I would just like to say this: If there were more people that think like Ian Simpson there would not be so many wars and all the horrors that go with them.

You are quite right about existence of the double standards, but there is a cardinal difference between the Chetniks and foreign armies in Iraq.

The real Chetniks were the elite troops in the Kingdom of Yugoslavia and the first known rebels against Germans in the Second World War. Their commandant Mihailovic has got medal: the Legion of Merit from US president Truman (the Chetniks were praised and recognised by West).

The late real Chetniks in the Balkans civil wars were not invaders but local people and churches, mosques, factories and other buildings were destroyed throughout all territory with involvement of all three sides (Moslems, Croats and Serbs).

In some cases, the Chetniks were solvents (playing the role of the real Chetniks) paid by Western secret services in order to damage the image of the real Chetniks and to show "ancient hatreds".

So-called 'concentration camps' were opened also by all three sides. The problem is because West wants to demonise the Serbs, hiding real cause of the civil war, hoping that then the history can be rewritten (Divide et impera!).

The modern West culture has come from the East, especially from the East Roman Empire and Greece throughout the Balkans to the West. The West has no the monopoly on culture, the way democracy and the truth in general.

Colonial times are so far away.

As you say, there was much hand-wringing among western politicians while the Chetniks did their work and many attempts by pseudo-academics to explain their brutality. Often the talk was of "ancient hatreds", John Major's fatuous remarks in Parliament on 23 June 1993 (Hansard, col. 324) being a classic example.

But such behavior of the pseudo-academics and politicians was because they wanted to cover up Western involvement in the project of breaking up Yugoslavia.

The NATO (Western) governments that bombed Belgrade were the same governments that decided to turn a blind eye to Slobodan Milosevic's government during the break up of the original Yugoslavia and were unwilling to address repeated warnings from the likes of Amnesty International about the fast deteriorating human rights situation.

Why wasn't the carrot of membership of the European Union in return for good behavior dangled then, when Yugoslavia was still a functioning, reasonably prosperous state, rather than waiting until years of war had broken the economic back of nearly every constituent part of the old Yugoslavia?

At the end, it has to be stressed that the part of the former Bosnia and Herzegovina in which Moslems are majority is much more close to an Islamic state than it was before the latest war. Your comment about the hard-drinking Bosnians simply is not true nowadays.

Killing civilians, destroying civilian infrastructures, running prison camps where torture, humiliation and murders take place, use of overwhelming force, shootings of wounded (fighters?) or not . . . the main difference with former Yugoslavia is that US troops and coalition forces are not at home, and far from it.

I have to point out that, as well as the Chetniks, you had had the same kind of behaviour from Ustashas on the Croatian side of the Yugoslavian conflicts, and I have to deplore the fact that it is always the Serbian side that is used as an example of fighting a "dirty" way.