More historical inaccuracy from Professor Ferguson

Professor Niall Ferguson, the tireless advocate of western imperialism, is on vintage form in his column in today's Sunday Telegraph. Drooling over Tony Blair's early foreign policy 'success', he writes:

Short, sharp interventions in civil conflicts had spectacularly positive results. Serbia went from ethnic cleansing to elections.

Really, Professor? Serbia (or more accurately Yugoslavia, as the country was officially called until 2003) held regular free and fair elections in the 1990s, the only trouble was that from a western perspective, the 'wrong' side i.e. Slobodan Milosevic's unreconstructed Socialist Party kept winning.

If you read Ferguson's column every week, I'm sure you will come to the same conclusion as I have: being a neo-con means never having to worry about letting facts getting in the way of the argument.

UPDATE: For a more accurate account of Blair's 'success' in Kosovo, here's a historian who does know what he's talking about.