Posted on 03/29/2007 8:36:19 AM PDT by kronos77
It is said that General Patton told his demoralized troops in WWII that to be an American it means to be a winner.
"America loves winners," Patton was attributed in saying to his troops who took his words to their patriotic hearts and won the war.
Like liberty, being a winner is the quintessential American spirit, dear and beloved, and being in company of winners, those that aspire to be victorious and free, is the predisposition of the American spirit.
In the Balkans, however, American allies are not winners but economically weak Islamic statelets, dependent on Western financial subsidies, predisposed to harboring Islamic terror and uninterested in economic growth. Their policies in the region are viewed with suspicion by their neighbors, their populace is embracing Islamic radicalism while more then half of their economy is based on criminal and otherwise questionable activity.
Bosnia and Albania, American allies in the Balkans, are all stagnant economies with an Islamic populace increasingly receptive of radical Islam.
With State Department's recent endorsement of Kosovo's independence, another future Islamic state in Europe that will depend on Western financial subsidies, America has clearly signaled to the region that progress of democracy and economic growth, particularly that of Serbia, is irrelevant and that Washington stands ready to break up democracies and demoralize the spirit of those seeking rule of law in order to pander to the Middle Eastern Islamic dictatorships who want to see another Muslim state in Europe.
In spite of Washington's tendency to acquire wrong allies in the Balkans, it is not too late for America to change its course there and to turn the possibility of a complete squander into a permanent gain.
(Excerpt) Read more at serbianna.com ...
What was Clinton thinking?
bump
Bush should set up the Democraps and immediately pull US troops out of Kosovo. We've been there over 10 years now and there still is no victory! Let the Democraps choke on that!
A curse of US foreighn policy is that Demms are making stupidities and when Republicans win, they go arround explaining why is in US interest to continue Demm policy.
Demms know that Republicans will pardon and continue their wrongdoing just in order not to admitt that US can make errors.
To paraphrase Patton,
"Thank God, that at least, thirty years from now, when you are sitting around the fireside with your grandson on your knees, and he asks you what you did while Serbs were fighting against Islamofascism, you'll have to cough and say, "I shovelled shit in Louisinana"
That applies to those brave Americans in Iraq and Afghanistan. The ones who aided Islamofascists establish beach head in Europe will play Alzheimer card. As they do today.
Making money for George Soros in coal and silver while keeping the Euro from becoming the currency of choice for heroin trafficking?
That he cannot afford to resist the pressure from Republicans like Bob Dole and their kindred souls among Democrats. He was being painted as Chamberlain style appeaser, so he gave in.
Posted on Bosnian Electronic Network on Thu, 29 Apr 93 by Andras.R. :
As the Clinton Administration continues to "consider its options" while keeping a wary eye on the opinion polls, a mighty chorus of media apologists has emerged from the woodwork to "explain" to the public why the U.S. couldn't and probably shouldn't do anything to save Bosnia. The following piece by Senior Associate Editor H.D.S. Greenway appeared on the op-ed page of the BOSTON GLOBE today (29 Apr 93). On the facing page the LETTERS TO THE EDITOR column is topped by an item entitled "Serbs have been misunderstood by the world" --the second pro-Serbian letter to appear this week (no pro-intervention letters have been published so far).
THIS IS WHY IT'S SO IMPORTANT THAT WE LET THE WHITE HOUSE AND CONGRESS KNOW NOW THAT THERE ARE AMERICANS WHO CARE ABOUT BOSNIA AND ITS PEOPLE. PLEASE take a moment and call (again) to tell them you've had enough of the hand-wringing and equivocation. CALL the White House comment line: 202-456-1111 today. Call your legislators. Write and call your local newspapers and TV stations. Do it even if you've done it many times before, before the moment slips away.
Article by a prominent Liberal comentator warning Pres. Clinton against yielding to the anti-Serbian pressure:
(C) BOSTON GLOBE 29 APRIL 1993
BEFORE WE JOIN A WAR, SOME QUESTIONS by H.D.S. Greenway
In the last few weeks, the Bosnian town of Srebrenica has become another Guernica in the eyes of the West, and the Clinton administration is being drawn inexorably toward military intervention in the Balkan civil war.
Secretary of State Warren Christopher has laid out what he calls the "severe tests" of an interventionist policy: It must be clearly stated, there should be a strong likelihood of success, there must be an "exit strategy," and it must win sustained public support in this country.
None of those conditions has been met.
But a public mood is rising. Television has zeroed in on Bosnia while other civil wars and ethnic cleansings go relatively unreported. Respected opinion makers from both left and right have been beating the intervention drum, taunting Clinton, calling his caution a weakness and making shallow, ill-considered comparisons with Hitler-appeasing Neville Chamberlain.
Before the United States commits itself to war, however, there are three questions that the administration needs to answer if intervention is to meet Christopher's "severe tests."
First, who will be our enemies? Second, what are our war aims? Third, what will we do if limited intervention fails to achieve our aims?
Bosnian Serbs are not allowed to link up their territories in what would become a "Greater Serbia," but the Croats in their part of Bosnia-Herzegovina fly the Croatian flag, use Croatian money and have linked up with Croatia.
If we will go to war against Serbian aggrandizement in Bosnia, will we also bomb Croats to prevent Greater Croatia?
Will our war aim be "stopping the genocide now," as Sen. Joseph Biden has said? If so, whose genocide? Only last week in Central Bosnia, Muslims and Croats were at each other's throats and, according to the United Nations, summary executions, massacres and ethnic cleansings were committed by both Muslim and Croat factions.
And while world attention was on Serbs shelling Srebrenica, the BBC reported on the mass graves the Serbs were finding just a few miles away in which lay the corpses of Serbs who had been decapitated, mutilated and tortured by Muslims during the Muslims' Christmas offensive.
Simplistic analysts have put all the blame for the Bosnian civil war on the Serbs and their leader, Slobodan Milosevic, the former Communist turned ultra-nationalist who has played the ethnic card to fan the flames of hatred. That Croatia's leader, Franjo Tudjman, has done much the same thing goes largely ignored. The real cause of the war, however, was as UN Secretary General Boutros Boutros-Ghali described it in an interview last summer. "You have three ethnic groups, and they have not taken into account the point of view of one of the three, which was the Serbs."
Croats and Muslims were granted rights of self-determination that the large Serb minorities living outside the province of Serbia were denied. Serbs had historical reasons to fear Croatian and Muslim domination, and Milosevic was able to take advantage of those fears.
True, the Serbs are responsible for the most atrocities, but if we intervene to tip the military balance against Serbs, will we be pre- pared to make war on Muslims and Croats if they turn on Serb civilians to enlarge their own territories?
This is not a cut-and-dried matter of forcing an invader out of another country. This is an entangled, tripartite civil war with 500 years of hatred. If putting back together the Humpty Dumpty of Bosnian unity --never more than an illusion-- is our aim, we'd better think in terms of a 100-year "exit strategy."
Lastly, what if a limited intervention fails to end the fighting and accelerates it instead? Unfortunately for Clinton, he will have to live with the results of intervention while pundits promoting war today will be the first to denounce him should things go wrong tomorrow.
And I recall telling my American neighbors about this in the early 1990's and they said "it must just be "Serb propaganda". These "Bosnians" were "nice, helpless and unarmed Muslims". Right, guess because they hadn't yet flown a plane into an American building, that is what made them "nice & helpless"?
This still pisses me off beyond all reason. We should have never gotten into the middle of this. Bosnia has never been "a country" and it never will be "a country" -- let alone one that isn't dominated by Islamic fanatics who want to kill all of us or make us all bow toward Mecca! We shot ourselves in the foot -- and we became the prepetrators of ethnic cleansing, instead of stopping it, if stopping it was ever the intention.
Unfortunately, TROP Bush administration will simply hand these sections of the Balkans over to the Islamists and soon enough it or its successor government, be it D or R, will be faced with the prospect of bombing Greece and Bulgaria along with Serbia when those Orthodox countries set out to cut the Mohammedan Albanian cancer out of their region once and for all.
Here on FR there is, suprisingly to me given the otherwise overwhelming Republican setiment of this site, real support for the Serbs, but out in the country both the Rs and the Ds are quite clearly behind our government's move to crush Serbia and Orthodox Christianity, or at a minimum, stand aside and gaze on benignly while the Mohammedans try to do it for them.
US foreighn policy:
Democrates in White House: Going arround the world making stupidities, trashing credibility of USA
Republicans in White House: Going arround supporting and continuing what Dems. dis, explaining that that is OK, just in order never, ever to admitt that US could possibly do wrong.
"What was Clinton thinking?"
Monica, be quiet, I'm on the phone....
never, ever to admitt that US could possibly do wrong.
Its a complicated story and not very pretty. In the Balkans you have the experience of having dealt at first hand with muslims for the last 500 years, and have bitter experience of muslim atrocities within living memory even before the breakup of Yugoslavia.
We had never experienced that until relatively recently.
In the early nineties, the Cold War was just ending. For us, Milosevic was just another communist trying to expand his power. The Bosnians, in our view, were bravely trying to gain their liberty from Serbs who were still ruled by the communists. In other words, for us the breakup of a communist country was a good thing, as it insured that communism would not be able to re-constitute itself.
We saw the Chechen revolt in much the same light in the early nineties, as far as we knew Chechens were just freedom-loving Estonians trying to break out of the Soviet Empire.
This is a geography lesson that you have had 500 years to learn, and we are learning on the fly.
During the Cold War, Turkey and Saudi Arabia were key allies for us, and key ambassadors to the muslim world. For our dealings with the muslim world we have tended over the years to rely on their view. So, again, as the Turks and Saudis supported such groups as the Chechens and other restive groups in Central Asia, and the Bosnians and Kosovars in Europe, we were inclined to accept their view.
So it was only after the Chechens gained de facto independence in the mid-nineties under Yeltsin, and yet continued to launch attacks into neighboring territories, that we began to change our view of them.
And it was only after 911 that we began to question what we had done in the Balkans. Because of Cold War sensibilities we have never thought for a moment of Serbs as being Orthodox Christians, but rather as communists and ex-communists. That is changing now, but it is rather late.
Once a policy has been laid down, it is very difficult to change course. This is especially true when our war against Islamists depends upon some of the very countries that are supporting the Bosnian and Kosovar muslims. So, since the damage is already done, its very easy in the interest of maintaining relations with the muslim countries we still depend upon, to prefer to leave things as they are in the Balkans, if at all possible, push the problem off onto the Europeans, if at all possible, and hope for the best.
We are starting to figure out that we were lied to, and we lied to ourselves, about the Balkans, but we can only extract ourselves from this mess bit by bit. Turning this ship around is going to be very difficult.
I can predict that if the Serbs fight again, we will not take sides against them again. Its one thing to fight on behalf of muslim freedom fighters against Serb communists, its another to fight our Serb allies in the War on Terror on behalf of Islamists. The world has changed for us since 911 and since Beslan. Sadly it didn't change soon enough to do the Serbs any good during their wars in the nineties.
And no, we will never admit we were wrong. We will just slowly, ever so slowly, shift gears in the Balkans. We are beginning to see the Serbs in the same light we see the Israelis, so thats good for you. We sympathise with the Israelis, we love them in fact. Unfortunately, the Europeans see you in the same light, and thats bad for you. Our sympathies for muslims have pretty much worn out. The rest of Europe isn't quite there yet.
Dear Marron,
The compunction in your heart is truly heart warming, and perhaps your statement is a beginning of the turning of the tide; where the true understanding of what is happening to the Orthodox in Serbia is going to come to light. The Lord does not leave his elected to be slandered and you are the beginning of those, once blinded, who are beginning to see the light. Please turn this understanding into action, into active support for the Serbian Peoples. Our D's and R's may be behind this effort to destroy the Serbian peoples but the American citizenry, can use their God-given free will to express another approach to this World crisis.
Please go to http://www.thepetitionsite.com/takeaction/905791187 and sign the petition, and encourage your American Friends to sign the petition as well. Although we've reached the 50,000 goal, we (a Serb friend in Seattle who has also been a great support is distributing petition to friends and family here and abroad) decided we wanted to continue to add names to it, in order that the pressure of the voice of the people continues to grow. The voice is predominantly Serbian, we should match those numbers with Americans who hearts are being touched by God to see clearly into this issue. We have sent the petition with 50,000 signatures and are planning to send it again when it reaches 100,000. With this support the Serbian people will see that American citizenry is in support of them, in the same spirit that the Serbian citizenry was an ally to us in WWII.
Also now is the time to call your congressmen and to write letters. Pre-formed letters can be accessed at
http://www.Serbianna.com and at serbian unity congress: suc.org. Urge your congressman to become a member of the Congressional Serbian Caucas in Washington. You can get a packet from Serbian Unity Congress showing how to go about this. I have found it very helpful. Also go to American Council for Kosovo to see what further ways you can help.
Also please go to Digg.com on Monday 2 of April and vote for the article written by Nebosja Malic from Antiwar.com. We are trying to counter the disinformation that the media continues to spew in support of this atrocity against the Serbian peoples. Word of Mouth is the only way now to counter it, and while we have freedom of the internet, we should use this medium to spread Truth.
May God Bless You On Your Journey.
I am so glad to see your testimony...for some time I was very worried if the citizens of the United States would ever see past the fog.
That was a beautiful response, marron. Thank you, it really helps for us to see it from the other side!
BB
Interesting comments.
Ummm...How do you think the current status of General Mladic will play in the future roll of events?
Just thought I would ask a "sharp question."
I don't think I'm the one to attempt that one. There are limits to my ability to prognosticate.
I prefer to remain within the realm of opinion, where mine is as good as anyone's.
Its a mistake in general terms to try to criminalize war, or to try to adjudicate it. I am in favor of war-trials in the immediate aftermath of a war, as these have a specific military purpose. At the end of hostilities, there are inevitably some war prisoners, usually the ones in a leadership role, who must never walk free. With those you hold a brief hearing to document the reasons you are going to hang them, and then you hang them.
Saddam and his inner circle are a good example. You can't have these guys walking around free, sipping tea and planning revolutions. So you drop them at the end of a rope.
These are not "trials" in the civilian sense of the word. There is no possibility of an acquittal. You aren't trying to decide "if" your enemy is guilty, probably by his own law he is not guilty of anything. But for military and political reasons he will always be a threat, so you document it and execute him.
But the idea of arresting war leaders years after a war, and then trying them in a civilian court with civilian rules of evidence strikes me as futile and even dangerous. War is by its very nature extra-legal. War is the circumstance that exists when normal legal institutions are insufficient to resolve a conflict. When a conflict is such that cops, judges, subpoenas, and men with briefcases are incapable of saving you, you call out the men with guns, who go and settle it directly.
Peace comes when the facts of the ground have been re-arranged such that a return to rule of law is possible. To try to apply normal peacetime law to the period in which law was inadequate to the conflict is to misunderstand both law and war.
To try to use law to force a return to status quo ante, to the status that existed prior to the war is also a mistake, as that is the circumstance that led to war in the first place. Peace comes by changing the status quo, not by returning to it.
I think its a mistake to encourage the conceit on the part of Dutch and Belgian lawyers that they have any jurisdiction over wars in which they themselves did not serve. The idea that a Dutch lawyer is going to impose justice on two warring parties is silly. Where are the Dutch regiments that are going to enforce this law? So they are forced to resort to bribery to get jurisdiction. The government of Serbia is alternately bribed and blackmailed to hand over its offending commanders. That might work with a small country that wants badly to enter the EU, but its hardly a legal standard. If the Dutch start seizing American commanders or Secretaries of Defense, I would consider it an act of war, although probably the Democratic Party would agree at least where Rumsfeld is concerned.
I don't know what is going to happen to Mladic. But my general belief is that wars should be settled on the battlefield, and that they can not be resolved in Dutch courts. If you capture a Mladic and hang him right at the end of the war, fine. But to go through a circus of a trial the way they did with Milosevic, and in the end basically acquit him posthumously, just shows the basic silliness of the whole thing.
["If you capture a Mladic and hang him right at the end of the war, fine."]
Okay, fine...Now do the same to Oric!
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