Slobo and Saddam

John Fund writes an interesting piece today regarding Yugoslavian dictator Slobodan Milosevic, found dead in his cell this weekend, and without actually mentioning Saddam, implies that there are comparisons between the decision to take out Slobo and the decision to take out Saddam:

In the end, Slobodan Milosevic was luckier than his victims. The former Serbian leader died at age 64 in his prison bed early Saturday, apparently of a heart attack, though full autopsy results are pending. Death was his small victory over the U.N. tribunal that now can't complete the first-ever war crimes trial of a former head of state.

As Serbian leader after 1989, Milosevic unleashed the ethnic furies that sparked the bloodiest conflicts in Europe since World War II. Yugoslavia was the West's great failure for most of the 1990s. "This is the hour of Europe," proclaimed Luxembourg's foreign minister, Jacques Poos, in 1991 when the Croats and Serbs came to blows. Yet not until after Srebrenica and its 7,000 dead men and boys in 1995 did the U.S. step in and lead an ineffective Europe to stop the fighting.

For too long, U.S. officials convinced themselves the Balkan wars resulted from implacable hatreds and nationalism rather than Milosevic's autocratic ambitions. But when NATO finally used force--with U.N. support in Kosovo only after the fact--his regime fell and the furies ended.

Today the new post-Milosevic arrangements in the Balkans are imperfect, sectarian tensions are raw and democracy is fragile. Western troops are still needed on the ground in Bosnia, Kosovo and Macedonia. But no one seriously questions whether outside intervention was the right thing to do. The tragedy of the Balkans is that it took so long for the West to generate the nerve to stop the man who died on the weekend as a largely forgotten war criminal.

I wonder if we'll look back on Iraq in a few years in the same way.