This reign of terror is not overlooked by the Western media. Instead, it is excused and even celebrated: the over 1200 Serbs abducted and since the “liberation” are routinely described as victims of “revenge killings” – as if their murderers were merely instruments of justice, however rough, and therefore somehow admirable. What has happened to Kosovo since the great “victory” brings to mind a famous Weekly Standard editorial that gleefully anticipated how we would get to “crush Serb skulls” – if only Clinton would listen to Bill Kristol (and Hillary) and start bombing. Kristol’s wish has come true. Certainly Hillary say can that Bill didn’t let her down this time. The skulls of Serbs are literally being crushed by the mobs that encircle them if they even so much as speak Serbo-Croatian in the streets of Pristina – as several unfortunates, including a few foreigners, discovered soon after “liberation.” Are you happy, Bill?
REIGN OF ERROR
The number of murdered and missing Serbs, to date, is 1,282 – more than half the total number of bodies found in Kosovo’s much-touted “mass graves.” The NATO-crats, you remember, initially claimed that the Serbs were engaged in a program of “genocide.” At the height of the war hysteria, CNN and other news outlets were routinely reporting claims of 100,000-plus Kosovars killed at the hands of “Milosevic’s willing executioners.” This was halved before the last bombs fell on Belgrade, and further revised downward to 10,000. To date, the exhumation of these alleged “mass graves” has yielded a little over 2,000 bodies, total – including Serbs, Gypsies, and others considered enemies by the KLA. This is the Kosovar “holocaust” descried by the “humanitarian” saviors of the Balkans and their brainwashed supporters.
SO WHAT ELSE IS NEW?
While most of Kosovo is ethnically cleansed of Serbs, they persist in the north, the site of their most sacred and ancient shrines, and it is there that the battle lines have formed. The city of Mitrovica has become a Serbian Alamo, with the Kosovar majority moving on the last Serb neighborhoods, held back by French troops – who found themselves under Albanian sniper fire the other day. The “peacekeepers” arrested some 46 residents of Mitrovica, 45 Albanians and a lone Serb. But don’t worry, we’ll get around to the Serbs soon enough: “Yesterday was a bad day for the Albanians,” said Mario Morcone, Mitrovica’s UN overseer, “but that will not be all.” So what else is new? The crimes of the KLA against the Serbian minority have so far been carried out with the full acquiescence of NATO’s army of occupation. As their forensic investigators comb Kosovo for scant evidence of a “genocide” that was said to have victimized tens of thousands, the NATO-crats are presiding over the creation of an ethnically pure Kosovo state – the government of which is now beginning to assert itself.
READING BETWEEN THE LINES
The New York Times described the lament of the French general whose troops were caught in the crossfire: “General de Saquui de Sannes, who has blamed the violence on both sides, said individuals were instigating attacks purposely to escalate the violence and to destroy the last multiethnic town in Kosovo where Serbs and Albanians are living side by side, if uneasily.” But what can this mean in the context of a Kosovo almost entirely “cleansed” of Serbs? If “extremists” are determined “to destroy the last multiethnic town in Kosovo,” then surely the General must mean Albanian extremists, for they are in power and in the majority. He confesses he is “worried that we may be in the process of an escalation of intolerance.” On whose part, he does not say – but clearly only one ethnic faction in Kosovo is in a position to exhibit intolerance, and that is the Party of Intolerance itself, known as the KLA.
THE PROVOCATEURS
Founded by student visionaries who combined the doctrines of Albanian Communist dictator Enver Hoxha with a homegrown pan-Albanian messianism, the KLA has never moderated its program of ethnic particularism and militant expansionism. In Mitrovica, these two themes merge seamlessly and logically. As they launch a campaign to drive the last of the Serbs out of the country, the KLA also hopes to provoke Milosevic and the hardliners in Belgrade – and the north is the most likely battleground. Using NATO as a shield, KLA provocations will play a key role in the next war, just as they did in the last:.
A PAUSE FOR STATION IDENTIFICATION
From the NATO-crats’ point of view, this is far preferable to contending with the militant Albanians in the streets of Pristina. In the face of a KLA insurrection against NATO, the only alternative is to turn that anger and violence outward, against Milosevic and away from NATO. The only way to delay the inevitable clamor for Kosovo’s formal declaration of independence and the consolidation of the KLA dictatorship is for the NATO-crats to go on to phase two of the war – which did not end with the signing of a cease-fire but only paused long enough for the US to elect a new Hegemon-in-chief.
COMPLAINT DEPARTMENT
As US sanctions bite deeply into Serbian flesh this bitterly cold winter, and yet another regional player – Austria – is demonized and isolated, the next President of the United States will have a great deal to do with whether or not the developing crisis explodes into war. And this brings me to a subject that occasionally comes up in letters, especially recently, which is why I spend so much time analyzing American politics. This usually comes from leftists, and all too many “libertarians” (i.e. free market leftists), who chafe at my praise for Pat Buchanan’s noninterventionism, praise they find entirely too effusive. After all, what does presidential politics have to do with foreign affairs?
HEAVY ON THE ITALICS
The obvious answer is: everything. The usurpation of the power to make war, reserved to Congress by the Constitution, has swelled the American presidency into an office far more exalted and powerful than that of any Roman Emperor. Compared to the original Caligula, the depraved aggressor who presently inhabits the White House exhibits his bloodlust on a far grander scale – a world scale. When we elect the President of the United States we are really electing the Emperor of the World. This is the job that John McCain is applying for, and if that doesn’t concern everyone who fears another war, then what will?
THE McCAIN THREAT
McCain has repeatedly said that he thought the Kosovo war ended too soon, that the US should have gone in and “finished the job” – presumably by occupying Belgrade and subjugating the entire country. Determined to avenge the nagging defeat of Vietnam, and caught up in his own megalomanic myth, President McCain would have us in a shooting war in the Balkans within months of his inauguration – and don’t think he would stop there.
LET HISTORY JUDGE
What fascinates me is the complete and utter silence on the vital matter of foreign policy in this presidential election: in spite of all that has happened, the endless interventions of the Clinton era and the ongoing carnage in Kosovo, we hear not a peep of criticism from the so-called “insurgents.” Bradley, the alleged liberal, who strives to be a latter day Adlai Stevenson, says not a word of criticism about the starvation tens of thousands of Iraqi children due to US-UN sanctions. This humanitarian – and profoundly human – gesture is left to “archconservative” Pat Buchanan. Documenting this inversion, this role-reversal on the question of war and peace in the age of globalization, is surely a major theme of this column, and reporting on this exciting new development is central to what Antiwar.com is all about. Hopefully this will suffice to answer some of my critics (who I thank for writing, and giving me material for a column). If not, then we shall have to let history judge whether or not American politics is the primary battlefield on which the fate of the world is decided.
