Milosevic and his forces committed ethnic cleansing, this is true. But the KLA also committed ethnic cleansing and it constitutes the bulk of Kosovo's new government. The Kosovar Albanians don't want to remain part of Kosovo, this is also true. But no doubt the Kosovar Serbs and Montegrins would like to remain part of Serbia, and had their ranks not been diminished by the KLA perhaps their voices would be louder. Are your two reasons still compelling enough when contrasting facts are considered?

Moreover, have you considered that punishing the Serbs by honoring Kosovo's secession defeats one of the main postwar goals of the US/NATO, that of liberalizing Serbia proper? That it overturns the trend towards reconciliation after human rights abuses (e.g. South Africa) by basically saying to the Serbs "you are all guilty and incapable of change"? And have you also considered that Kosovar independence may be a violation of international law since UN Res 1244 allows for Kosovar autonomy and protection but not secession?

@Duoist: As for Kosovo being 92% Albanian, it was around 15% Serb and Montenegrin before the Albanians themselves cleansed their neighbors. And it was majority Serb in the beginning of the 20th century until Hitler cleansed the Serbs and encouraged more Albanians to settle there. Are we going to honor all such demographic shifts with statehood? Because the American Southwest might be looking pretty good to Mexicans in the next few decades.

The Declaration lays out the reasons why our founding fathers declared independence and thus defined a set of conditions under which they deemed it proper to do so. The Declaration begins with an assertion that the fundamental rights of man are not derived from any legal system, but come from the Creator - they are inherint human rights. So an assertion of independence is a natural right under a particular set of circumstances. There is no need to make appeal to any legal regime to find a right to assert soverignity.

The Kosovars seem to have as compelling a set of reasons for independence as one can imagine, and a far stronger case than the American colonies had. An overwhelming majority of popular support, compared to the approximate 1/3 support for our Revolution, and a recent history of brutal oppression verging on genocide, as opposed to the imposition of a few higher taxes.

The Serb claims to the land seem to be based on factors that are at odds with basic American values, so I don't see any reason we should be sympathetic to those claims. We believe, as was written in our Declaration, that the legitimacy of any government derives from the consent of the governed. This is not only an American principle, it also is common sense, in that an unconsenting population will always been in potential revolt and can only be controlled by force. The question of who owned the land at some point in the past is simply not a relevant criterion for any beleiver in democracy.

Granted that the problem remains of how to define the minimal units of legitimate soverignity. Perhaps it does come down to knowing it when we see it, but some of the obvious things we look for are levels of popular support, the nature of the existing regime, the manner in which the restive population has been governed by the reigning power, and the fundamental cultural similarity or difference between the rebel areas and the rulers. Kosovo does not seem like a very difficult case under these standards.

It's been Serbian as far back as 1190.

Kosovo has never been Serbia's

?

The rub is that the "Albanians" laid claim to Serb land. If these "Albanians" simply broke off a chunk of Albainianland there wouldn't be such a rub. They didn't, they took Serb land. This will be another area of never ending fighting.

In the particular case of Kosovo, I believe this is a case of Kosovar opportunists avoiding good faith negotations with Serbia and seizing the day while under the protection of NATO, not a particularly good analogy to our own War of Independence.