[lizma2]

“I write in the desperate hope of warning my fellow Americans to learn the lessons of Yugoslavia.”

I did. Was there visiting family in Yugoslavia just as the Wall was coming down.

What smacked me in the face was there was NO middle class, just the poor and the ruling.

[gr8eman]

Yeah... kinda apples and oranges IMO. The zipperheads who came to (invaded) Kosovo weren't coming there because Albania was a Shiite hole and Kosovo was not. Kosovo was and is and likely will always be a SH! The invaders came to Kosovo because some ancient backwards reason, and when the Serbs said "go back, this is Serbia", Madam Notsobright and the Brits mainly opened up a can of whoopa$$ on them for no particular reason other than a photo of a kid who had some physical condition everybody mistook for a starving holocaust victim. I wrote a paper on that while studying the effects of propaganda. Even Margaret Thatcher got roped into that one.

I challenge anyone to study the history of that region and grasp it! (I cannot) But what I can say is for lack of anything else to do, I used to have a long running "conversation" with one of our interpreters who was born in Skopje, grew up in Pristina yet said she was Albanian. I said if you were born in Macedonia, you're Macedonian or you can consider yourself Kosovar since you grew up there. The argument went on for hours, so maybe the effect was the same as the Mexicans coming here!