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 ...
Be wary of Democrats with compensation issues.
Sadly, Ukraine is a country that refuses to pay its bills. It gets cheap gas from Russia but won’t pay, the Chinese are asking for money, and the IMF canceled its first bailout because there were no reforms going on. Ukraine just wanted IMF cash.
This is not a country to start a war over.
What moral leg do we have to stand on when Russia and China start bombing civilian targets in the US SW to help mexican illegals annex aztlan?
There is no such thing as a “Kosovar.” She was kidnapped by the Albanians.
Oh, wait...
Its amazing how imperialist and interventionist American leftists can be when it suits them.
“Most interesting - the long-term origins of this conflict.”
The “long term or origins” of this conflict go back to Catherine The Great.
Oh, wait.....
That halfbright woman is so good at paying it backward.
We were on the wrong side in Kosovo and we are on the wrong side of Crimea now!
Historically Russia has always backed the Serbs. Clinton went I there to distract from problems at home and to get street cred as a war time president. We had no business there then and do not now
“Attacked a country that had done nothing to us and facilitated the annexation of part of that country that had been invaded by foreign muslims. Kosovo has been effectively cleansed of Serbs and Christians.”
The worst part for Serbia was that they lost so much of the land given to them by the Allies after WWI. Besides seeing the new countries of Bosnia, Croatia, Macedonia, Slovenia, and Montenegro spun off earlier in the nineties, they then had to watch part of Serbia itself (Kosovo) broken off as well...
True.
I hate to say it, but Bush gets part of the blame. Kosovo still hadn't been handed over to the Muzzies as an independent country, and illegally raped from Yugoslavia, until well after George Bush was in office.
Instead of trying to undo the damage, Bush just went right along with Clinton. As, of course, did McCain and the rest of those idiots.
McCain practically wanted to nuke Belgrade.
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