The Balkans and Iraq

Over at BuckeyePolitics.net, our sister site, Tim Russo has an excellent post explaning the parallels between the mess we created in Iraq and the disaster in the Balkans following the removal of the Communist dictatorship on Yugoslavia. Tim cites Peter Galbraith, former US ambassador to Croatia during the Clinton administration, who sums this up in a recent interview on NPR. Money quote:

Democracy killed the Soviet Union, it killed Czechoslovakia, it killed Yugoslavia, all multi-ethnic states that had been held together by dictatorship. The same thing is happening in Iraq.

This describes the dilemna we are now facing in Iraq. This is what happens when you have a president who knows nothing about a region but tries to transform it through an invasion.