I think I've finally figured out why there's so much trouble in the Balkans. You remember the Balkans, right? Ethnic cleansing, civil wars, Yugoslavia melting like the Wicked Witch of the West into a whole bunch of brand new tiny countries following Tito's death, Bill Clinton and Nato bombing the shit out of Bosnia and Herzegovina in 1995 and Yugoslavia in 1999 to convince them to stop slaughtering Muslims, Slobodan Milosevic winding up in the Hague as a war criminal where he dropped dead before they reached a verdict? That Balkans. All this stuff was a pretty big deal back in the '90's.

It seems the people who inhabit that part of the world don't get along all that well. And I don't mean cutting ahead of each other in line at the dry cleaners or giving each other wedgies not getting along, but real slay them in their beds with their entire family not getting along. Some serious shit going back the better part of a thousand years. What happened back in the mists of time isn't exactly clear but it involved wholesale slaughter and a few of the clowns who directed these attacks earning the nickname "The Great," that term of endearment reserved for the most bloodthirsty sons a bitches you'd never want know your address.

History's chock full of these jokers. Usually the joke is on the suckers who buy their Our National Honor is at Stake spiel and follow them into battle when the only thing that's really at stake is getting more land and money for the Great One. Usually these guys sort of fade into history like a bad case of hemorrhoids and pop up on the History Channel every so often on "Butchering Tyrants Week." Not so in the Balkans. These atrocities might as well have happened last week if you're a Serb, A Kosovar, an Albanian, a Bulgar, a Croat, a Romanian or a Macedonian.

A Macedonian, you say? The cats who followed Alexander the (what else?) Great all over the world conquering and slaughtering everything in their path in 330 B.C.? Yep, the same. They're still around but their glory days are millennia removed. They wound up with a landlocked portion of ex-Yugoslavia smaller than Massachusetts in that whole tawdry series of civil wars. And the Republic of Macedonia is not even all of what is traditionally called Macedonia, presumably the rest of it swallowed up by other Balkan States who are still pissed off that Alexander kicked their ancestors asses 2,300 years ago. At least so far. Let's see what next year's Rand-McNally Atlas looks like. Them Balkans are a balky lot, no doubt about it.

I think I may have uncovered the reason why there are so many wars in the region and why the hatreds go back so many centuries without ever getting resolved. I know a native of Albania who tells me that in that country when someone shakes their head up and down in agreement in really means no. When they shake it side to side that means yes! I couldn't believe it but she assures me that it's true, emphatically shaking her head no, that is, yes. Wow! How basic is that? It's like the Bizarro World way of responding but Superman's not on hand to figure it out. And she further informs me some Balkan nations do the reverse head shake like Albania and the some do it the regular way like the rest of us. No wonder they can't agree on a peace treaty or the borders of their countries or whether or not they still still hate or forgive each another!

I can picture it now, the delegations sitting down with all the foreign and domestic diplomats in top hats and tails, U.N. Delegates looking to get their picture taken like they had anything to do with it, the lawyers and official functionaries ringing the table where the assembled leaders are poised to sign the historic documents putting an end to centuries of enmity and bloodshed when Bingo, the head shaking begins and they are really agreeing with each other but to both sides it looks like they're changing their minds and saying no and everybody stalks out mad as hell, whipping out their cell phones and ordering air strikes and massive military mobilizations.

And it's got to be especially galling when the guy shaking his head "no" is smiling as he does it. This means War, sir! I wonder if the American diplomats in attendance at these talks back in the 90's knew about the reverse head shake bit. Knowing our inept diplomats, they didn't. Or maybe like me they just couldn't believe it. America has never been noted for its skill at international diplomacy. I suppose the same can be said of the various Balkan nations. I mean, they've had like a thousand years to figure out that the other guy does a reverse head shake. We only got in the game in the 1990's.

Which make me wonder what else our diplomats are not catching. In Iraq, there's 3 different tribes, or sects or identical triplets that hate each other, whatever. You'd think it would be the Americans they hate, what with us invading their country for no reason, killing a million people, pulverizing their infrastructure and dismantling their only sources of national unity, their military and their government. Well, of course they do hate us but not nearly as much as they hate each other.

There's Sunnis, Kurds and Shiites over there and if you paid me my weight in crude oil I couldn't tell one from the next or the next. It's sort of like that Israeli-Palestinian deal. At least over there one side wears checked tablecloths on their heads and throw rocks and the other side wears skull caps and shoots rubber bullets. It's a strange and beautiful relationship neither side can let go of but at least you can tell the players without a scorecard. In Iraq it's not so easy to tell who's who until your Humvee gets bombed and even then you have no idea if the guy who blew you up is a Sunni, a Shiite or a Kurd. Not that it matters all that much to you when you're trying to exit a flaming vehicle with your left foot stuffed in your coat pocket hoping the surgeons can reattach it. American officials are always trying to get the three sides to sit down and work out their differences even though they themselves can't figure out for the life of them what they could possibly be. Like I said, American diplomats aren't the sharpest pencils in the schoolbag.

For all we know those differences could stem from something as basic and silly as that whole reverse head shaking thing in the Balkans. Maybe there's other body language and physical signals we thought were universal but are not. Maybe when a Shiite draws a finger across his throat it's not the universal promise to cut your throat that we think it is, but means instead "Nice necklace, emir!" And maybe when a Sunni raises his middle finger to a Kurd he means "You're # 1, big guy!", but the Kurd doesn't know that and goes off to form a militia. And maybe all those roadside bombs are really schoolboy pranks by the frat boys from the local Madrasah that got out of hand. Perhaps the Iraqis will stop bombing their own open-air markets and police stations if we just say pretty please with curry on top. We just don't know.

So maybe it's time for the State Department to hire back all those Arabic speakers they fired because they were gay and try to figure this stuff out. Hell, don't they know that since we toppled the Taliban in Afghanistan that Afghani men are flaunting their teenage boyfriends again? Do they think Iraqis are allergic to gay interpreters? Or maybe they think that Iraqis are like paunchy Republicans who can be as gay as they like as long as they lie about it and publicly condemn homosexuality. Like our new Afghani allies, Iraqis just might welcome the gay Arabic interpreters and be a lot more cooperative and explain their culture patiently to our dim bulb ambassadors. God knows their nation needs all the help it can get redecorating their country now that we've blown holes in so many buildings and absolutely ruined the drapes and furniture in a lot of people's homes.

So ambassadors, get busy and find out if we're missing something as basic and obvious as the reverse head shake. For all we know, all those fatwahs issued on each other just might be some version of getting punked rather than a real death sentence. "Just Keeding, Akbar! Gotcha!" And maybe those Arabic speakers will patiently explain to our diplomats that Iraqis are not like Americans, because well, they're not Americans, you nitwit, they're Iraqis! And don't leave it to me to figure this stuff out, I was 10 years too late to solve the Kosovo wars with the reverse head shake revelation.

It's already almost 6 years onto the Iraq war and it's obvious that outside of defeating their smaller and weaker army we don't have a clue about dealing with the people who live in a nation we attacked. Aren't you supposed to bone up on the behavior of a people when you go to war against them? Even football teams do that, study films of their upcoming opponents and formulate their game plan accordingly. Being that we broke our own law, international law and every law of decency you can think of by invading and destroying Iraq for no reason but to intimidate the oil producers, you'd think at the very least our government could be as prepared as a damned football team for dealing with the people who live in Iraq and will be there long after we've gone home and gotten on with the business of trying to excuse our bad behavior by forgetting all about them and forgiving ourselves. You think? It just makes me shake my head sadly (side to side, by the way, in the regular, not the Albanian way).