Serbia Sans Montenegro

Under other circumstances, I wouldn't have given a rat's ass about Montenegro voting to secede from Serbia over the weekend, making it the last country to break away from what was once Yugoslavia. After all, these clowns have been beating up on each other for centuries.

But there was the matter of those nasty little regional civil wars in the 1990s that climaxed with the Kosovo war.

Given the Bush administration's abject record in Iraq, you may not recall that the Clinton administration did a passable job of patching things up with the help of the U.S. armed forces and an assist from NATO. (Although Wretchard reminds us at The Belmont Club that most of us don't rememberl that the U.S. used airpower without any prior U.N. authorization. Sound familiar?)

Publius has a good roundup here of what might happen in that neck of the woods.

(Hat tip to Glenn Reynolds at Instapundit.)

MEANWHILE, BACK AT THE RANCH

Seven years after the U.S.-NATO intervention, the Serbian province of Kosovo still is being administered by the U.N.

The latest talks to determine Kosovo's fate got underway in Vienna in February and have been puttering along. They involve representatives of several Kosovar institutions and a team formed by the government of Serbia.

The future of the province is supposed to be determined by year's end, but don't bet on it.