I need to sit down and work out Kosovo et al ... ever since I discovered on ET that (unsurprisingly) the mainstream media narrative was a fairytale I have failed to adequately grasp even the basics of the situation in that area.

I suspect I'm not alone here: I very much doubt that almost all the members of the governments involved don't understand what they're doing. There will be a small number of civil servants who think they do, but they'll mostly be operating on biases and sympathies.

Sometimes the system is just fucked.