Has anyone thought about the peculiar logic
behind NATO's "peace
mission" in Kosovo? They dragged the warring parties to some
two-bit pastry shop called Rambouillet, held a gun to their heads,
and said, "If you don't sign our peace deal and allow us
to protect ethnic group #1, then we're going to bomb and kill
ethnic group #2!" After arm-twisting the Albanians into signing
a deal that they didn't believe in, we carried out our threat.
We bombed the Serbs on behalf of the Albanians, assuming, like
Dr. Evil, that everything would go to plan. No contingency planning
at all. For example, no plan on how to counter the obvious and
natural reaction of the Serbs to take all of their Tomahawk-inspired
fury out on a totally defenseless Kosovar population. NATO's reply?
"They were going to do it anyway." In fact, CIA leaks
show that Clinton was warned that bombing could spark mass ethnic
cleansing.
It wouldn't have seemed possible a few months ago, but this war has given Russia the opportunity to seize the moral high ground on the world stage. When the Serbs refused to give in, the West increased the ferocity of the air attacks, killing over 1,000 civilians thus far. In other words, we're doing what the Russians did in Chechnya, but whereas the West kept conspicuously quiet about the Russian mass slaughter, the Russian government and people have been shocked and vocally outraged by NATO's "barbaric aggression".
Trying to bring the Serbs to heel by making them suffer won't work; these people have too much practice at suffering. After their army was slaughtered by the Turks at the Battle of Kosovo Field in 1389, things started getting a little bit rough for the Serbs. Though many Serb uprisings were brutally suppressed, the Serbs slowly drove the Turks out, eventually "liberating" Kosovo in a series of blood-drenched battles. In 1914, the Serbs were overrun by the Central Powers.The Serbs lost one-fourth of their population during the war; two-thirds of its male population between the ages of 15 and 55 perished. World War Two was even worse. After being overrun by a Nazi blitzkrieg, the Serbs found themselves at the mercy of the Nazis' Croat puppet regime, the Ustashe, who killed over a million people in death camps so horrible they repelled even the SS. Meanwhile, the Serbs somehow managed to pin down eight divisions of Nazi infantry, the Italians, a Bosnian Muslim SS Division-and wage a bitter civil war against fellow Serbs. In all, one-fourth of the Serb population died during WW II. Toss in a respectable number of dead Serbs since the wars in Croatia and Bosnia started earlier this decade, and you get the idea: bombing will not scare these people.
Why do American troops have to go in at all? Why should kids from Ohio and New Mexico have to die in Kosovo? Kosovo is part of Europe, and every one of the big Western European countries has a huge, expensive army.
Even the Secretary of State isn't sure what we're doing in Yugoslavia. Madeleine Albright said that NATO just wanted to "Send Milosevic a message". When a pool reporter pointed out that she had earlier said that the NATO goal was to STOP Milosevic, she hesitated and said, "That, too."
The Serbs were behaving with relative restraint in Kosovo (by Balkan standards) until we started bombing Serbia. Then they decided they had nothing to lose, and started driving Albanians out in earnest. Wasn't this what we were trying to prevent?
After the Gulf War, the US had everybody believing in air power again. The bombing of Serbia is going to destroy that belief. The USAF trains in Nevada, and the less a landscape resembles Nevada, the less effective American air power. Iraq looks just like Nevada; Kosovo looks more like Vietnam.
These endless comparisons of thugs like Milosevic to Adolf Hitler insult the public's intelligence and cheapen the special, awful legacy of WWII. Before America started calling Milosevic a new Hitler, it used the same tactic to demonize everyone from Saddam Hussein to Manuel Noriega to Osama bin Laden to the Ayatollah Khomeini to Fidel Castro. Gore Vidal put it this way: "The CIA's demonizing process is fascinating, swift, unvarying. Each demon admires Hitler. Keeps a copy of Mein Kampf beside his bed." Hitler killed six million Jews; he made lampshades out of little children; he tried to take over the entire world. Milosevic is a monster, but he's not close to a record like that. Comparing Milosevic to Hitler proves that the U.S. government no longer trusts its citizens to make real moral distinctions.
In 1941, the Nazi puppet state of Croatia wanted to solve the Serb Question once and for all... not by mass expulsions, but by extermination. Out of 6.3 million people in the new Croat state, there were 1.9 million Serbs. Official documents show that the Ustashe government planned to exterminate or convert every one of them. Within weeks after the Nazi takeover, Croats set to massacring Serbs in a variety of ways, including a documented favorite trick: throwing Serb mothers with their children off cliffs, by the hundreds. By mid-1941, even the Germans started complaining. Here is a quote from an SS report: "The Ustashe units have carried out their atrocities not only against male Orthodox of military age, but in particular in the most bestial fashion against unarmed old men, women and children..." The Croats set up several concentration camps, including the infamous Jasenovac death camp, which is to Serbs what Auschwitz is to Jews. This camp is notorious not just because hundreds of thousands of Serbs, Jews and Gypsies were killed there (Serbs claim a million Serbs were killed at Jasenovac), but because of the way they were killed: butchered with knives, like pigs. In all, the Serbs are said to have lost some one million people just to Croat death camps and massacres. If it is unthinkable that the Bundeswehr could be called in to bomb Tel Aviv in order to force the Jews to sign a peace agreement with the Palestinians, then why can we order German bombers to attack Belgrade with a clear conscience?
Serbs are now comparing NATO to the Nazis. Here's why. The Nazi invasion of Yugoslavia in April, 1941, began with the relentless bombardment of Belgrade, flattening most of the city before a ground invasion by troops from Germany, Italy, Hungary and Bulgaria. Three of those four are now NATO members. Modern German bombers, ominously sporting iron cross Luftwaffe markings, are targeting Serb cities. And now, once again, Germans, Italians and Hungarians are preparing to invade.
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