You open your article about Bosnia’s fraught future with a joke that is now doing the rounds in this European Union’s protectorate: “nothing can succeed in Bosnia, not even a crisis” (“A Tearing Sound,” April 4, 2009). “Pessimist note that Yugoslavs used to tell a similar joke in the 1980s,” you add breezily. Well, the very same joke is now doing the rounds in much of ex-Yugoslavia, including Croatia, perhaps the luckiest bit of the defunct country after Slovenia. By extension, the future of the entire region is now in question. Fighting could resume not only in Bosnia, as you surmise, but in Kosovo and Macedonia, as well. That is one thing that often “succeeds” in the Western Balkans, even without a crisis.