Down Doobie Doo Down Down, Comma Comma ...

Tea: Chai

Music: Bobby Darin, "Beyond the Sea"

Time: Night.

Oh, look, another trouble spot is on the front burner again.

I'm no foreign policy wonk, so I'm not going to get into whether the U.S. was right in recognizing Kosovo's declaration of independence. (Part of me figures we have no choice, given that most Kosovars are ethnic Albanians and Albania happens to be one of the rare Muslim countries that Really Likes Us. It also probably didn't hurt that Kosovo has declared itself a secular Muslim state, which is the only kind we'd back -- especially against a Christian-majority country (Serbia is largely Orthodox.)

Heck, I might get international recognition from Washington if I declared my backyard a secular Muslim state. Then again, I like bacon and the occasional beer, so that won't work.

Russia and China, both of which have restive Muslim minority populations (especially Chechnya, which continues to be a pain in the Kalashnikovs for Moscow), consider Kosovo's independence a Very Bad Thing, of course. Since both of them have all sorts of UN clout, don't rush out to buy new globes just yet.

I know the last half of the last century saw several high-profile unifications (Germany, Vietnam and ... um ... oh, yeah. Yemen), and there are likely a few more to come (Korea, most likely, and perhaps even Ireland and China). But compared to all of the breakups in my lifetime, the marriages stand out as the exception.

The split between East Pakistan (now Bangladesh) and West Pakistan (which has dropped its married name and now goes by "Pakistan" made sense. They're a gazillion miles apart. All the other splits have been contiguous -- and with few exceptions, contentious.

The Czechs and Slovaks woke up one day, realized they'd be happier apart, shook hands and vowed to keep in touch. No worries there.

Even Serbia and Montenegro managed to keep things civil when they split up, ending the last vestiges of the old Yugoslavia, and the only people really hacked off about Macedonia becoming independent were the Greeks, who shouldn't have had a say in the matter anyway.

Not all the cranky breakups were bloody, to be fair.

The Baltic States? They never wanted to be in the Soviet Union anyway. They gave Moscow the collective bird, looked west and haven't looked back. Ukraine and Georgia make Russia grumpy on a regular basis these days (although Belarus clearly misses the Good Old Days), but it hasn't progressed to the point of shooting at each other. Moldova has its own separatists to contend with (as does Georgia), Armenia and Azerbaijan finally get to dislike each other again as a matter of Official Foreign Policy. The various -stans, meanwhile, are content to keep their fights inside their national borders.

Then we come to the nasty dissolutions: Slovenia (which got off with a ten-day war). Croatia. Bosnia-Herzegovina. East Timor. Eritrea. Lots of bad blood there, a good deal of it on the ground.

No matter which way things turn out with Kosovo, I'm betting there will be plenty of new national flags flying in New York and Geneva before another dozen years are up. Can the U.K. hold together? Spain? Canada?

It's going to be interesting. Then again, that's a Chinese curse, isn't it?

"May you live in interesting times."

That we do.