The West's intervention in Kosovo was a reaction to the Serbs' final solution to the problems of the recalcitrant province. The Serbs attempted to drive out the Albanian majority using soldiers and civilians for mayhem and murder. It was not an arbitrary, irrational act, merely a final inhuman escalation of a conflict lost in the medieval clashes between Islam and Christianity, whose increasingly secular descendants wage the same war, having learned nothing and forgotten nothing in seven centuries.
A past of separate schooling, separate histories and separate development, conducted in different languages with different scripts, has fueled enough rancor in Kosovo to make Northern Ireland's divisions look like a minor fraternal tiff.
After its bombing campaign in Serbia, the Western alliance finally drove the Yugoslav Army out of Kosovo, only to see it leave a bloody trail of "goodbye" atrocities on its withdrawal route. In its wake, the Kosovo Liberation Army revisited the same atrocities on the Serbs left behind and on their Gypsy "collaborators" before the West's troops arrived to pry the two apart.