February 14
When Saddam Hussein forcibly annexed Iraq's "19th province" in 1990 - part of the former Ottoman province of Basra that had evolved under British guidance into the state of Kuwait - the world cried foul. Western countries noisily insisted that the sovereign integrity of the emirate's territory and borders was guaranteed by the UN charter.
Egged on by Margaret Thatcher, the then US president, George Bush Snr, drew his famous "line in the sand", setting in train the first Gulf war. The consequences are still being played out in Iraq today.
Less than 18 years later, these same self-appointed guardians of the international order are on the brink of turning their own argument on its head - by underwriting Kosovo's forcible secession from Serbia.
Unless something unforeseen transpires in the next 72 hours, the US, Britain and most of the EU will throw their collective weight behind the dismemberment of another smallish sovereign state.
Ironically given the Soviet legacy, it has been mostly left to Russia to protest this apparently blatant violation of the UN's territorial principle and international law. The Russian foreign minister Sergei Lavrov said:
"Many of them [the western countries] do not understand the risks and dangers. They do not understand it would inevitably result in a chain reaction in many parts of the world. It would undermine the basics of security in Europe. It would undermine the basics of the United Nations charter."
All the same, Kosovo's unilateral declaration of independence from an outraged and spluttering Serbia is finally expected on Sunday.
It marks a moment of great peril for Europe, for the EU states are not passive spectators. Within hours of the declaration of independence, foreign ministers meeting in Brussels will order the deployment in Kosovo of up to 2,200 police officers, judges and administrators. European troops already make up the bulk of the peacekeeping force there.
As the UN bows out, Kosovo will effectively become an EU protectorate, under its costly, possibly indefinite supervision. Whether the EU countries, divided among themselves, endemically infirm of purpose, and facing many other demands on military and nation-building resources (such as Bosnia, Chad, Lebanon and Afghanistan) are equal to this task is open to question.
Despite the boldly proclaimed certainties of the moment, Kosovo is Europe's "great leap in the dark". It is the extreme expression of Blair-school interventionism.
And again echoing Thomas Hobbes, a keen student of chaos, sceptics suggest the independent existence of Kosovo, a land with few people, fewer natural resources, unbridged ethnic divisions and little visible means of support, will prove to be "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short".
Olli Rehn, the EU enlargement commissioner, typifies the "big picture" view in Brussels that Kosovo's separation is desirable, necessary and inevitable.
"People in the Balkans face a stark choice this year: their region could either finally resolve its outstanding problems from the wars of the 1990s [such as Kosovo] or fall back into instability and extremes of nationalism," he declared last month.
But Serb politicians warn that Europe's desire to set the ghosts of the 1990s to rest is blinding it to the immediate and longer-term dangers of an enforced Kosovo settlement.
In the first instance, the Serbian prime minister, Vojislav Kostunica, is promising to reject independence as the "illegal act of terrorists ... We shall not allow such a creation to exist for a minute."
On the ground, around Mitrovica in the ethnic Serb-dominated northern portion of Kosovo, independence is likely to be greeted, or preceded, by the creation of a new, rejectionist local assembly, a campaign of civil disobedience, and possible violent resistance.
The strong likelihood is that within a day of its birth, northern Kosovo will be de facto partitioned. That is why Kostunica is urging all Serbs not to abandon their homes and to hold their ground.
Reports suggest Belgrade may urge all the province's 120,000 ethnic Serbs to withdraw from the Kosovo police force, end cooperation in other bi-communal institutions and endorse "parallel structures".
Serbia also has the power to curtail or cut telephone, internet and electricity services in Kosovo - and is threatening unspecified retaliation against countries that recognise Kosovan independence.
That may all be fixable in the months ahead. But in the longer term, the impact of Kosovo's internationally approved secession on internally divided states such as Georgia, Bosnia, Moldova and Cyprus, and even Spain or Britain, is incalculable.
So, too, are the consequences of the west's bypassing of the UN (where Russia will block Kosovo's recognition) - and the extent and severity of the entrenched security and economic challenges confronting the EU.
This is the daunting prospect that Russia's deputy prime minister, Sergei Ivanov, has likened to the "opening of Pandora's box".
It is what the Serbian labour minister, Rasim Ljajic, more grimly calls "a prelude to chaos".
