Ping!
Assistant Secretary of State for European and Canadian Affairs Richard Holbrooke persuades the State Department to license Military Professional Resources Inc. (MPRI), a private military contractor, to provide training to the Croatian army. [Ripley, 1999, pp. 81-82, 90; Scotsman, 3/2/2001] According to MPRI information officer Joseph Allred, the firm exists so that “the US can have influence as part of its national strategy on other nations without employing its own army.” [New American, 5/10/1999; Serbian National Federation, 8/1999]
Nacional says that Clinton engaged US military to attack Serbs:
“In addition to electronically destroying the Serbian communications, the US military also acted militarily against the Serbian positions, when it fired on the anti-aircraft battery near Knin from American combat planes that flew over the battle area.”
Nacional says that the entire ethnic cleansing of Serbs was monitored live in Pentagon. From Nacional:
“This time, the entire Operation was transmitted in real time via satellite to the Pentagon, where these images remain archived today.”
The news that over quarter of million Serbs have been expelled and hundreds of thousands murdered has been, says Nacional, a news item that “was released only once, on the 6 o’clock news. Afterwards, the US sharply condemned this, and that news was never repeated.”
Nacional says that “US was thrilled with the how fast and clean the operation was conducted”.
But...but...according to the msm only Srbs were the bad guys, Croats and muslims were pure as the driven snow.
This was in fact one of the most successful acts of covert US policy since WWII. One can speak of “private” military contractors, but in reality this was an operation conducted entirely by the US government.
The arming and training of Croat forces changed the strategic balance of the Croat/Bosnian war and, pretty much, ended it. The current state of peace and relative prosperity for, at least, the bulk of Croatia and Bosnia is a direct result.
Until that time the Serbs were militarily superior due to the open support of the Bosnian/Croat Serbs by the Serbian state. After this there was no choice for the Serbs but to negotiate realistic terms.
“which killed or displaced more than 200,000 Serbs in 1995, in the largest European land offensive since World War II, the Genocide Victims of Krajina say in Chicago Federal Court”
Idiotic statement by blind nationalists. Serbia killed 10,000 Kosovo Albanians and displaced close to one million so there you have it, a new post WWII record. And I’m willing to bet that more than 200,000 Bosniaks and Croats were ‘displaced’ by Serbs.
Serbs got burned badly, first they threw out all the Croats from Krajina (Serbs were settlers there) and then refused the Z4 plan, only to lose everything in a brilliantly planned move by USA. It taught Serbs a valuable lesson, one that was continued in Kosovo: Stop causing trouble or you will cease to exist as a country.
With what I’ve read, the Serbs left days before the liberation of Croatia began.
You shouldn't start a war, execute it in the most brutal of ways, destabilize a region bringing in outside attention and lose. Like the innocent Germans that died in WWII, the innocent Iraqi's that died in Iraq, innocent Libyans, Iranians, Panamanians in wars past...... those are the consequences of begging for a beat down when ignoring warning after warning and pushing a very “reluctant, measured and reserved” West/NATO to take action. Those that bring these dead to the forefront are like the Green Helmet Guy (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salam_Daher) and their arguments are no arguments at all, they are appeals to emotions. Those nations that politically were the instruments for this war in Europe are by a far not belligerents looking for a fight. Frankly, the Germans (One of the political forces behind intervention) are nearly pacifist and appeasing trying to avoid any sort of military confrontation anywhere. But when you destabilize a region and send 320,000 refugees to Germany alone, even they begin to push for military action on the belligerents in the region that started the war, has all to benefit from it and no intentions of stopping. Hell, you had the Austrians questioning their pseudo neutrality in the 90s and if they should have taken action! At least the Germans learned their lesson from WWII, but the Serbs are still dreaming, arguing, denying........... They don't even have a collective concept of what they did and how wrong it was.
There are only two things that were really wrong with the intervention in the Balkans that we should reconsider for the future:
1. The US ended up doing the dirty work, flipping the majority of the bill, and it was a EUROPEAN problem. We paid the price more than ANYONE else in a war that others stood to loose and benefit from. The Turks had volunteers filtering into the region, as did the Chechen's. You had the Russians backing the Serbs. The problem was spreading, you had refugees flooding Europe, the war was spilling over............ And the US ended up taking the casualties because it was us that were essentially running the air war, sending in ground troops into the real hot spots and in some cases getting tangled up in skirmishes.
2. We executed this war on good faith as part of a NATO alliance on the request of two European nations that politically pushed hard for this intervention calling it a security crisis. Seven years later one of those nations did all they could to back out of any commitment and backpedaled as much as possible, restricted their rules of engagement etc after 9-11. From Afghanistan to Iraq, the Germans that politically “pushed” for the Balkan intervention were one of our larger political liabilities after 9-11. Within Europe, NATO and the UN they did all they could to undermine the Iraq mission, and even in Afghanistan their motto should be, “from as far away, with as little and late as possible.” Basically, there should be a realization that many of these NATO nations not only are marginal contributors to the alliance, and do little internationally, but even when they themselves benefited and used this alliance, they will later do little to nothing for you when in need.
What the Balkans and later 9-11 (Iraq/Afghanistan/GWOT) really showed is a very lopsided relationship between the US and her European NATO allies. A relationship where one side feels they can make demands and the other is required to respond, but yet they themselves are under no obligation to do anything when called upon. That's the "real" tragedy of the Balkan conflict.
The Slick WH occupant at the time and his henchmen and women should be court marshalled and hanged for war crimes against innocent civilians.
Aside from this lawsuit, many people, on all three sides lost and suffered much in that war. IMO, Germany was partially to blame by recognizing Craotia before any framework vis’a’vis Serbian and Bosnian ‘rights’ were set forth.