A country in flames, religious and ethnic violence, thirty dead so far, well-meaning peacekeepers seemingly powerless to deal with a cauldron of ancient hatreds, and warnings of a conflagration that could suck in surrounding countries. Sounds like the familiar litany about Iraq? Nope: this is Kosovo. As the Independent reported today:

'Albanian rioters were also attacking Finnish peace-keepers patrolling the small Serbian enclave, hurling stones and Molotov cocktails at the men they until recently thought of as their protectors.'

Nor was this a localised, spontaneous outburst:

'The grim scene in Obilic was a portrait in miniature of the violence that has racked Kosovo for two days, as Albanians turned simultaneously on several Serb enclaves, in what may have started as a spontaneous protest but which has assumed the hallmarks of an organised campaign. As the extra S-For troops were rushed from Bosnia to beef up Kosovo's visibly disorientated 17,000 peace-keepers, there were signs that their arrival might calm the fury of the Albanian gangs. The lawlessness engulfing Kosovo has given an opportunity for shadowy extremists to renew the score-settling that has plagued the territory for centuries. What might have started off as an isolated burst of anger in Mitrovica over the still unexplained drowning of two Albanian children now appears to be something more planned. "We have had similar attacks to these in Kosovo before," said a UN spokesman, Derek Chappell. "But the fact that these attacks took place at the same time all over Kosovo does make me think they were orchestrated by the same extreme groups." Lt-Colonel James Moran, a K-For spokesman, was more explicit. "There was a lot more organisation today than we saw yesterday," he said. "People had organised buses to take protesters to different areas. We turned several around." Whoever was behind that agenda has certainly succeeded in nullifying the UN's attempts to build bridges between Serbs and Albanians over the past four years.'

Did anyone say, ahem, 'quagmire'? Have we heard loud laments that the return to violence in Kosovo just shows how wrong it is to interfere with someone else's quarrel? Has the Today programme been hectoring us that this is what you can expect when you go to war without a UN resolution? Have the anti-war-on-Iraq obsessed media been saying we told you so, and calling for the PM's head on a plate for taking us into Kosovo in the first place?

Au contraire. To the Independent, Kosovo has been 'a model of nation building' and 'we cannot now allow it to disintegrate'. The Guardian leader avoids expressing a view at all, contenting itself with describing the situation with brutal starkness:

'Five years on, the United Nations Interim Administration Mission in Kosovo (Unmik) is no nearer than ever to handing over control to Kosovo's self governing institutions. It prefers to put the issue of "democratic standards" before the quagmire of final status talks, but as Unmik stalls, the frustrations of the Albanians build up. Everything is taking too long. The country is still technically part of the Serbia and Montenegro union, and the Albanians want independence now. The more Serb houses are torched, the less likely they are to get it. The Albanians, demographically the youngest and fastest-growing community in Europe, have no tradition of self-rule. Politically, though, they are biting the hand that feeds them. Only one thing can happen to the final status talks scheduled to start in 2006 - that they will be further put off. The image of Nato's peacekeeping force, K-For, has changed too, from liberator to colonial police force. At the last weapons amnesty, only 900 of an expected crop of 150,000 firearms were handed in. Trust is breaking down.'

In other words, Kosovo is an appalling mess, in which after five years of UN peacekeeping progress seems dismayingly illusory. Yet in the one year since the war in Iraq, there has been an unceasing campaign of harrassment -- from the same people who so passionately supported war in the Balkans -- directed at the occupiers in Iraq on the grounds that everything is taking too long, there is no tradition of self-rule and the liberators are colonialists.

Obviously the two situations are very different. But the main difference is that the liberators in Iraq were the US, and in Kosovo the UN. The UN's mess is therefore to be glossed over -- indeed, until the violence erupted this week, almost totally ignored -- simply because, as George Orwell might have said, UN good, US bad. Oh -- and the war in Iraq was fought out of self interest, to protect ourselves from future attack or threat. That, of course, made it unforgiveabale.