Posted on 10/20/2004 12:46:21 AM PDT by kattracks
The Democrats have been characterized as a party of peace marchers and flag-burners -- a Neville Chamberlain cadre chattering away on cable TV, knee-jerk internationalists who’ve mistaken the United Nations for the United States Marines.
I must protest this calumny.
Under the right circumstances, the Democrats can be Sgt. York and Audie Murphy times Rambo. There was a little war of which Democrats are exceedingly fond – so much so that they’re still bragging about it five years later.
It’s a conflict that didn’t involve allegations of weapons of mass destruction. The nation we subjugated wasn’t a sponsor of international terrorism. (This time, we fought for the terrorists.)
It wasn’t remotely related to national security. And the justification for our intervention turned out to be a complete fabrication.
For 78 days in 1999, we bombed Christian Yugoslavia (our ally in two World Wars) to aid Moslem separatists who were tight with Osama bin Laden. Ever since, NATO has occupied its sovereign territory – with disastrous results.
Appearing on CNN’s “Late Edition” in August, Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton offered her husband’s 1999 adventure, over the ancient province of Kosovo, as evidence that Democrats are better at fighting wars than Republicans. (I would have thought Korea and Vietnam proved that conclusively.)
We smashed the Serb war-machine, and “we didn’t lose a single American military person,” Hillary boasted of the conflict her draft-dodger hubby dragged us into. She neglected to mention that it was a war we fought from 30,000 feet.
The party of McGovern and Dean is so proud of this notable feat of arms, that it invited Hashim Thaci, chieftain of the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) and Clinton’s erstwhile ally, to attend the Democratic National Convention. (You’d think the Party in a Perpetual Fog would be at least a little curious about how Thaci got the nickname “Snake.” Hint: It’s not because he’s a patron of the arts.)
On his return to Kosovo, Snake Thaci – head of a terrorist gang that finances its operations through drug-running and prostitution – proclaimed, “It was confirmed once again that a Democratic administration would recognize and respect the will of the people of Kosovo for self-determination.”
Self-determination is code for independence from Yugoslavia – the creation of another Republic of Jihad (Balkanistan) on the periphery of Europe.
The Clinton gang that ran the war – including Richard Holbrooke and Wesley Clark (then Supreme Commander of NATO forces) -- are slated for key posts in a Kerry administration. Assistant Secretary of State for European Affairs under Clinton, Holbrooke (who once called the Serbs “murderous assholes”) could be Kerry’s Secretary of State.
The War Hero and his running-mate both voted for the Senate resolution authorizing the use of force in Kosovo. A war resolution died in the Republican House.
What, we went to war without congressional authorization! We also did it without the permission of the United Nations. (Whatever happened to multilateralism?) Still, the French and Germans were on board – always a bad sign.
In a July 23, 2004 letter to Albanian-Americans, Kerry charged the Bush administration was “turning its back on the region” Whenever Bush doesn’t coddle terrorists (the PLO, the KLA) Kerry accuses him of abandoning whole regions.
In said letter, Kerry declared, “The people of Kosovo must be able to determine their own future, including how they want to be governed.” Since “the people of Kosovo” now are overwhelmingly Moslem, thanks in part to Clinton, Kerry is committing himself to Kosovo’s independence.
He wants to finish the job our last Democratic president started in 1999.
Kosovo is the ancient heartland of Serbian Orthodoxy. Until the 1970s, its population was predominately Serb.
Due to illegal immigration from Albania, Moslems became a majority and began agitating for autonomy. Then they started committing atrocities against their Serb neighbors – like beating elderly nuns, raping young girls and attacking monasteries. Then the KLA – which the U.S. State Department listed as a terrorist group as late as 1998 – started assassinating Yugoslav police and government officials.
Slobodan Milosevic, an ex-communist apparatchik who was President of Yugoslavia at the time, overreacted. (It is the Balkans, after all, a region second only to the Middle East for ethnic/religious harmony.)
Casting about for a way to take the nation’s attention off oral sex and impeachment, Bubba determined that we must intervene to save the saintly Albanians from the savage Serbs.
Ethnic cleansing was afoot, President Perjury gravely intoned. Exactly how this was different from the exchange of populations that took place throughout Europe in the aftermath of World War II (think of Poland and Germany, think of India and Pakistan) was never quite explained.
Worse, there were reports of killing fields and mass graves. Milosevic was cast as an architect of genocide – the Heinrich Himmler of the Balkans,
At the Rambouillet conference, the Yugoslav president was presented with an ultimatum: allow a peace-keeping force into Kosovo (as a prelude to detaching the province from Yugoslavia) and permit NATO forces to occupy the entire country, if they choose.
The Serbs refused and the bombing commenced. We killed over 3,000 – mostly civilians, mostly with cluster-bombs -- before Milosevic finally yielded to vastly superior force.
After the Yugoslav Federal Army was driven from Kosovo, forensic experts scoured the countryside, and came up empty-handed.
A December 31, 1999, article in the Wall Street Journal (coincidentally, by Daniel Pearl) reported that allegations of “indiscriminate mass murder, rape camps, crematoriums, mutilation of the dead – haven’t been borne out in the six months since NATO troops entered Kosovo. Ethnic-Albanian militants, humanitarian organizations, NATO and the news media fed off each other to give genocide rumors credibility. Now, a different picture is emerging.”
Following these revelations, there were no cries of “Where are the MGs?” (mass graves). Republicans didn’t begin every speech by accusing Clinton of lying to the nation in his rush to justify an unnecessary war (though they could have).
Michael Moore did not make a documentary on how a Democratic president engineered a conflict to advance his personal agenda. (“Fahrenheit 1999”?) No one in the media asked about Clinton’s exit strategy (5 years later, U.S. forces are still stationed in Kosovo) or demanded to know how he intended to “win the peace.”
Whether or not there was ethnic cleansing before the war, there certainly was afterward.
Albanians, who were handed a victory by Clinton and NATO, drove out 277,000 Serbs. (Hundreds were murdered and thousands brutalized.) As of March 2004, Moslem multiculturalists had destroyed 135 Orthodox churches, monasteries and shrines – all under the watchful eyes of KFOR , as NATO’s Keystone Cop peace-keeping force is called.
The rampage continues. The latest pogrom occurred in March, when (in a planned and coordinated campaign) 28 Serbs were murdered, more than 600 wounded and another 3,600 forced to flee. The Serbs left in Kosovo -- estimated at between 102,000 and 114,000 -- live in a state of siege. Should KFOR be withdrawn, they’d all be dead or exiled in a matter of days.
Yes, Kosovo truly was the Democrats’ finest hour – a prime example of just how tough the party of Jimmy Carter and Ramsey Clark can be, when they’re in a fighting mood.
On the other hand, their Kosovo allies are threatening to give scum-of-the-earth a bad name. Back in ’99, Senator Joe Lieberman, who’s rumored to know something about foreign policy, called the KLA “freedom fighters.” Well, you know what the moral relativists of the left say: “One man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter.”
As it transpires, the KLA is allied with other freedom fighters, -- whose SOP is car bombs and demolishing sky-scrappers. Bin Laden was active in the Balkans as early as 1994.
In a Washington Times story published within days of 9/11, defense expert Bill Gertz disclosed: “Islamic radicals, including supporters of bin Laden, have been supporting Albanian rebels fighting in the region (who then were trying to de-stabilize Montenegro), including members of the Kosovo Liberation Army. Intelligence officials have said there are reports that KLA members have been trained at bin Laden camps in Afghanistan.” During the initial fighting there, U.S. units scooped up Kosovar Albanians who were serving with the Taliban’s foreign legion.
Another investigative article (“Al Qaeda’s Balkan Links,” The Wall Street Journal, November 1, 2002) noted, “By feeding off the region’s impoverished republics and taking root in the unsettled aftermath of the Bosnia and Kosovo conflicts, al Qaeda, along with Iranian Revolutionary Guard-sponsored terrorists, have burrowed their way into Europe’s backyard.”
Also, in the wake of the Democrats’ merry little war, Kosovo became the prime route, after Turkey, for the importation of heroin from Southeast Asia to Europe – just one more way our friends the freedom fighters thanked us for giving them a country.
The foregoing all is courtesy of Bill Clinton, John Kerry and the other Democrats who know what the US military is for – killing Christians to aid Moslem terrorists.
Whatever the shortcomings of President Bush’s plans for Iraq, at least he’s trying to bring democracy to a nation that’s never known it before. Bush, Rumsfeld and Cheney ousted a brutal dictator, who sponsored international terrorism and (at the very least) was actively acquiring WMD-technology.
In Kosovo, we put the terrorists in power. Kerry helped. He voted for it. He defends it. (Thaci was his honored guest in Boston.) Now he’s pushing independence for the terrorists. In terms of betraying the West, this is easily the best work he’s done since his contribution to undermining the U.S. war effort in Vietnam in 1971.
Don Feder is a former Boston Herald writer who is now a political/communications consultant. He also maintains his own website, DonFeder.com.
Big Orthodox PING!
Thanks, and may "Kerry" swiftly become a word never heard again on television or radio.
It was during Clinton's Kosovo adventure that I (and probably many other Republicans) became forever opposed to John McCain. He was on TV constantly insisting that Clinton put American ground troops in Kosovo. He came across, to me at least, as blood-thirsty in the extreme. Perhaps I overreacted, but nevertheless, McCain's insistence on trying to widen the Kosovo war by inserting an American army was something I could never support.
There is another thread by the same title, on which I both commented and posted good materials from the Serbian-American Voters' League;
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1250926/posts
And does anyone know what our "exit strategy" was for Kosovo?
Mark
You should have read Feder's column about Everett Koop, years and years ago. Gave me the chills.
Dan
The Kosovo war breaks all the rules in so many ways. The pacifist Democrats bombed a country into the stone age to promote multiculturalism and because doing so would not benefit our own country in the least. "Palaeocons" who support Arafat, Hussein, and company to the hilt suddenly become anti-islamic when it comes to Serbs and Albanians. And of course there are Jewish liberals and "neocons" who seem to think that the moslem Albanians are the "Israelis" of the Balkans.
Thank G-d for Don Feder, who always tells it like it is.
Yes, yes, yes! You did not overreact. It was during that time that I cultivated an intense dislike for McCain, Mr. "Lights out in Belgrade!" What a jerk. I was also disappointed by other Repubs as well, like Bill Kristol and the crew at the Weekly Standard and the editors of The National Reivew, who joined in the call for war against Yugoslavia. In fact, it was the sane voices on the right who knew the whole thing was crap that led me to Free Republic in the first place, God bless it. I almost became a card-carrying Libertarian because of my disappointment in many Republicans and thought of lodging a protest vote (Libertarian) in the 2004 elelction as I did in '96 (Dole is a real Albanian errand boy), but went with Bush, even though he said during the bombing that he approved of it. Hopefully the fact that Kerry is so gung-ho about giving the KLA what they want will make Bush and the Republicans realize what a mistake it would be.
I'm certain when McCain was all over TV pushing so hard for Clinton's dirty little war that's when most grassroots Republicans turned against him. I only said "perhaps I might have overreacted" because he's making a strong effort for GWB this go-round. Trying to be fair to the senator.
Good point. I do dislike him less since he has been stumping for W.
"Why are you doing this? Why are you destroying our homes? America is supposed to be a Christian nation and we're Christians".
"We hid and protected your airmen and soldiers in World War II."
"Why are you doing this to us?"
I was ashamed to be an American for the first time in my life.
MRN
Both had their reasons, I'm sure ... though Dole's may be somewhat more obvious, upon examination of the public record:
Bob Dole & Yugoslavia: Concurrent Resolution 150 and Other Puzzle Pieces
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