Ping!
Just because the Albanians were actually bad guys, doesn’t mean the Serbs were good guys. Rubio’s statement is still wrong however.
Don’t know the particulars, perhaps Marco doesn’t either.
He still kicks ass. I hope he is VEEP, and then President.
The best idea would have been to let the Serbs, Kosovans, Albanians fight it out amongst themselves, or let Europe deal with it. I can not see how it was in the USA’s interest to intervene there.
The history and tradition of the Balkans is so muddled, its impossible to say if in the end, the US achieved anything at all there. Maybe we merely delayed an even worse day of reckoning.
Washington Examiner
September 23, 2011
Rubio defending wrong side in Balkan conflict
As a Jewish conservative who vigorously defended Cuban-Americans during the Elian Gonzalez siege, I am sickened that Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., would smear another maligned people as he did in a Sept. 13 speech at the Jesse Helms Center where he said, “The American armed forces ... stopped Nazism and Communism and other evils such as Serbian ethnic cleansing.”
A year after our leaders lied to us in 1999 about the mythical “Operation Horseshoe” (the ethnic cleansing plan subsequently shown to have been a Croatian-assisted concoction by a resurgent Germany delivering payback to Serbs for World War II), it was the Miami Cubans’ turn to be depicted as wild extremists and “kidnappers” for merely expecting due process.
The fact that Elian’s father, Juan Gonzalez, wanted asylum for both himself and the boy came out in a belatedly revealed INS memo that was ordered destroyed by then-Commissioner Doris Meissner.
The Balkans are an example of where the American military was the opposite of “a force of good,” giving wings to a state ruled by fear by an elite that is above the law, and where prosecution witnesses either drop out — or drop dead.
Julia Gorin
Las Vegas
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COMMENTS:
Aleksandra Rebic Today (Sept. 26, 2011)
Excellent letter by Julia Gorin. Thank you for publishing it. Ms. Gorin has been consistently vigilant about the misinformation and disinformation campaign waged against the Serbs for two decades now. She is a true journalist.
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http://washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/letters-editor/2011/09/letters-editor-sept-23-2011
Rubio is another one of those soundbite guys, basically pandering to the “American Exceptionalism” crowd for quick applause by parroting the typical rhetorical bullshit without any substantial knowledge of the subject matter.
Sarah Palin made the same type of ridiculous statement when she tried to compare the emotional sensitivity of building of the Ground Zero mosque to that of Serbs building a Church in Srebrenica.
No excuse for ignorance.