It is fairly common to describe what Wikipedia calls the Yugoslav Wars (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yugoslav_wars) as de Balkan War(s) that broke out after Yugoslavia fell apart.
I read it as referring to those conflicts. I think that makes more sense, too, as the target audience wouldn't really know of those earlier wars (I knew, but not even for a monument thought of them when reading this)
OK, OK, I agree now that that's what he meant. But for me, "the Balkan wars" is standard terminology referring to those wars, which really did involve all of the Balkans, and I thought he was making some kind of a point about a century of history in Europe coming full circle - some people like to do that. And I still think that the article is panic-mongering badly-argued long-winded garbage.
+1 on this unfortunate terminological crash: "Balkan wars" to me means the stuff that happened between 1830 and 1913 as the Ottoman empire withdrew from eastern Europe; "Yugoslavian civil war" is what happened in the 1990s/00s.
(Oh, and the First Gulf War was 1980-88, the Second Gulf War was 1992-93, and the Iraq Invasion was the Third Gulf War. It's odd how wars get air-brushed out of the record if America wasn't involved ...)
Are you referring to the Iran-Iraq war? If so, that seems a strange name for it since it mostly had nothing to do with the Persian Gulf. Though admittedly neither did the other Iraq wars except that that's where the American ships attacked from.
I read it as referring to those conflicts. I think that makes more sense, too, as the target audience wouldn't really know of those earlier wars (I knew, but not even for a monument thought of them when reading this)