The irony in all this, of course, is that while Saddam Hussein was mustard gassing the Kurds in the 1980s, there was no call for humanitarian intervention. Indeed, he was an American ally. And he stayed a European ally all during the 1990s. Yet, because of the deeply idiotic US President of the 2000s, the call to stop Saddam was largely opposed by the global human rights community. It just seems so odd to me, and clearly I realize that the US was not really interested in a humanitarian intervention, that the genocidal lunatic extracted a degree of sympathy. It's also just as clear that Milosevic was really a lightweight compared to Saddam--and the current Iranian leadership, for that matter.

Yet, of all these genocidal lunatics (Bush, Milosevic, Saddam, whomever in Iran decided to annihilate Kurds in the 1980s) the one generally equated with Hitler is Milosevic. Milosevic is probably the lowest on the totem pole when it comes to atrocities perpetrated. If we all agree that the worst crime committed by Milosevic and the Serbs was the thousands killed at Srebrenica, it certainly would surprise most to hear of UN and NATO generals stationed in the Bihac pocket give testimony that they considered the forced kidnapping (and subsequent murder) of those men to be a form of revenge. Why did the UN Dutch troops hold back? Because they (as well as their commanders) were in the pocket a year earlier when Bosnian Muslims had killed 2,500 Serbs. This is indeed the slipperiness of the entire war. 100,000 dead, 50,000 Muslims, but also 50,000 Serbs and Croats. In this light, the unlawful punishment of Serbs in Kosovo seems rather crazy, absurd. The fact that Colin Powell made this evident to Madeleine Albright does me no good since the same man encouraged the invasion of Iraq under false pretenses four years later. It really makes you wonder.

The great ironies, however, come when something like Operation Storm is considered a viable response to the Serbs, or when Bernard Kouchner says that some degree of revenge for Albanians is understandable in Kosovo. It really boggles the mind.