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it ignores the documentation that western military forces -- admittedly German and British, not US as far as I can tell -- were training the KLA in 1998

I don't profess to be an expert on the Balkans, so I'm not familiar with the evidence. Do you have a source?

Let's face it, the KLA has proven an embarrassment and is fast becoming a threat, so now it's expedient to pretend that the marriage was one of convenience instead of mutual lust for Serbian blood.

While I have a deep respect for Serbs and Serbia, I have never been able to understand the Serbian persecution complex. Nobody, outside the Balkans, has a lust for Serbian blood, with the possible exception of the Germans. Yet the Serbs continue to memorialize defeat and persecution by canonizing such events as their defeat to the Turks in 1389. Really, its been over six hundred years, get over it!

As for massacres, I'll pay attention when Messrs _card and Ranger show as much outrage over the mass graves in Afghanistan populated by Talibans who were suffocated by America's allies there.

Ok, I'll be consistent. I want to see General Abdulrashid Dostum punished for his crimes, just as I'd like to see punishment meted out to certain elements of the KLA and Serbian Army and police.

Here are several articles from the London Sunday Times about NATO countries’ pre-bombing sponsorship of the KLA. These were both placed on FR at the time of publication. The timing of these stories was more or less coincident, respectively, with the US-sponsored terrorists’ offensive in the Presevo region of Serbia, and the US-sponsored terrorists’ subsequent offensive in Macedonia. I inferred from that timing that the Euros were singing like canaries to show their displeasure with those developments.

This was published on December 3, 2000. You can find the entire article reprinted here. Unfortunately, the Times’ site doesn’t permit an archive search back that far.

AMERICAN intelligence agents have admitted they helped to train the Kosovo Liberation Army before Nato's bombing of Yugoslavia. The disclosure angered some European diplomats, who said this had undermined moves for a political solution to the conflict between Serbs and Albanians.

Central Intelligence Agency officers were ceasefire monitors in Kosovo in 1998 and 1999, developing ties with the KLA and giving American military training manuals and field advice on fighting the Yugoslav army and Serbian police.

When the Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE), which co-ordinated the monitoring, left Kosovo a week before air strikes began a year ago, many of its satellite telephones and global positioning systems were secretly handed to the KLA, ensuring that guerrilla commanders could stay in touch with Nato and Washington. Several KLA leaders had the mobile phone number of General Wesley Clark, the Nato commander.

European diplomats then working for the OSCE claim it was betrayed by an American policy that made air strikes inevitable. Some have questioned the motives and loyalties of William Walker, the American OSCE head of mission.

"The American agenda consisted of their diplomatic observers, aka the CIA, operating on completely different terms to the rest of Europe and the OSCE," said a European envoy.

The next is from March 18, 2001. It’s an excerpt; I don’t have the full article in my archives, but the relevant reference for our purposes is in the second paragraph. The original URL is: http://www.sunday-times.co.uk/news/pages/sti/2001/03/18/stifgneeu02001.html. However, that link now just takes you to the Times’ main page.

"Embarrassingly for Kfor, it emerged that two of the Kosovo-based commanders leading the Albanian push were trained by former British SAS and Parachute Regiment officers in the days when Nato was more comfortable with the fledgling Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA).

"A former member of a European special forces unit who accompanied the KLA during the Kosovo conflict said that a commander with the nom de guerre of Bilal was organising the flow of arms and men into Macedonia, and that the veteran KLA commander Adem Bajrami was helping to co-ordinate the assault on Tetovo. Both were taught by British soldiers in the secretive training camps that operated above Bajram Curri in northern Albania during 1998 and 1999.

'"The final irony of this is that Nato will be facing not only its own weapons but also its own tactics,' said the special forces soldier. 'And Nato simply can't handle a guerrilla war - the Albanians will beat them.'

'"Even backed by howitzers placed in the football stadium by the Macedonian army, the special police were no match for the rebel group, said to number no more than 300 yesterday, and found themselves pinned down by shooting from Kale and from three subordinate positions in a bewildering combination of crossfire.

As for your other comments, I underestimated you re the Afghan incident. Both you and I know, though, that any alleged crimes he committed will never be adjudicated in a US-backed tribunal. Concerning the Serbs’ persecution complex, the cause is precisely the neighbors in the Balkans, though the Germans and Austrians have a pretty sorry record there too. If the Serbs feel persecuted, perhaps there is justification – after all, their neighbors did try to exterminate them in the 1941-45 period. Looking strictly at Kosovo, my read is that the KLA’s goal was the eradication of Serbs (and other non-Albanians) and their culture there. The Serbs, having been on the receiving end of earlier Albanian attempts to do just that, fought back as if their continued existence in Kosovo depended on it. They were right. The advent of KLA rule under NATO/KFOR has extinguished Serb people and culture in Kosovo except in a few small and probably untenable pockets – a true genocide. I can’t blame the Serbs (I’m not one, BTW) for fighting the way they did, because the stakes for them were so high.