The death of longtime US diplomat Richard Holbrooke December 13 has provoked an outpouring of praise from official spokesmen and apologists for American imperialism, and particularly from those who, like Holbrooke himself, came to prominence as advocates of US military intervention in the Yugoslav civil war of the 1990s.

In contrast to Vietnam, where Holbrooke first entered the service of American militarism, and the ongoing wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the US intervention in Bosnia in 1995 and then in Kosovo in 1999 were hailed by the representatives of American liberalism as wars that demonstrated the role of the United States as a "force for good."

Last Wednesday, in the Washington Post, Strobe Talbott, the deputy secretary of state in the Clinton administration, hailed Holbrooke's legacy, declaring that he came to "epitomize the very best of what a single American can do to improve a dangerous world."