A few years ago in Tuzla, Beba Hadzic, a former resident and refugee from the Srebrenica, talked me through some video footage of the fall of his town. As the camera followed the swaggering General Mladic through the soon-to-be 'ethnically-cleansed' streets, it panned briefly across a motley band of gunmen in mix'n'match camouflage. Beba pointed and said: "Chetniks."

Chetniks were the irregular forces that did most of the dirty work in Yugoslavia. They mainly belonged to private armies led by people like Dr Vojislav Seselj, the former Amnesty International prisoner of conscience currently awaiting trial for war crimes in The Hague, and Arkan, the Belgrade mafia boss that got a bullet through his eye in January 2000.

The word 'Chetnik' was also used to describe anyone that shared the extreme nationalist politics of then President Slobodan Milosevic and his allies. Those who ran the notorious detention camps at Omarska and Trnopolje were Chetniks, as were the snipers that terrorised Sarajevo and Gorazde and the mortar crews that showered Bihac and Tuzla with death and dismemberment. It was Chetniks, too, who 'ethnically cleansed' the villages of the Drina Valley and the Krajina region, and destroyed the mosques of Banja Luka and the National Library in Sarajevo.

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. If such commentaries were demoralising to the many politically moderate Serbs still living in Milosevic's Yugoslavia, they must have been doubly insulting to the Serbs that lived in, and helped defend, Bosnia's cities.

The 'theory', if we dare dignify such nonsense with the name, was that people in the Balkans were not like us: they had an atavistic viciousness about them. To them, history was flesh and blood. Hundred year old wrongs could be righted with a bullet to the head of a twenty-year-old; a fourteenth century defeat on the Field of Blackbirds could be avenged with a twentieth century massacre in a sports arena. How else could we explain the sheer wantonness of the destruction? And how else make sense of the indiscriminate shelling of residential areas, and random murders by psychopathic snipers – the horror that came to symbolise the siege of Bosnia's cities?

Ten years on and a semblance of peace has returned to the Balkans. We no longer see images on our television screens of gaunt and frightened prisoners in Omarska, broken bodies in the centre of Tuzla and Gorazde or people dodging bullets as they negotiate Sarajevo's 'sniper alley'. Instead, we have Abu Ghraib, Fallujah, Ramadi, Latifiyah, Samarra and Baghdad.

Much as the Chetniks regarded civilian and combatant alike as fair game, so too it appears that many in the occupation forces in Iraq do not make too many distinctions between ordinary Iraqis and those they call 'insurgents'. In an interview at UC Berkeley in October 2004, Seymour Hersh, the veteran journalist who originally broke the Abu Ghraib story, recounted a telephone call he received from an officer serving in Iraq.

The officer said his unit was based in an agricultural area, alongside some Iraqi security guards that his soldiers had got to know quite well, when command issued orders for the village to be 'cleared'. Another platoon arrived and began executing the Iraqis, shooting them one by one. The original unit, some of them hysterical, attempted to stop what was happening but the platoon captain told them: "No, you don't understand, that's a kill. We got 36 insurgents."

The assault on Fallujah, preceded by air strikes and artillery bombardments, has revealed further the kind of tactics employed by the US military. Abdul-Hamid Salim, an Iraqi Red Crescent volunteer, said that, inside the city, "anyone who gets injured is likely to die because there's no medicine and they can't get to doctors. There are snipers everywhere. Go outside and you are going to get shot."

Nor are those that escape guaranteed to find safety. Associated Press reports that men aged between 15 and 55 caught trying to flee the city are forced to return. Bilal Hussein, an Iraqi photographer that lives in Fallujah, thought of swimming to freedom across the Euphrates, after witnessing American soldiers firing on houses in his neighbourhood, but changed his mind when he saw helicopters machine-gunning people in the water.

Among the horrors he encountered was a family of five being shot dead. An officer involved in the operation was quoted as saying: "There is nothing that distinguishes an insurgent from a civilian. If they're not carrying a weapon you can't tell who's who." Work that one out.

War, as Von Clausewitz said, is the continuation of policy by other means. The violence in the Balkans was not some spontaneous expression of tribal hatreds, but an attempt by Milosevic to control as much of the territory and resources of former Yugoslavia as possible.

He was able to unleash such brutality because, for years, he had been convincing the Serbian people that enemies besieged them. Each of Yugoslavia's constituent nations had, at some point, been accused of wanting to destroy the Serbs, with particular venom being reserved for the Muslims of Bosnia who were said to be stockpiling weapons for an Islamic revolution, in alliance with foreign mujahedin.

Likewise, in the build up to the invasion of Iraq, there were warnings of anthrax and botulinum stockpiles, and purchases of uranium for nuclear weapons. Saddam was also said to be in league with Bin Laden, providing bases for al Qaeda cadres. There were no weapons of mass destruction of course, any more than the hard-drinking Bosnians were planning an Islamic state, and, if anything, it could be said Saddam helped Bush in the so-called 'war on terror' by assassinating America's old enemy Abu Nidal in August 2002.

Since the original pretexts have been discredited, Bush and Blair have sought to justify their war by claiming to have liberated the Iraqi people from tyranny and preparing the way for democratic elections, which, according to Blair, will be a beacon of hope for all the peoples of the Middle East.

Whether the long-suffering Iraqis would describe things in quite the same way is open to question. As Misha Glenny says of the Chetniks claim to have liberated the city of Vukovar: "Anybody who believes that you can liberate a pile of useless ruins which you yourself have created needs remedial education in semantics."