Posted on 03/23/2014 7:30:20 PM PDT by Lorianne
Fifteen years ago this week, I broke a promise I'd given to myself: After being captured and threatened with execution by Kosovar guerrillas the year before, I had sworn to give up war reporting. Now I was on my way to Belgrade to report on the effects the NATO bombing campaign was having on Serbia. When friends challenged my decision, I explained that I thought the course of history was changing at that very moment and I had to document it.
I was wrong about the documenting-it part: I stayed in the region for six weeks, writing a number of stories, including 34 separate dispatches for Slate from Serbia, Montenegro, and Macedonia, but it took a lot longer than that for the catastrophic historic change to become evident. It has taken 15 years. Russia's invasion of Ukraine completes that story.
On March 24, 1999, Russian Prime Minister Yevgeny Primakov was on his way to Washington when he got word that NATO had begun bombing Kosovo. He ordered his plane turned around. A few hours later, he landed in a Moscow that was reeling from the insult of not being consulted. Russians had only a vague idea of what Kosovo was but a very strong concept of Serbia being a land of fellow Eastern Orthodox Slavs and of Yugoslavia being a rightful part of Moscow's sphere of influence. Not being consulted—or even, apparently, warned—sent the very clear message that the U.S. had decided it now presided over a unipolar world. There was no longer even the pretense of recognizing Russia's fading-superpower status: President Bill Clinton had chosen not to wait the few hours it would have taken for Primakov to land in Washington, allowing him to save face by at least pretending to have been in on the conversation.
(Excerpt) Read more at slate.com ...
You just may be spot on! I always why Clinton was so quick to start dropping bombs on the civilians of Belgrade..
Most interesting - the long-term origins of this conflict.
This author is the woman that admitted that homosexual marriage was instituted to destroy heterosexual marriage. Look it up.
So? What does it have to do with Kosovo?
This time Putin mentioned Kosovo. Indeed, in his speech to parliament on Tuesday, he made it very clear that by annexing Crimea he had avenged Russia for what had happened with Kosovo.
“It was our Western partners who created the precedent; they did it themselves, with their own hands, as it were, in a situation that was totally analogous to the Crimean situation, by recognizing Kosovo's secession from Serbia as legitimate,” said Putin. And then, as he cited American statements on Kosovo, he got more and more worked up until he said, “They wrote it themselves. They spread this all over the world. They screwed everybody—and now they are outraged!” (The Kremlin's official translators, who are forever civilizing the Russian president's speech, translated this sentence as “They wrote this, disseminated it all over the world, had everyone agree, and now they are outraged!” The expression Putin used, however, was “vsekh nagnuli,” street slang for having had nonconsensual anal sex with everybody, rather than for having everybody agree.)
Madeleine Albright came from a Jewish family and in WW2 they fled the Nazis —they sheltered in a Serb town that she later bombed to smithereens, as Clinton’s Secretary of State.
I’m afraid this is all too obvious.
Clinton fought that war on the wrong side, helping Albanian illegal immigrants and invaders steal Kosovo from the Serbs—who, it was noted at the time, were the Russians’ “little brothers.”
It was against our interest, but it was even more against Russia’s interest.
That led to Russia’s assault on Georgia, and now—among other causes—to this.
I hope one day to see Serb tanks roll back into Pristina.
And that numbskull, Wesley Clark almost got us into WW III.
Have to admit, I've been waiting for that one. Because the parallel is exact...and Clinton's pretext even more scurrilous than Putin's own.
As ye sow, so shall ye reap.
Ukraine now gets to play Serbia and, along with the U.S., pay for another of Clinton's foreign policy sins.
I’m amazed that Slate would publish this.
The cold war ended with President Reagan. It started up again with Bill Clinton and Barack Obama.
The same Bill Clinton that negotiated that ridiculous Budapest Memorandum that now has us in this situation in Ukraine.
15 years later Clinton’s treachery lives on. After Obama is gone, I wonder how many years his treachery will endure.
No good deed goes unpunished.
Way into the next century.
100% "I'm not going to start the third world war for you," General Sir Mike Jackson, commander of the international KFOR peacekeeping force, is reported to have told Gen. Clark when he refused to accept an order to send assault troops to prevent Russian troops from taking over the airfield of Kosovo's provincial capital. The Times of London reported on 23 May 2001 in an article titled, "Kosovo clash of allied generals."
I hope NATO doesn’t start bombing Russian ethnic communities in Ukraine, to help their Ukrainian fascist client state brothers.
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