I see Andrew Sullivan has now elevated me from the pro-torture right to the pro-genocide right. Eat your heart out, Jonah and JPod! He’s based this on a quote from America Alone that a chap in The Calcutta Telegraph interpreted to mean that I supported Milosevic’s strategy of “culling” Muslims in Bosnia, and the usual hysterical lefties at The Huffington Post picked up on.

My book isn’t about what I want to happen but what I think will happen. Given Fascism, Communism and ethnic cleansing in the Balkans, it’s not hard to foresee that the neo-nationalist resurgence already under way in parts of Europe will at some point take a violent form. That’s pretty much a given. Indeed, Ralph Peters and I have already argued about this: the difference between us, as I explain here , is that I think any descent into neo-Fascism will be ineffectual and therefore merely a temporary blip in the remorseless transformation of the Continent.

To deduce from this that I would be pro-genocide if it were more likely to work is a bit of a stretch. I appreciate Andrew Sullivan’s need to make a living and I regret that, alas, there don’t seem to be as many takers for his “conservatism of doubt” as his publishers evidently thought. But if he really feels the need to embroil me in a piffling pseudo-scandal I’d appreciate it if next time he could just finger me as the father of Anna Nicole’s baby and leave it at that. I’ve no idea why my bosses at The Atlantic Monthly thought Andrew Sullivan was just what their website needed, but I find it hard to believe they lured the oldest established permanent floating corporate blogger away from Time Warner in order that the big new hotshot signing could obsess quite so much about the magazine’s comparatively obscure obituarist. Even if I am in my spare time New Hampshire’s only wannabe Hutu warlord.