These celebrity revivals are sooooo exhausting.

First we have the long-awaited return to the stage of Joker Karadzic, although without his funny costume and disguise he was really not that scary.

And with him returns Batman Holbrooke, the distinguished former American diplomat whose considerable ego and ruthlessness helped bring peace to the Balkans.

Holbrooke grumbles that Karadzic was not arrested once the Bosnian war was over:

In an interview on CNN aired after the court hearing, Mr Holbrooke said: "I negotiated a very tough deal. He had to step down immediately from both his posts as president of the Serb part of Bosnia and as head of his party. And he did so.

"But when he disappeared, he put out a piece of disinformation that I had cut a deal with him – if he disappeared we wouldn’t pursue him. That was a completely false statement."

Mr Holbrooke also said it was a grave mistake that Karadzic was not arrested after Nato forces deployed to Bosnia following the peace agreement.

"He should have been arrested. His green Mercedes was parked in its parking spot outside his office for six months after (the peace deal) each day. The Nato commander at the time refused to arrest him even though he had the authority to do so. It was a terrible mistake."

Agreed. A terrible and expensive mistake.

But by whom exactly?

The commander of the NATO Rapid Reaction Force in Bosnia in early 1996 was General Mike Walker (British).

Further up the NATO chain were two Americans, Admiral Leighton Smith as commander of IFOR and at the top of the NATO command chain General George Joulwan, Supreme Allied Commander Europe (SACEUR).

Holbrooke in another interview blames Admiral Smith by name:

… Karadzic should have been captured in the first few months after [the signing of the] Dayton [Peace Accords], in early 1996. Even though everybody knew where he was, he was not brought to justice because the NATO commander, Adm. Leighton Smith, failed to exercise his authority. Smith said it was not a mission of his command, which was a terrible thing to do. Had Karadzic been arrested back then, the history of the Balkans would have been much easier during the last 13 years …

Weedy NATO fails again!

Really?

The point of course is that the arrest of Karadzic required a top-level political decision, since the risks of the Dayton deal breaking up if it all went wrong had to be factored in.

Thus:

… the military warned of casualties and Serb retaliation if an operation to arrest him took place. They said they would carry it out only if ordered to do so directly by the President; thus if anything went wrong the blame would fall on the civilians who had insisted on the operation, especially on the President himself.

This was a heavy burden to lay on any President, particularly during an election year, and it was hardly surprising that no action was taken to mount, or even plan, an operation against Karadzic in 1996 or 1997 (sic).

A ‘heavy burden’?

Or is taking a tough strategic decision exactly what a President is paid to do?

Who wrote that politically disobliging passage anyway? No fan of the then US President Clinton, obviously!

The Riddler?