Posted on 02/22/2008 8:13:08 PM PST by processing please hold
The West went into Yugoslavia to prevent ethnic cleansing, and ended up presiding over it
Can’t blame the Serbs for protesting, which is what they do en masse as I’m writing this — not that it’s likely to do them any good. After the province of Kosovo seceded from Serbia on Monday, the major Western liberal democracies stumbled over each other in their eagerness to put the stamp of good housekeeping on it. By now a dozen nations or more, including the U.K. and U.S., have recognized the breakaway province of ethnic Albanian Muslims as an independent country.
The apprentice sorcerers who precipitated Kosovo’s secession by launching a bombing campaign against Slobodan Milosevic’s rump Yugoslavia in the last year of the last century, are now on the face-saving mission of pretending that this was what they wanted all along. It wasn’t. Their ideal Kosovo was a multicultural Elysium, where Serb and Albanian Kosovars, miraculously reconciled by the bombs of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), lived happily ever after.
Such pipe dreams were shared by the stubborn innocents of the boomer generation, people whose consciousness was shaped by the hallucinogens and chimeras of the 1960’s, from Britain’s Tony Blair to U.S. president Bill Clinton, not excluding Canadian prime minister Jean Chrétien and various luminaries in his cabinet.
In 1999, America’s least martial and most libidinous president came close to declaring that NATO was making love in the Balkans, not war. The allies were bombing Yugoslavia to put an end to regimes that persecute people on the basis of “how they worship or who their parents were,” Bill Clinton said.
Yes — a few wars earlier. Persecuting people for “who their parents were” describes Hitler deporting Jews to Auschwitz. It doesn’t describe ethnic Albanians trying to be masters in what they view as their own house on a collision course with Serbs who share the same illusions of mastery and ownership.
Jews in Nazi-occupied Europe didn’t contest an inch of any nation’s soil. Autonomy? Independence? Most didn’t even look for a separate identity. Jews were the victims of a lunatic racial hatred. The two ethnic groups in Kosovo have been the victims of their own resolve to set up exclusive rule over the same piece of real estate.
Is it a surprise that in the end there was no multicultural Kosovo? The West went into Yugoslavia to prevent ethnic cleansing, and ended up presiding over it. Within five years of being bombed into submission, nearly 200,000 Serbs were “cleansed” from the province. Liberals were getting concerned. In the Toronto Star Gwynne Dyer raised the spectre of three “disasters” (his word) brewing in post-war Kosovo: One: instead of NATO’s war-aim of ethnic harmony, the Serb minority will be cleansed. Two: this will discredit what was supposed to be a new kind of war, fought for human rights, not national ambitions. Three: Kosovo will end up in the hands of “the worst elements of the KLA (Kosovo Liberation Army), people who have no mercy for Serbs and no love for democracy.”
Hmm. Not a pretty picture, but “disaster” denotes an unexpected calamity. The developments Dyer described were foreseeable from the word go. They were entirely, even boringly, predictable. Indeed, left-leaning liberals soon progressed from “disastrous” to “inevitable” when describing them.#
After the war, the novelist Salman Rushdie wrote that “[British prime minister Tony] Blair’s ideal Kosovo is a dream.” He quoted reliable sources saying that “there are few Serbs left in Kosovo, and it is probably impossible to protect them.” Rushdie’s conclusion was that “Mr. Blair and his colleagues should now support the construction of the free, ethnically Albanian entity that seems like a historical inevitability.”
But had an “ethnically Albanian entity” become a “historical inevitability” only after the war, when Rushdie discovered it? Or was it perhaps a historical inevitability from much earlier on — say, when 16 nations in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, the world’s strongest military alliance, decided to wage war on its behalf?
Few people, other than the graying flower-children who comprise the West’s power elite, thought that reconciliation and power-sharing between the two sides in Kosovo was possible. Cultural mosaics work for American-style immigrant societies — maybe. Trying to impose multicultural models on regions of ethnic nation-states is obtuse or arrogant. Or both.
NATO-types who dispatched warplanes over the skies of Serbia in 1999 had essentially pulled a mini-Hitler. Some 60 years earlier, the Fuhrer marched into Czechoslovakia to grab its “Kosovo,” the ethnic German Sudetenland. The Nazis saw nothing wrong with dismembering a sovereign country to satisfy their ambitions as ethnic nationalists. After all, they were Nazis. Their war crime had some internal logic.
For NATO’s left-leaning bien-pensants, the equivalent might have been to carve out some multicultural republic of vegetarian non-smokers in the Balkans. Still a war crime, but what the hell. That wasn’t what NATO did, though. The great Western alliance for multicultural values became a Rent-An-Air-Force for ethnic nationalists. An Albanian Muslim Kosovo carved out of Serbia, standing for no Western values or interest, encouraging ethnic secessionism all over the world: voilà, NATO’s legacy. Not a very big bang for the buck.
The kid gets ahead of himself, and deigns he is ready to wield the power of the magic..under the spell of his own HUBIS, and disregarding the warnings of his mentor that he is unready.
Long story short: the apprentice gums up the planet.
Clinton , et Ali, are the apprentices; the mentor is history: common sense, unfettered by delusion.
That help?
HUBRIS
Honest...I hit 'post' only once!
:) Ahh, a new day. Maybe I’ll be more on the ball today.
I had to do a double take on the name too when I first saw the story.
I just thought I'd put them all together on one post. :)
I’ve done it myself, more than I care to remember. lol
ooops.
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