Kosovo is free, and peace engulfs the land.  Tim Judah (whose “War And Revenge” is a suitably depressing primer on the war in the 1990′s, in my not-remotely-expert opinion) looks at who’ll be voting themselves off Yugoslavian Survivor next week.  Can’t wait.

Matt Yglesias has a rather odd retrospective on the American involvement, which begins:

With Kosovo’s formal declaration of independence from Serbia on Monday, and the United States’ decision to extend recognition to the planet’s newest country, the time has come for a look back on the approximately 10 years of intense U.S. involvement in that conflict. Kosovo is a tiny, seemingly worthless patch of land lacking in all natural resources, but it plays a strangely large role in our foreign-policy debates. During arguments about the Iraq War, in particular, liberal hawks had a habit of wielding the poor Kosovar Albanians as a cudgel: If you supported Bill Clinton’s 1999 bombing campaign, the argument went, then surely you could support a war against Saddam Hussein.

“If you’ll eat filet mignon, then surely you’ll eat this maggoty cow shit” is an argument with similar persuasive power.  Unfortunately, Matt doesn’t provide any actual examples of this argument in the wild – I recall Tim Russert saying something along these lines at a Democratic debate in 2004, but I’m long past being surprised at Russert’s idiocy.  One can think of any number of objections to the thrust of the article, the fundamental point is that it doesn’t seem particularly useful to look back at Kosovo primarily as the source of specious arguments possibly deployed by Americans with no influence on policy.  Some shit isn’t about your office politics.

Later, in a related blog post:

At the end of the day, the only just solution for Canada, or for the former Yugoslavia, or for Iraq or Lebanon or anyone else necessarily involves the creation of tolerably liberal rights-respecting governments or else intolerably illiberal population transfers and ethnic cleansing. There’s no administrative fix whereby simply drawing the boundaries in just such a way solves the problem. To create really adequate solutions, the international community will have to find a way to create liberal regimes. And this, of course, is precisely what we don’t know how to do.

We don’t know how to do it because it can’t be done.  You can’t impose liberal political solutions from the outside.  The best you can do is stay engaged, try to manage, contain, and prevent these trivial things in boring, resource-poor, politically Byzantine backwoods from getting out of hand.  You can regard examples of this as “modest successes” or unmitigated disasters - and you can carry Rwanda like a rugged cross or a potential disaster averted - but these are different descriptions of the same sobering realities.  After the SSRI-overdose fairyworld of neocon foriegn policy, it might be worth returning to these things.