[Jacob Kell]

"When you compare the gangsters, thugs, hoodlums, and scumbuckets in the Balkans, the biggest group operated out of Belgrade."

Biggest, i don't know. The most powerful, probably.

"We acted accordingly."

No we didn't. If we had only supported the Serbian democratic opposition back in say 1996-the year I believe that Serbians were protesting en masse in the streets against that son-of-a-b***** Milosevic (gee that rhymes)-we might have gotten him removed from power and there may not have been a Kosovo war to begin with. Plus we basically supported the KLA to the exculsion of the more moderate Kosovo ALbanian factions, like Rugova. Anyhoo, it's all a moot point.

[joan]

Belgrade and non-Kosovo Serbia are multicultural. The Muslims in Belgrade weren't attacked, their shops weren't looted, etc. even during the bombing. Albanians come and go easily in Belgrade. But you cannot say the same for Serbs in Croatia or the Muslim-Croat part of Bosnia or Kosovo. The Serbs were fighting for their lives against separtists who wanted to cleanse the Serbs from their terroritories (statelets). There is plenty of evidence that the Bosnian Muslims weren't multicultural - at least not the Izetbegovic regime which was supported by the west. I could dig up information which shows that Muslim paramilitaries killed scores of civilian Sarajevo Serbs in the first few days of the war. What kind of message is that? Multicultural? No, it was a message of genocide towards the Serbs.

[Hoplite]

The bone of contention in the 1996 elections was the results in local elections - Milosevic's coalition retained control at the Federal level, and would have done so even had he conceded all of Zajedno's wins.

Were we to address Kosovo, we should have done so as a part of Dayton, rather than waiting until the only viable force on the ground was the local version of Columbia's FARC. But playing that game leaves us with having ought to have addressed the whole Yugoslav breakup in a more proactive manner rather than leaving it to the Europeans and hoping for the best.

Alas, it is as you said, moot.