Serb Nationalists...

...are determined to prove that they learned nothing from the ruination of war. Perhaps some more airstrikes would bring them around?

The Coming Independence of Kosovo

The Serbs are-unsurprisingly-not happy about it. They appear to have learned nothing after seven years of war.

"Success", Defined

George Packer writes today to applaud the success of international intervention in Sierra Leone. Frances Trix, writing at Informed Comment, says the success of the international mission in Kosovo is somewhat more qualified. There are two lessons to take away from these similar pieces. First, a humanitarian intervention can save lives and save a nation, if it's conducted with narrow tailoring to meet feasible goals. Second, we must always be on guard for the lack of knowledge or understanding of other people that makes hubris and over-reaching in humanitarian interventions possible or likely. Balancing competing considerations before engaging in humanitarian missions or nation-building is not as sexy as claiming that should do something before a "smoking gun becomes a mushroom cloud", but it's the only realistic way of approaching such problems.