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| Return to: Left History: a digital archive | Return to: Say no to imperialist wars! | Return to: NATO-Yugoslav War Internet Resources |
A tot set out to imitate his big brother after overhearing him boast of his teen-age prowess dating girls in his car.
So he coaxed the little girl next door into taking a ride in his new red wagon. He pulled her down the block and around the corner and then lisped his brother's line:
"Put out or det out"
She replied, "OK, I put out."
"Oh, Dod," he moaned, "what I do now?"
After trumpeting their conquest of Yugoslavia, the braggarts of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization today find themselves in the shoes of the little boy with the red wagon. Oh, God, what do they do now?
The answer is nothing . . . nothing that's going to work, anyway.
Tidying up after a war is already proving more tedious and thwarting than waging it from five miles up in the air with no troops on the ground. It threatens also to be even more costly, and not just in dollar amounts.
Every new report out of Kosovo illustrates what an absolute pluperfect cock-up the victorious powers have on their hands, just as Secretary of State Madeleine Albright was warned over and over again.
The 39 nations that managed after 78 days and nights of bombing to defeat a lone Balkan nation with no active allies -- without accomplishing a single one of their announced war aims -- have recently concluded their first "what do we do now?" meeting in Sarajevo, which is conveniently in Bosnia, not Serbia where the messes made by the war languish, mocking them.
They decided to begin pouring billions into such vague concepts as "rebuilding" and "economic development" of the Balkans. Only one thing was clear; it won't be the last such conference. You could almost hear Arnold Schwarzenegger intoning, "I'll be baa-aack . . . with money." It'll be a bundle, too. Taxpayers will be running a tab for decades.
What's the point in all this?
To put back together the pieces to which NATO bombs blew so much of the Serbian infrastructure? Apparently not. President Clinton says not a dime goes to helping Serbia until it ousts its elected butt-head, Slobodan Milosevic. Who's to guarantee his successor would be any less butt-headed?
No one has ever disputed that Balkan states on the periphery of Yugoslavia could stand a healthy infusion of economic help. Some are quivering, gibbering basket cases.
But it's been that way before Tony Blair, the British prime minister, and Clinton got their heads together and decided in their collective wisdom to launch a war on Yugoslavia and rewrite the NATO charter from a purely defensive alliance into an avowed aggressive instrument against other yet-unnamed targets of opportunity.
They didn't have to wait for a manufactured war to do good works in the Balkans if economic improvement was their goal all along.
No, what's motivating Clinton and Blair -- and thus NATO, which those two control -- is the same thing after the war that propelled them pell-mell into it in the first place: control of the economy of Europe.
It is an article of faith in their Third Way-New World dogma that they have discovered a deep truth unseen by mere mortals that economic control follows military dominance.
Well, yes and no. It worked for Adolf Hitler and Joseph Stalin until it stopped working. It worked with the Marshall Plan only because post-World War II Europe put in more resources than did the U.S.
The Balkans -- which resemble nothing so much as a sack full of unintroduced cats with their tails tied together -- are a whole different piece of work. They lack the resources to conduct their own economic salvation, but remain possessed of more than enough fratricidal stamina to engage in endless, mindless Hatfields-and-McCoys blood feuding.
And right at the heart of the Rubic's Cube of this ethnic swamp fester Serbia and Kosovo. For anything to work in the Balkans as a whole, it has to work first and foremost in the old Yugoslavia -- which means Serbia and Kosovo, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Slovinia and Croatia, Montenegro and Macedonia.
And those are just a few of the clawing, biting, spitting, hissing cats in the sack that Clinton and Blair have so recklessly chosen to adopt and tame.
Any child with a pail and scoop who has been to the beach could have warned those two. Sand castles look beautiful until the tide comes in.
Sand castles are precisely what Clinton and Blair, with the rest of NATO tagging along behind them, are proposing to construct in the oozing sand of the Balkans.
There is no way they can breeze in from outside and create any lasting structures atop the quicksand they have chosen to romp in.
Even the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, which has thrown away billions upon billions of taxpayers' dollars blindly trying -- with outstanding lack of success -- to "re-nourish" the American coastline contrary to what nature has in mind, wouldn't try such a hopeless stunt.
Well, nature is even more relentless in the Balkans, and has been making its insistent point for centuries. No one yet, including the awesome armies of the Nazis, has been able to separate those cats in the sack, let alone litter-box train them.
This game in the Balkans that Clinton and Blair are playing at -- and for which Americans mostly are paying -- won't work. The age-old conflicts will break out once again, as they always do.
When they do, things will be even worse than before. And whoever within NATO who has been left holding that sack will pay the price.
There is only one happy prospect to this entire Kosovo mess: It will spoil Clinton's and Blair's scheme for establishing Anglo-American hegemony over the rest of Europe, which they cannot pull off without having first digested what they've so foolishly bitten off in the Balkans.
Have they altogether stopped teaching history and geography of the Balkans in the schools of England as well as here?
James Duport didn't realize he was writing about Clinton and Blair when in 1660 he penned:
"Whom God would destroy He first sends mad."