Ending the Balkan Quagmire at American Thinker

Julia Gorin

Ending the Balkan Quagmire at American Thinker

For the past eight years, I've been in a lonely place politically. I don't mean the kind of lonely that conservatives generally find themselves in. I'm talking about utter desolation, for there are just as few conservatives as liberals where I've been. One of the only non-Serbian Americans to do so, I watched with steady interest for the better part of a decade the clockwork predictability of the fallout from our forgotten Kosovo intervention, a bombing campaign against an emerging post-Communist democracy rooted in Judeo-Christian values--on behalf of tribalistic, blood-code-following nominal Muslims claiming oppression and no less than genocide and ethnic cleansing.

Watching the Albanians predictably move on to terrorize Macedonia within a few months of our intervention that would "contain" the conflict, and then watching Albanians turn their weapons on NATO peacekeepers within 18 months, I wondered what it would take to get a national discussion going about that huge, self-destructive debacle. What would it take to have the debate that, it must be said despite my hobby of mocking Europeans, the German public had in 2001 when it put its politicians' feet to the fire after learning the hoax that their country had been party to, thanks to a German documentary unapologetically titled "It Began with a Lie."

In sharp contrast to every other cynically reported war, this time not only were our peacenik presses on board, but conspicuously they didn't try to ingratiate us to the enemy perspective by letting us hear incessantly from the other side, as they're otherwise fond of doing. Something was off. Even the evolving "alternative media"-self-tasked with policing the mainstream press and usually very wary of "facts" coming from the mainstream media and of cause celebres--were either silent on this or on precisely the same page as the New York Times, with its Sontag yentas for the first time explaining the concept of "just war". I found that, aside from Serbian-Americans (and Serbian-Canadians), who would later describe 1999 as a surreality they observed as if outside themselves, the only other people who as a group understood that our action meant something awful for the free world were the Russian-Jewish community that I myself had come from-a cartoonishly patriotic and capitalistic immigrant group with less than zero feeling for "Mother Russia" (if we're talking about the 70s and 80s wave).

Every now and again, a glimmer of hope that the fraud would be revealed surfaced, first in March, 2000 with a Washington Post article titled "Was it a Mistake? We were Suckers for the KLA" and then in April, 2001, with a Toronto Sun article titled "The Hoax that Started a War". Now, I thought, the story of the century-a fabricated genocide and PR campaign starting a war-would finally "break."

But the silence persisted, and none of the rare newspapers giving the occasional op-ed space to the dissenting perspective was interested in actually investigating. Nothing changed in this regard after the attacks of September 11^th. Not even after a Washington Times article titled "Hijackers connected to Albanian terrorist cell" came out a week after 9/11, reading:

Albania is one of several places U.S. intelligence agencies are focusing their resources...Islamic radicals, including supporters of bin Laden, have been supporting Albanian rebels fighting in the region, including members of the Kosovo Liberation Army...KLA members have been trained at bin Laden training camps in Afghanistan...As of last year, the group operated a residence in Tirana, and the CIA has been pressing Albania's government to expel all associates of the Islamic terrorists.

Meanwhile, every one of my own articles attempting to expose the hoax-relegated to a small segment of the alternative media because of a near blackout on the subject everywhere else-dropped with a thud. As did an article coming out two months after 9/11, titled "Al Qaeda's Balkan Links"(which appeared only in the European edition of the Wall St. Journal). Same thing with a March 2002 National Post article titled "U.S. Supported al-Qaeda Cells during Balkan Wars, Fought Serbian Troops":

Osama bin Laden's al-Qaeda terrorist network has been active in the Balkans for years, most recently helping Kosovo rebels battle for independence from Serbia with the financial and military backing of the United States and NATO...In the years immediately before the NATO bombing of Yugoslavia in 1999, the al-Qaeda militants moved into Kosovo...to help ethnic Albanian extremists of the KLA mount their terrorist campaign against Serb targets in the region.

Even after another National Post article in 2004 by Canadian former UN General Lewis MacKenzie, titled "We Bombed the Wrong Side?", came out, Kosovo remained off the media's and public's radar-something that vested politicians were counting on

[SNIP]

LINK TO FULL ARTICLE

And a Blog Swarm too:

This article is all about how US and EU counterterrorism foreign policy went so horribly wrong. It explains how jihadist terrorism has succeeded in overrunning Europe and in attacking the US. It's particularly important for Americans to read this article, because it cites news stories from reputable sources that have had some exposure in Europe, but haven't made it into the US media.

So why am I asking for a blog swarm?

Exactly because this information isn't getting around in the US, and I want this story to get some exposure!

Why is this story being kept off the radar screen in the US?

Simple: It's a catalogue of errors and misdeeds that makes the US media conglomerates look bad, and the US government (i.e., nearly everyone on both sides of the aisle) look even worse. It reveals an ongoing foreign policy fiasco that makes the Bay of Pigs Invasion look like a victory by comparison. And it isn't just a fiasco for the government, it's a fiasco for the American and European public, because it has greatly increased everyone's vulnerability to jihadist terrorism.

What to do?

• Link to the original story on your blog.
• Ask everyone else you know to do the same.
• Publicize the story in any other legitimate way that you can think of.
• If you wish, post a comment here indicating where else this article is being publicized.

This story has been submitted to Digg as How US and EU counterterrorism foreign policy went so horribly wrong. We'll see how long it stays there before Digg's censors and bury brigade get to it, as recently happened with Foehammer's Anvil.

See Also:

A Balkan Base for Al Qaeda?


Milosevic Trial: Fair, Faked or Fantasy?


Serbian Network


Sorting Through the Lies of the Racak Massacre and other Myths of Kosovo

Systematic Destruction of Orthodox Churches and Cemeteries Continued in 2003

What has been the result of NATO military occupation of the Serbian province of Kosovo-Metohija? Kosovo Ombudsman Merek Nowicki announced the findings of his investigations on December 19, 2002. Nowicki concluded that Kosovo might become a "black hole" of human rights in Europe. UN Resolution 1244 was not being followed. Nowicki concluded that UNMIK was "not respecting human rights regulations established by international community." He found that the remaining Kosovo Serbs lived in Holocaust-style ghettos in Kosovo. The Serbian population has no human rights protections and is under daily pressure to leave Kosovo. What has US/NATO/ KFOR done to allow for the return of the 240,000 Serbian refugees expelled by the UCK in 1999? According to Nowicki, NATO and UNMIK have done absolutely nothing: "The possibility of a Serb return to urban areas is almost zero, because a minimum of conditions for their return have not been secured."