So they finally caught Karadzic this morning. Only thirteen years too late. He, for those of you not up your Balkan history, was the floppy-haired thug and former psycho-analyst working under Milosovic who supervised the massacre of innocent Muslim men and teenage boys in a programme of ethnic cleansing, so called to avoid the tag of genocide which would have impelled NATO to take decisive action to prevent it from happening. What use are semantics when you’re being lined up alongside your father and grandfather about to be shot?

Reading about his capture made me realise something. Now that the war has been over these thirteen years, people seem a lot clearer as to who were the bad guys. When it was going on, Milosovic, Karadzic and even the brutish military commander Mladic, who is still being hidden up in the mountains by his former cohorts, were all treated with a degree of respect. They may have been the villains of the piece but they were never out-and-out demonised.

One had to negotiate with these monsters, so it was considered bad-form to bad-mouth them. I don’t remember the same approach being taken towards Hitler or Saddam Hussein, even though in the case of the latter we had happily done business with him for the first twenty-three years of his reign.

During the Balkan crisis, our own Doctor Death, MP David Owen, shuttled back and forth in an interminable round of push and shove where nothing much was achieved, a spade was rarely called a spade and if it was, neither NATO nor the UN had the balls to back it up.

In the meantime, a low-rent mobster such as Milosovic happily ran rings around the best diplomats Europe had to offer, knowing that without America’s support - Clinton at the time ridiculously embroiled in a petty farrago of his own making with intern Monica Lewinksy - NATO was both impotent and reduced to the immobile.

This fiasco of real-politik was brilliantly illuminated some years later in Peter Kominsky’s film ‘Warriors’, a savage indictment of the restrictions placed on the serving soldiers of UNPROFOR. I urge you to watch it.

Looking back at these events now, with the benefits of hindsight and clear of the so-called Fog of War, it seems utterly remarkable that villains such as Milosovic, Karadzic and Mladic were tolerated at all. One look at their wives should have been enough to know these were deeply disturbed men. Each spouse wore the look of a harridan lifted from a Tim Burton movie, their black, beehive hairdos set off by a mis-applied smear of garish red lipstick. These were women of your nightmares, not so much mothers of the nation as their ugly, weird relations.

Karadzic himself, a failed poet, in love with his own words, a vain egoist scarcely believing his own luck at finally being given an open mike, bestrode our screens nightly, his grey fringe continuously swept from his face as he gazed down from his gun-placements at the pock-marked ruins of buildings his men had been gleefully shelling, his henchman Mladic, forever impassive by his side, his demeanour that of a vicious night-club bouncer.

One thing united these three charlatans, they were all out-and-out bullies. Worse, all three of them had a deep understanding of the venality of human nature. Learnt from Hitler, a man Karadzic's own father fought against during the Second World War and whose methods of fear and control have been followed by every totalitarian leader since, they understood the idea that when the chips are down and you want to seize power, the best way to do it is to find someone the public can blame for all its ills.

This happened in Germany in the 1930’s and it happened again in Serbia in the 1990’s. After the Eastern Bloc fell, Yugoslavs had to find some group on whom to pin their economic woes - however illogical. What was bizarre was that unlike the Jews of the 30’s, who at least had a degree of social standing and were undeniably successful in various businesses, the Muslims of Bosnia had no such claim.

In no sense could it be suggested they were secretly turning the wheels of power. And less it should be thought that the Jews were doing the same back in Germany, let me state now, the success of a family trade should be celebrated rather than feared. There’s no reason on earth why Jews shouldn’t be allowed to pass their talents onto their sons and daughters just like everyone else. No conspiracy... merely expertise and knowledge.

The Muslims of Bosnia were simply used as a scapegoat. No logic. No economic justification. A bit of long-forgotten 400 year-old history dug up for the sake of it - the battle at Kosovo Polje - and that was it. Communities who had happily lived with each other for years, had worked together, had inter-married, were suddenly set against each other simply to foster the power-base of a small minority of deranged egomaniacs who, because of their own failings both socially and professionally, would stoop at nothing in order to claw their way up the social ladder.

And what did we do? We sent envoys, peace-keepers, an army of diplomats. We discussed, we negotiated, we hummed and we hawed. We tied ourselves in knots in hopeless attempts to come up with a ‘language’ which would satisfy all sides, while extricating us from the unholy quagmire of horror we had allowed a few psychopathic criminals to create.

How did it end? A good question. Did we “strike down upon thee with great vengeance and furious anger”? Did we heck. A three-week bombing campaign by NATO forces finally forced talks to be held in Dayton Ohio in November 1995 where an agreement was signed allowing Milosovic to remain in power while formally separating the territories of Bosnia Herzogovina from Serbia.

Milosovic was finally brought down by his own people having led them into the fourth of his ill-considered wars, this time in Kosovo. Once again he only capitulated when NATO used limited air strikes against strategic Serbian targets in the spring of 1999. It took another two years before he was finally arrested and sent to the International Criminal Court in The Hague, where Karadzic himself will be headed soon.

What strikes me looking back at this ignominious fiasco of foreign policy, is how little we seem to have learnt from our errors.

Currents events in Darfur seem as opaque as those taking place in the Balkans a decade ago. The Sudanese territory is split into three separate states, North, West and South. The Janjaweed, a violent Arab Militia backed by the President Omar al-Bashir are presently decimating the population of the South using spurious claims that they are housing rebel forces. Breaking it down, it becomes clear that it is essentially a North versus South battle, Arab Nomads backed by the Government attacking rural farmers.

While the chief prosecutor of the International Court in Hague, Luis Moreno-Ocampo, last week formally filed a request for the arrest of Bashir on genocide charges, there seems little appetite amongst the International community to implement his wishes.

China in particular still invests heavily in Sudan (for investment read arms sales) needing its oil for its own rapidly-growing infrastructure... hell, something has to power those Olympic floodlights after all. And as happened with Burma, China is one superpower with whom we clearly don’t want to pick a fight.

So until those farmers in Southern Sudan have something we feel is worth fighting for, they’re pretty much on their own.

Milosovic, like so many tyrants before him, sowed the seeds of his own destruction. He never knew when to quit.

In the end his own people had simply had enough. Nevertheless, as long as he wasn’t bothering us, we’d have happily put up with him. After all, for eleven long years, we did.

As for Karazdic, why capture him now? It seems Serbia realises its economic prosperity lies at the heart of the European Union. You want something? You better give us a little in return.

Funny how money talks.

Question is... do you think we could bribe the Taliban? There's a certain fellow whose whereabouts they must surely know. Doesn't every man have his price?