Kosova Redux

Seth Ackerman SAckerman at FAIR.org
Mon Jan 29 12:29:48 PST 2001


As a valediction to this thread, I encourage anyone interested in U.S. Balkan policy to visit the website of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, the American news/propaganda service in Europe. RFE/RL's Southeast Europe service features the excellent Balkans Report, a twice-weekly series of reporting and commentary on the week's events on the Balkan peninsula. The report is at http://www.rferl.org/balkan-report/.

Especially check out the commentaries by editor Patrick Moore. These articles are an invaluable resource for insight into U.S. motives in the Balkans. The pieces are almost certainly cleared with State Department personnel (just like Voice of America). But since Balkan Report is not an official statement of U.S. policy, the authors are free to be much more open about what's really on their mind than the typical State Department press briefing.

So you have several big themes: (1) Kostunica is just as bad as Milosevic. The entire Serbian political culture is irredeemble for the forseeable future. Ignore Serbia and concentrate on making Kosovo and Montenegro independent.

(2) Those who do not see the wisdom of this view are either closet Milosevic symps or deluded hollow men who think they can put the Humpty-Dumpty of Yugoslavia back together again (a phrase often used).

(3) Depleted uranium scares, Racak massacre conspiracy theories, Rambouillet revisionism -- these are the insidious tools of the aforementioned hollow men.

(4) The chancelleries and foreign ministries of Europe are positively crawling with such deluded hollow men who busy themselves coddling Kostunica, ignoring the Kosovo Albanians, and bitching about the American hyperpower.

(5) The deadliest, most mortal sin of all is currently being contemplated by these Europeans: undermining NATO by building a separate European defense/foreign policy. The sheer folly of this monstrous plan was proven again and again in the '90's when the EU's incapability of dealing with the Balkan wars without American help exposed the charade of the "hour of Europe" -- yet out of pure bloody-mindedness, the blind Euros are at it again. When will they learn?

Of course, the report also has its share of insipid humanitarian rhetoric, but the real issues are laid out on the table in a franker way than almost anywhere else.

Seth



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