Bored out of my mind, working night shift, so I was reading Stars and Stripes, and oen of the cover stories was "Kosovo: 5 Years Later" It got me to thinking, seeing as I've been here for a good part of that 5th year, just why America got involved in the first place. And how some of the reasons for getting us in here, just didn't seem good enough to go into Iraq, and how some of the reasons people claimed were behind us going into Iraq were good reasons to stay out of Kosovo.



To elaborate a bit; a Basic timeline leading up to the conflict in 1999

http://www.cnn.com/SPECIALS/1998/10/kosovo/timeline/ (http://www.cnn.com/SPECIALS/1998/10/kosovo/timeline/)



So, Slodoban Milosevic in a move to put down any Albanian insurgency, begins a genocidal war against the ethnic Albanians. Literally hundreds of thousands of ethnic albanians flee their homes in terror, many being killed and left in mass graves. Serbian troops moving through the province raping, murdering, and looting the cities as they went.

Obviously with the huge influx of refugees into neighboring countries it gains international attention.

March 1999 Enter the US, and the rest of NATO. We try to negotiate for the autonomy of kosovo, Milosevic refuses so we move in and begin bombing the bejesus out of Serbia.

In hindsight we found more than enough evidence of war crimes and other attrocities to warrant the military action. But before I remember people debating on wethter or not we should do anything at all, as these people have been fighting forever it seems. Many of the arguments, especially by the left were that we had zero economic interest in the region, and that if we were going to intervene here, why not in other areas of the world too?

The first half of the question, in my opinion is just stupid. Of course something should be done, genocide is bad, duh.

The second half though, is interesting, if we were going to intervene here, why not in Africa, why not in other places in the world?

Two possible options come to mind for me, (as well as others but these seem to fit pretty well)

1: Clinton wanted to pull attention away from himself

2: The political enviroment here was much different from most African countries, and the other "hot spots" in the world, and much easier to deal with. Lob a few cruise missiles, and move troops in when the dust settles.

So, after the succesful bombing campaign that left most of the Serbian military in shambles and definitely not in a position to defy us, we moved in NATO forces.

Now 5 years later, Things are mostly calm, but the issue of Kosovo's independance is still an issue. What I think it's going to come down to is, either the EU, is going to have to make an exception to the idea of not changing international borders again, or they won't.

If they don't as soon as we're gone, or there is a small enough NATO force here, Serbia is coming back in. They want Kosovo back (why I'll never know)
It's gonna be one hell of a civil war when it happens.

But for now, things look promising, schools are full of children, both serb, and albanian. They live in relative peace. With the exception of the March riots there hasn't really been any violence beyond basic crime.

To relate it to the war in Iraq, compare Saddam with Milosevic. Both have murdered thousands of innocents through their actions, troops, and police. Both raped, tortured innocents, and oppressed the basic freedoms, everyone on Earth should be entitled too.

This time when the idea of war came up, the same people who protested going into the balkans because of a lack of financial interest suddenly want to blame the whole invasion of Iraq on nothing but financial gain.

We had a man who needed to be removed from power, at the time our intelligence also pointed to him having weapons of terrible power, and ties to various terrorist groups. Even if there hadn't been any inkling of WoMD there is no reason he shouldn't have been taken out.

But this time, it's not a video game war, watching the camera attached to a cruise missile, so all of a sudden doing the right thing isn't so popular with the policy makers in Washington. Soldiers dying is never a good thing, but does that mean that we shouldn't do the right thing?

Good point; well said.

'Serbia is coming back in. They want Kosovo back (why I'll never know)'

- "The Balkans" by Misha Glenny.
Unless you've read this tomb of a book, it's hard to understand any of the extremely complicated past that exists in the region.

Well, maybe a little more accurate would be to say, I know why, but I sure as hell don't understand why.

Maybe with about 20 years worth of infrastructure, it'd be "worth it", but right now, it'd be like two kids playing king of the hill in a dump.

Yes Halo, because we're all incapable of looking into the same things the author did when he wrote that book 4 years ago.

I'll save you the trouble of reading it: The author says it's our fault the Balkans are in the state they are in, not their centuries long ethnic conflicts.

Great book.

(yes, that was sarcasm)

To get back on topic, yes, we(as in the rest of the world, or even just NATO) should do the right thing. We should do the right thing in Africa too. Most of all the UN needs to either help us do it or get out of our way.

Oh, and no more accepting oil bribes please...

That isn't "helping".

ROFL

You're just beyond pathetic, on every subject Crist0.

Maybe after 3 years and 10 different idiots, this broken record has just about worn me out.

Or maybe you're completely full of shit and you're finally becoming self-aware. Topic after topic all you say is "You idiots if you only were capable of being as smart as me." When it comes down to facts you're usually wrong.

Oh, right.

Yes, that's it.

Glad to see you admitting it. It'll take some time but you can be deprogrammed I'm sure. The most important thing is to begin using your brain to reason and think for yourself.

'begin using your brain to reason and think for yourself.'

- It's so ironic, it's almost..metallic.

Well I hope you at least try. For your own sake.

Am I wrong Halo?

Is that not the central theme of his book, that the Balkan problems are to be placed at the foot of the western world's powers instead of their own internal conflicts?

It's funny because you quote Misha Glenny but he agrees that Europe criticizes America for action yet takes no action themselves and offer no better alternatives.

'Is that not the central theme of his book, that the Balkan problems are to be placed at the foot of the western world's powers instead of their own internal conflicts?'

- Not really, no.
Though a theme, definately.
You tend to forget that the Balkans was a playground for the Great Powers. Russia, Ottomans, Austro-Hungary..
There wasn't an independent state between the frontier of Austria and the lands of the Ottomans for a hundred bloody years. And I mean "bloody" literally.
If the Russians weren't wiping their arse on Moldavia, then the Hungarians were shitting all over Serbia.

So yes - I'm thinking Balkan conflicts have a *little* to do with outside influence.

Of course, age old emnities and ethnic clashes constitute the majority of problems.

Glenny gives a perspective - and undeniably awsome history - of the Balkans in a way that is often discarded, as you had done above, with a sneer. But from you, Crist0, I'd expect no less.

http://www.bosnia.org.uk/bosrep/decfeb00/glenny.cfm

Haven't read the book and understand very little about the Balkans, although I dated a Macedonian girl and a Polish girl :) I can firmly say judging from those two that Eastern European women are obsessed with money, and that they drink way too much.




And yet the thesis, though seldom directly expressed, sets the tone of the whole book: the people of the Balkans often seem curiously passive creatures here, their destiny determined by others. So, for example, the political process by which Slovenes, Croats and Serbs came together to declare their own state in November 1918 is not discussed, and the declaration of Albanian independence six years earlier is completely ignored: both states, it seems, were just created at the whim of outsiders.

More troublingly, Glenny's brief summary of the Bosnian war says almost nothing about Milosevics active role, both in preparing the conflict and in committing his own armed forces to the `ethnic cleansing' campaign. As for Kosova in 1999, it is perhaps predictable that Glenny should portray Milosevic as the passive victim here, but his bland statement that the Yugoslav leader responded by `directing hundreds of thousands of refugees into Albania, Macedonia and Montenegro' strikes me as painfully inadequate in its choice of verb, rather as if a mass of people who just happened to have left their homes had been given assistance by traffic policemen. If Glenny's political judgment is not always reliable, he should at least receive credit for emphasising that conflicts in the Balkans do have political causes, and are not just upwellings of congenital violence. His finger-wagging at those Westerners who have talked about a `Balkan mentality' and have portrayed the region as a place of permanent murder and mayhem is a useful corrective to many previous writings (including, it must be said, some of his own). And yet one cannot help noticing that when his narrative pauses to give special attention to a particular event or episode, again and again it is murder and mayhem on which he has chosen so lovingly to focus - assassinatory conspiracies in Bosnia, mass-murder in Smyrna, the shooting of Radic in the Belgrade parliament, the annihilation of Jews in the Second World War, and so on. Some of these events were the product of external forces, some of internal. What they have in common, therefore, is not that they prove or disprove his thesis, but that they tend to reinforce the very stereotype against which he so passionately warns his readers.

Not really, no.
Though a theme, definately.
You tend to forget that the Balkans was a playground for the Great Powers

So no, that isn't the central theme of the book yet you turn around and say "but, but it really is that way!".

Coming from you Halo, I expect no more.