Posted on 03/09/2008 7:33:51 PM PDT by Ravnagora
It is hardly a conservative policy to support the establishment of an Islamist state on the European continent, turn a blind eye to the well-documented persecution of an ancient Christian community, engage in a Woodrow Wilson-style passion for nation building and follow in the footsteps of Bill Clinton. Yet that is what the United States has done by recognizing the independence of Kosovo.
Kosovo is the ancient heartland of the Serbian people going back to the dawn of their history. It certainly had a Muslim ethnic Albanian majority before Clinton and his Secretary of State Madeline Albright bombed Belgrade back in 1999 in order to force the Serbs to cede its autonomy. Since then the Albanian Muslim majority has become overwhelming and had has run rampant over the ancient Christian Serb community.
Clinton and Albright’s policy had other far-reaching consequences. They established a very novel and dangerous principle whereby long-established borders could be redrawn and long-established nations dismembered with U.S. support on the principle that a disaffected national minority in a single province refused to accept the overall rule of the state. These were the same Clinton policymakers -- as I document in my new book: “The Politically Incorrect Guide to the Middle East” -- who could not pay any attention to the rise of al-Qaeda as a serious threat to American national security and lives around the world because they were obsessed with peacemaking between the Israelis and the applied to areas of southern California or Arizona swamped by illegal immigrants from Mexico.
Conservatives should have no trouble swallowing the gnat of Sen. John McCain as the Republican presidential candidate if they can gulp down this camel. For the U.S. policy of recognizing the existence of Kosovo as a sovereign state is so reckless, wrong-headed and plain dangerous to American interests and national security that it is difficult to know where to begin.
There was certainly a case to be made for preventing the Yugoslav civil war from even starting after the collapse of communism, And an equally good case for trying to bring it to a quick halt once it had. But our European allies could not bestir themselves to raise even a few thousand peacekeepers to prevent hundreds of thousands of innocent people being slaughtered in the horrors of ethnic cleansing. The United States finally did intervene three and half years later to impose a solution, of sorts, that involved the continuing commitment of U.S. military power to maintain it.
Getting bogged down in the Balkans over Bosnia was bad enough. But getting embroiled with Serbia now is far, far worse. Kosovo is ancient Serb land, the site of the tragic battle of Kosovo in 1389 when the conquering Ottoman Turks wiped out Serbian independence for half a millennium and imposed their long night of enslavement and religious persecution over the entire Balkans peninsula. As William S. Lind has warned, Serbs already regard the cutting off of Kosovo from their nation the way the French regarded losing Alsace and Lorraine to newly victorious Imperial Second Reich 1871. The French never rested until they could fight a war of revenge to retake those two provinces: that war was World War I. And it started in the Balkans when a disaffected, crazed young Serbian nationalist Gavrilo Princip murdered the heir to the Austro-Hungarian Empire, the Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife Sophie while they were on a visit to the capital of Bosnia: which was Sarajevo. What goes around comes around over and over again in the Balkans.
The Bush administration‘s current policy of recognizing Kosovo certainly cannot be justified on the grounds that it will give the United States credibility in the Middle East. It certainly will not impress al-Qaeda, Hezbollah, Hamas or the leaders of Iran’s Revolutionary Guard to fall into the arms of American diplomats weeping tears of joy -- except perhaps, for realizing what useful idiots their American adversaries have become. Bombing Belgrade to drive the Serbs out of Kosovo in 1999 certainly did nothing to make Osama bin Laden reconsider his plans to try and kill scores of thousands of Americans on 9/11.
Worst of all, the Kosovo recognition policy has engaged Russia when it is already riding high thanks to soaring $90 a barrel to $100 a barrel global oil prices and modernizing its armed forces including its strategic missile forces as fast as it can. Look for a wave of crime and not-so-random terrorism against American interests to be unleashed throughout Central Europe from Estonia to Macedonia and Bosnia -- all with plausible deniability for the real culprits. The Russians also know that security in Central Europe is largely a hollow shell because the European Union and its major governments are too stingy and scared of recognizing unpopular truths to take any action to make their own borders secure against terrorism, illegal immigration or very organized crime. That leaves plenty of room for Russian organized crime interacting with the Kremlin‘s security services to stir up as much trouble as they can, especially where they can find Russian or Russian-leaning ethnic minorities who don’t want the new orders being imposed from Washington and Brussels.
Nearly 30 years the great German Chancellor Prince Otto von Bismarck famously declared that the entire Balkans peninsula was not worth the life of a single Pomeranian grenadier. And as a Prussian junker aristocrat, Bismarck of course had no time for any Pomeranian.
Bismarck was a lifelong conservative who regarded Britain’s liberal, do-gooding prime minister and appeaser of Irish terrorists, William Ewart Gladstone, as the most dangerous man alive. The great, tolerant, conservative Christian and genuinely democratic civilization of 19th century Central Europe was destroyed because Kaiser Wilhelm II and his policymakers did not heed Bismarck’s warning and indulged in their own fantasies of projecting power and bringing enlightenment to the Balkans. What was true then is true now.
____________________
Martin Sieff is defense industry editor for United Press International. He has been nominated three times for the Pulitzer Prize for international reporting. His latest book, The Politically Incorrect Guide to the Middle East,was published in January by Regnery.
Bush & Rice are really asleep at the switch for this particular train wreck ... that, or else the leftists at Foggy Bottom continue to slip wormwood into their coffee.
Would not go so far as to agree. Take a look at W's policy toward the PA/Israel fiasco.
W completely ignores Hamas and Abbas (who is a terrorist himself and virulently anti-Israel as they lob hundreds of missiles in Israel, continue to support suicide bombers, etc.,) in fact he has given them millions and wants to send more as well as plane loads of weapons which they use against Israel. But, let that spineless, peace-at-any-price, Olmert, finally decide to respond (albeit very weakly) against the Islamofacist, then Bush dispatches Condi-Clueless, to reign in Olmert and shut down the minor offensive.
Is it just me, or did I miss an outraged President Bush condemning the latest murderous attack on the school and threaten the PA that he would withdraw his support for a settlement if this continues? Someone please direct me to when and where this happened this week.
Anything for a legacy.
One problem with all this: Kosovo has been a de facto independent state for several years now. The U.S. didn’t create this situation, and all the U.S. and other nations are doing is recognizing the reality on the ground.
Is a new Muslim nation-state in Europe desirable? Perhaps not, but short of war what can we do about it? Muslim Kosovo will exist whether we recognize it or not.
In what sense is Kosovo a “Muslim nation-state”? I have not heard that any part of the constitution is rooted in Shariah. Just because most of the citizens consider themselves Muslims does not mean that the nation is “Muslim.”
In fact, the US did create this situation — the US unleashed war on Serbia, no one else did! And the media acquiesced to Clinton’s “genocide” hype. . . just as it acquiesced meekly to Bush’s “WMD” hype. Which just goes to show that the MSM is neither conservative nor liberal, but simply corporate. All they care about is the bottom line, and if it suffers from attacks by either the left or the right, it caves.
I dislike the subtle sense in this article that Kosovo is just another part of the so-called “clash of civilizations,” in which we should line up with the Christians and against Muslims, as if we are all just parts of big tribes. I reject this thinking.
If the author cared about human rights as a universal thing, in which all people are equal, he would have mentioned the awful state of the Roma (gypsy) Kosovars, who have suffered as much or more than the Serbs. But Roma are not Christian, or not Christian enough, I suppose, so they do not fit into the writer’s tribe.
It was a mistake to attack Serbia, and it is a mistake to set up Kosovo as an independent state. And the reason is not a fear of Muslims (I do not fear them), but rather because I fear the collapse of secular national identity. In this action, the US is legitimizing the idea (seen in places like Israel and Iran and Pakistan and Sri Lanka) that one religion or ethnicity is a higher class of citizen than all others. In the US we see these ideas as well: coming from people who assert the US is a “Christian nation.” Should such a (bad) idea gain currency, suddenly anyone who is not Christian — such as myself — will become a second class citizen. This kind of thing is not good. Believe me, secular national identity, which is part of the liberalism that ended Europe’s religious wars, is going to be something we miss deeply if we throw it overboard.
The US should have encouraged political negotiations between the Albanian Kosovars and Belgrade, and our message should have been: ensure the equal rights of this minority population. This is the only way to peace. Sri Lanka is another such place, and the fighting there will never end until there is a political settlement. It never would have started had the government not discriminated against minority groups.
W has never ignored Hamas. On the contrary, he has done everything he can to isolate and destroy them, limited, of course, by the fear of appearing barbaric before the media. In 2006 Bush (behind the scenes) fomented the civil war, foolishly in retrospect, since it ended up with his side losing. Better to let other nations decide their own affairs, as long as their decisions are democratically made. After all, Hamas won the elections: Bush’s plotting was both undemocratic and ineffective. Had he not intervened in this way, Hamas would not have taken over Gaza.
You are correct, but, you seem to have a lack of knowledge.
Let me explain. One of the primary reasons NATO found itself sucked into Kosovo was because there was a prevailing belief that if the Kosovo conflict was not stopped it would soon spill over into Macedonia. If that happened then that republic's neighbors would be pulled in. Albania would invoke its defense treaties with Turkey, Greece would then become involved and there might even be subsequent repercussions in Cyprus.
Furthe, and perhaps more importantly, is that 1999 NATO bombings were a knee-jerk reaction to Serbian actions from Dubrovnik to Vukovar, to Sarajevo, to Srebenica.
I hope this helps.
The catastrophe for the people particularly the Kosovo Serbs but not a catastrophe for the politicians.
btt
“In what sense is Kosovo a “Muslim nation-state”?”
“ratbert38”, because it’s a nation-state and it’s people are mostly Muslim.
I did NOT say, nor intend to imply, any more than that.
“Believe me, secular national identity, which is part of the liberalism that ended Europe’s religious wars, is going to be something we miss deeply if we throw it overboard.”
We (the U.S.) are incapable of throwing European/Balkan “secular national identity” (or lack thereof) “overboard”.
“The US should have encouraged political negotiations between the Albanian Kosovars and Belgrade, and our message should have been: ensure the equal rights of this minority population. This is the only way to peace.”
Sounds good in paper. I might even wish it were possible. But the belief that “secular national identity” will always triumph, if only the U.S. pushes it sufficiently, a) overestimates the power of the U.S. to push anything, and b) presupposes that the Serb and Kosovar activists think in terms of secular national identity.
For better or worse, 19th century-style secular “liberalism” has little bearing on Kosovo.
Another recycled Serb-bashing loser.
And the "intellectual" backup of William Kristol--Hegemony Cricket?
Argh. And the GOP would tell us that McCain is the better protector of military interests.
So were several southern states. Didn't do them much good either!
NATO went into Kosovo and THEN the Albanian terrorists spilled into Macedonia and into the Preshevo valley! How long until the they start up again?
Kosovo and 5 other Albanian populated areas from your map.
This speaks volumes.
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