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One lesson the West has clearly learned -- albeit belatedly -- is that many of the new nationalists are not the freedom-fighting variety of 19th century romance or of cold war fiction, but tribal gangsters epitomized by Milosevic and his Croatian opposite number, Franjo Tudjman. They can, and will, pop up anywhere in the world, in the lands emerging from the coma of communism as well as those caught in the mire of Third World poverty. It is a vital interest of the democracies to detect, contain and extinguish the fires before they explode into new, bigger and even deadlier Bosnias. If they can learn that lesson, then the suffering of Bosnia may not have been totally in vain, and the demons unleashed in the wake of the cold war may yet be exorcised.