[J Aguilar]

Perhaps, but such tiny countries makes them very dependents of the European powers: Britain, and especially Germany and France.

Yougoslavia would have had a greater weight in the European Union than the sum of the States in which it has disintegrated.

[endthematrix]

There’s still plenty of corporations for the West to buy, currency manipulation and absorption into the EU..

[jeddavis]

Wonder what Hitchens is gonna say when the Russian tanks roll into Kosovo...

[txlurker]

It's a shame, in retrospect, that it took us so long to diagnose the pathology of Serbia's combination of arrogance and self-pity, in which what is theirs is theirs and what is anybody else's is negotiable.

That sums it up nicely.

[canuck_conservative]

Shouldn’t the title be “The Serbs’ Self-Inflicted Wounds”, not the byline?

Excellent article BTW, finally puts the lie to all the claims made by the history-denying Serbian Apologists on this forum.

[canuck_conservative]

The lies and distortions are over. Hitchens has you nailed.

Let the truth shine in!

Thus, and if we exempt some decisions made by Stalinist bureaucrats after the re-creation of Yugoslavia in 1945, Kosovo has never been treated or recognized as Serb territory within Yugoslavia and never at all by international treaties outside that former state. Even those hasty Stalinist decisions were later undone by Tito, who granted Kosovo a large measure of autonomy in 1974. It is very important to remember that Slobodan Milosevic launched his own petty and violent career, as the head of a Serb-Montenegrin crime family, precisely by canceling Kosovo's pre-existing autonomy in 1990, remaking himself as a nationalist demagogue instead of a Communist one, and bringing in the roof of the Yugoslav federation.

[Uncle Chip]

With Kosovo independent, Yugoslavia is finally dead.

The dream of the WWII Croatian/Muslim Ustasha come true --

[bert]

......irredentism......

Foul....... red flag for making up a word

[gitmogrunt]

Hitchens,just another irrelevant anglo-saxon who failed Balkans History 101 along with Clinton-Bush-Albright-Rice,McCain,et al.

[gitmogrunt]

http://www.kosovo.net/default1.html

[longtermmemmory]

divide and conquer.

This is foolish because this article was duplicated with EVERY Single little province.

Yougoslavia is not dead because all the propaganda pushed by tito for territorial aquisition is still going strong in the country-lettes.

[Navy Patriot]

I wouldn’t stop for Christopher Hitchens or his analysis of the warm and fuzzy Albanians even if he WAS in a crosswalk.

[TigersEye]

You should, second, ask if you know of any case comparable to the Kosovo one, where a national minority was so long imprisoned within an artificial state.

Tibet?

No, I guess not as long.