Leaving aside the fact that Poland has a formal strategic alliance with the US - a state of affairs that, to the best of my knowledge, did not obtain between Russia and any of the Balkan countries, there's a pretty damn big difference between intervening in an ongoing humanitarian disaster like the Yugoslav civil war. Even granting that the military and geostrategic logic would be the same, the political logic would be quite different.

Or, to put it a bit more bluntly: Poland is not a psychologically valid battleground for a war-by-proxy, because it's not some insignificant third-world backwater embroiled in civil war - it's a charter member of both NATO and the Union, which makes it a significant third-world backwater, and it's not an outright humanitarian disaster either (although a case could certainly be made that it's a human rights disaster). It's not a distinction that I particularly care for, but then again, I don't particularly care for war-by-proxy either. Or war in general, for that matter.

- Jake

Friends come and go. Enemies accumulate.