Ratko Mladić, the Serbian general convicted of genocide for orchestrating the 1995 Srebrenica massacre that killed at least 8,000 Bosnian Muslims, died Thursday in a UN prison hospital in The Hague — and the establishment press is once again wall-to-wall on a foreign conflict that cost American taxpayers billions and isn't our war to fight.

Mladić, 84, had been serving a life sentence handed down in 2017 after his capture in Serbia ended 16 years on the run. The International Residual Mechanism for Criminal Tribunals confirmed his death and said Judge Graciela Gatti Santana ordered a full inquiry into the circumstances. His son, Darko, had spoken earlier about his father's declining health after a series of strokes, according to both The Guardian and Al Jazeera.

The man was a monster. Both outlets recount the same core facts: Mladić commanded his troops to "scorch the brains" of Bosnian Muslims and boasted of being a "Serbian god." He oversaw the siege of Sarajevo, which killed 10,000 people. At Srebrenica, after Dutch UN peacekeepers withdrew, his forces rounded up thousands of men and boys, killed them, and bulldozed the bodies into mass graves — some later dug up and relocated to hide the evidence. The Guardian adds the chilling detail that Mladić had the siege filmed, proclaiming "we give this town to the Serb people as a gift" and claiming revenge against Muslim Turks who once held the area under the Ottoman empire. The next day, his men were filmed handing sweets to children while the slaughter was underway.

Defiant to the end, Mladić told the tribunal in 2014: "I do not recognise this court." At his sentencing, he shouted: "This is all lies, you are all liars!"

The UN tribunal found Mladić part of a criminal conspiracy with late Serbian President Slobodan Milošević and Bosnian Serb political leader Radovan Karadžić to ethnically cleanse non-Serbs from Bosnian land for a Greater Serbia. Former UN rights chief Zeid Ra'ad al-Hussein called him "the epitome of evil."

Al Jazeera notes what The Guardian buries: despite his crimes, "many Serbs continue to revere" Mladić as a protector. That matters, because it tells you the tribal hatreds that fueled this war haven't gone anywhere — and no amount of American intervention or international tribunals will fix that.

Here's what the press won't ask: how much did the U.S. spend on NATO operations, UN tribunals, and nation-building in the Balkans? What did ordinary Americans get for it? While the establishment swoons over international justice, American communities bury their own dead from violence every single day with a fraction of the coverage. The press decides whose suffering matters, and it's never ours.

Mladić is dead. The mass graves are still there. And the foreign policy class will use both to justify the next intervention you'll pay for.