than a crime, they are a mistake.

For Serbia to recover from the monstrous era that the entire former Yugoslavia is emerging from, it needs to go through a process similar to the de-nazification Germany went through after World War Two. It must face its own history and that is not achieved by putting The Demon on trial in the Netherlands. He did not act alone and whole sections of Serbian society must face up to that fact.

The place Slobodan Milosevic should have gone on trial for mass murder and other war crimes was in Serbia because then, and only then, can Serbian society itself drive a stake through the heart of its own darkness. There are a lot of good people in Serbia who are quite capable of doing just that.

Of course this could have been achieved another way too: like Mussolini, Slobodan Milosevic, his vile hellish wife, most of his adult family and about fifty senior ministers, police chiefs and generals could have been strung up on meat hooks as a lesson to future generations. That would have worked too. It might not be pretty but it would have been justice.

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I have been fuming about this for a while. A few days ago, Wolfgang Petritsch, the euro-gauleiter in Bosnia-Herzegovina (BiH), announced he thinks Croatia needs to structure its democratic system on multi-ethnic lines. In short, he wants ethnic groups to be encouraged to see themselves as politically different rather than as members of a common civil society. He has of course be informally invited to take his views, write them on sheets of stiff paper, roll them up tightly and stick them somewhere warm and dark. We have already lived through the aftermath of the Yugoslav experiment in tribal collectivism. I for one have no desire to do that sort of thing again, thank you very much.

Unlike hapless BiH, Petritsch would do well to remember that his views do not have a large NATO army to impose them in Croatia. Someone once asked me why I was so glad that NATO does not 'guarantee' Croatian security in the same manner as in BiH. Simple. What was the point of the war if we are going to trade taking orders from Belgrade for taking orders from Brussels via some petty Austrian politician like Petritsch? Security of the sort on offer from Petritsch and his Euro-collectivist kind is the security of the cage.

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I could of course be referring to the fact, as David Carr wrote that socialism far from being dead has just re-branded itself, and is stalking the night looking for victims. And certainly that is true. However the news is not all bad. The political culture in Croatia still has a woeful hangover from the communist era, but things have nevertheless has taken a turn for the better lately. The Mayor of Zagreb, Milan Bandic was involved in a minor auto accident and just drove off. As a result, his political career is in tatters and public opinion scandalised so much that he has been forced from office. However just a few short years ago he could have done so with impunity. That is real progress.

But I wasn't really thinking about that sort of thing at all. In my usual self-centred way I was thinking about something much more important: after being laid low with the flu (or whatever it was) I am actually up and walking around at last, still coughing like I have the plague but at least I am moving again like the undead risen from a coffin. Ok, I know that I do not live in Transylvania, but I am probably a hell of a lot closer to it that most of the Samizdata's readers (about 350 km/220 miles away).

And so off I go to the market this morning to stock up my depleted shelves (I had someone else shopping for me but he never gets the right things). There is still about half a metre of snow on the ground and so I am wrapped up like a yeti, but it is so nice to be outside. After filling up my car, I drive back and start unloading the car... and who should saunter through the open front door but Little Monster, my missing cat. I am amazed. I thought he must be run over by car or frozen under half metre of snow one week ago.

Far from it. He is fluffy and smells slightly of perfume. Someone had even tied a strange looking ribbon on his little collar. I should have just thrown him out and told him to go back to who ever has been looking after him the last week.

Well, at least I finished unloading my shopping from the car before I fed him. That showed him who is the boss.

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USS Clueless has a lengthy article about US unilateralism which makes some interesting points. He also makes some rather dubious ones.

We gave Europe one chance, after WWI, to dictate their own terms and the result was another bloody war. So the second time, we did call the tune -- and the result was a hell of a lot better.

As for Britain and France dictating its own terms, what about Woodrow Wilson's role in dismembering the Austro-Hungarian Empire and trashing all vestiges of the potentially stabilising old order? America shares some of the blame for the instability in Europe in the 1920's and 1930's. And the 'second time' was better for who? I don't think too many Poles, Czechs and Hungarians would agree with Steven as they ended up with nearly half a century of communist rule. Does Steven think Yalta was America's finest hour?

But that's because we are willing to try the unconventional. For example: after WWI, France insisted that Germany, with its ruined economy, pay drastic reparations to France. The result was hyper inflation, collapse of the Weimar Republic, and the rise of the Nazi Party.

All of which may never have happened if the US had stayed out of the Great War and a negotiated settlement had been reached in 1917 or early 1918.

And even in the recent past the Europeans have proved that their counsel sucks. That's what we learned in Yugoslavia, something I've discussed here at great length. Years of dithering where the US lobbied for military action and the Europeans counseled diplomacy and sanctions, and what it got us was years of slaughter and civil war there. Finally the US issued an ultimatum; and after 6 weeks of bombing, and the war there ended. Milosevic was deposed, and the Serbs went back to democracy and ceased to be imperialistic. And it's been reasonably peaceful there ever since.

Yeah, and they all lived happily ever after dreaming good dreams about nice Uncle Sam. That is an... interesting... analysis of the intricacies of the recent Balkan Wars. Whilst I am not fan of European diplomacy (to put it mildly), US actions in the Balkans were at best only half right and Kosovo was a rather more ambigious matter than you seem to think. Do you not think the fact the Croatian and Bosnia Armies (not the USAF) had defeated the aspirations of a Greater Serbia might have had more than a little to do with Slobo's declining political fortunes? He was politically very vulnerable due to the fact he had lead Serbia to catastrophe, horror and defeat in Bosnia and Croatia, unemployment was running at over 30% (50% by some estimates), the currency was fast turning into toilet paper and so is it really so surprising that he collapsed after yet another military defeat, this time at the hands of the largely US strategic air offensive that resulted from the Kosovo affair?

I am afraid Steven's analysis contains some grossly simplistic elements and seems to ascribe almost magical qualities to the application of US military force: the USAF turns up and shazam... peace breaks out all over the Balkans. It is rather more complex than that.

[Editor: Link fixed. Now goes to correct article on USS Clueless]

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I have flu and the world hates me, even the rascal Dawson does not like me any more. My dog is at my mother's house and my cat took one look at me as I started to fall ill a few days ago and sodded off. It seems he has decided not to come back so I have stopped looking out of the window for him. Bastard. Typical guy. There is about half a metre of snow on the ground and my heating only works when it feels like it, so here I am, blogging to the world with my laptop under the duvet with me. Only my 'editor' in London calls me so I am starting to wonder if there is anyone left alive and unfrozen in all of Croatia... except for the idiot who lives next door. Why do some people feel the need to rev their cars for 20 minutes before driving off? If the damn thing starts, drive it!!!

I was going to write about our idiot mayor in Zagreb (naughty boy), cretin provincial journalists in the USA who see the world through the narrow prism of their own country and why if I had met a certain much commented on 'libertarian anti war' Internet writer in 1991 here in what used to be Yugoslavia, I would have put a 9mm bullet between his eyes.

However I have realised that all these things pale into insignificance compared to my own personal misery at the moment.

Irritable? Me? Nah.

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In an article in the New York Times, Maureen Dowd writes that after September 11, Americans were turning away from unimportant things like expensive clothes and luxury

But now we are supposed to be in the era of the real rather than the pretentious, the warm rather than the cool, the fundamental rather than the grandiose.

So we must ask: Is the vast new $40 million Prada store that has just opened not far from Ground Zero, trumpeted by the company as "the New York Epicenter" and designed by the hot architect Rem Koolhaas, a relic of our gluttonous ways or a resumption of them?

Of course I realise that Americans are going through a process of adapting and trying to understand new realities, but at the risk of sounding unkind, all they are really doing is waking up from a dream and finding themselves in the real world.

It broke my heart when I saw those terrible images on television on September 11 and oh how I wished a thousand deaths on the monsters who were responsible for it. But I felt nothing more, or less, than I felt when Sarajevo was besieged for 1400 days, during which 10,000 of its people died and 50,000 more were injured out of a population of just over 500,000.

During the war, everywhere in what used to be Yugoslavia experienced shortage and hardship and sudden horror. Americans watched this through the filtering eyes of CNN and the BBC for a few minutes each day before going back to their dinner or driving to the mall, yet it might as well have been occurring on another planet psychologically speaking.

People in Sarajevo would have to dash across roads to go to the markets, risking death from Cetnik snipers and artillery fire on a daily basis. But if you ever go back and look at the videos, look very carefully at the people. You will see women with clean hair, lipstick and makeup. Men wearing pressed jackets and even ties. People determined to retain their humanity as well as just survive another day.

I think Maureen Dowd does not understand, at least not yet, that if the monsters can make you live in their world of poverty and sorrow, then they have truly beaten you. That is why when I realised that Benetton was about to open a shop in Sarajevo in 1995, I wept because I realised that the nightmare was almost over at last. So Maureen, take it from me that there is nothing noble about 'sweat suits and old clothes already in the closet'. Listen to me and go to that place in New York, only a few blocks from the World Trade Centre that those evil people destroyed. Wander through the wonderful opulence of Prada's shop and gaze at the exquisite Italian style, treat yourself to a nice little black dress: then look around again and realise that you have won and they have lost.

[Original link to NYT article via Instapundit]