Once again being brave and breaking with Republican elite opinion on the Ukraine crisis, Andy McCarthy explains how Progressive policies led to this moment. Unlike the narrative that appeasement led to Russia’s annexation of Crimea, McCarthy makes the opposite argument. It was Tranzi progressive interventionist polices that encouraged Putin to annex Crimea.
In 1999 the US/NATO bombed Serbia to force them out of their province of Kosovo. This intervention was justified as humanitarian an defend by Progressives all over the world. The result was the installation of a Narco-terrorist regime with al-Qaeda links in Kosovo. Another result was the resentment in Russia over what was done to Serbia. Now Putin has turned the table and uses the example of Kosovo as justification for him jumping the shark by invading Crimea.
‘Your independence is irreversible, absolutely irreversible.” So declared Vice President Joe Biden, thrilling a parliamentary assembly in Pristina, Kosovo. These were still the early months of the Obama administration, and the vice president was touring the Balkans to take a victory lap in the breakaway Serbian territory whose independence he’d done so much to champion as an influential senator.
As Vladimir Putin tucks away Crimea, just as he clawed South Ossetia and Abkhazia back from Georgia five years ago, Kosovo is worth remembering. So is President Obama’s staunch support of Manuel Zelaya, the socialist would-be dictator Hondurans tried to rid themselves of back in 2009. With an unreconstructed Soviet imperialist eying more worlds to reconquer, one is constrained to ask whether the Beltway’s transnational progressives will ever be called to account for greasing the skids for him.
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But the Kosovo precedent — which, as National Review’s editors noted this week, is one that Putin wielded as a club against the West while storming Ukraine — is not solely, or even mostly, Obama’s fault. He was a bit player in the closing act of a debacle that tossed territorial integrity overboard when our bipartisan foreign-policy solons decided it was inconvenient to their trendy priorities. In this instance, it was about appeasing Islamic supremacists.
Kosovo was an overwhelmingly Albanian-Muslim province of the former Yugoslavia. It had sided with the Nazis in World War II and later come under Communist domination. The mutual hatred between the Kosovar Muslims and Orthodox Christian Serbs resulted in centuries of dueling atrocities and efforts by each side to wipe out the other.
In the Nineties, while straining for independence from the Serbs, Kosovo served as a safe haven for al-Qaeda and affiliated terrorist groups. Like contemporary “rebels” in Syria and Libya, the Kosovo Liberation Army had moderate Muslim elements but also worked cooperatively with the jihadists. Naturally, the separation of Kosovo from Serbia became a cause célèbre of the Muslim Brotherhood and the global jihad. As night follows day, it also became fashionable at the soirées where transies convince themselves that Islamic supremacists will surely moderate if given the responsibilities of governance and will like us better if we support their access to power.
[….]
But the Kosovo precedent — which, as National Review’s editors noted this week, is one that Putin wielded as a club against the West while storming Ukraine — is not solely, or even mostly, Obama’s fault. He was a bit player in the closing act of a debacle that tossed territorial integrity overboard when our bipartisan foreign-policy solons decided it was inconvenient to their trendy priorities. In this instance, it was about appeasing Islamic supremacists.
Kosovo was an overwhelmingly Albanian-Muslim province of the former Yugoslavia. It had sided with the Nazis in World War II and later come under Communist domination. The mutual hatred between the Kosovar Muslims and Orthodox Christian Serbs resulted in centuries of dueling atrocities and efforts by each side to wipe out the other.
In the Nineties, while straining for independence from the Serbs, Kosovo served as a safe haven for al-Qaeda and affiliated terrorist groups. Like contemporary “rebels” in Syria and Libya, the Kosovo Liberation Army had moderate Muslim elements but also worked cooperatively with the jihadists. Naturally, the separation of Kosovo from Serbia became a cause célèbre of the Muslim Brotherhood and the global jihad. As night follows day, it also became fashionable at the soirées where transies convince themselves that Islamic supremacists will surely moderate if given the responsibilities of governance and will like us better if we support their access to power.
Andy McCarthy once again refuses to go along with the Republican Party’s narrative on Crimea an gives the background on what led to this crisis. Progressive interventionist policies have given justification for others to do their own interventions. Before anyone dismisses what Andy McCarthy has wrote, keep in mind he has been right about events like the Arab Spring. Do not drink the Tranzi Progressive kool-aid on foreign issues.
Libya which was another case of Progressive nation building, is a failed state 3 years after Qaddafi was overthrown by NATO and Libyan Islamists.
TRIPOLI, Libya (AP) — At the heart of the Libyan capital, the open-air Fish Market was once a place where residents went to buy everything from meat and seafood to clothes and pets. Now it’s Tripoli’s biggest arms market, with tables displaying pistols and assault rifles. Ask a vendor, and he can pull out bigger machine guns to sell for thousands of dollars.
Libya, where hundreds of militias hold sway and the central government is virtually powerless, is awash in millions of weapons with no control over their trafficking. The arms free-for-all fuels not only Libya’s instability but also stokes conflicts around the region as guns are smuggled through the country’s wide-open borders to militants fighting in insurgencies and wars stretching from Syria to West Africa.
The lack of control is at times stunning. Last month, militia fighters stole a planeload of weapons sent by Russia for Libya’s military when it stopped to refuel at Tripoli International Airport on route to a base in the south. The fighters surrounded the plane on the tarmac and looted the shipment of automatic weapons and ammunition, Hashim Bishr, an official with a Tripoli security body under the Interior Ministry, told The Associated Press.
Progressive foreign policy is a failure.
Update: Russia is throwing Kosovo back at the US and NATO.
MOSCOW (Reuters) – Russian television blasted viewers with 15-year-old footage of NATO bombing raids, burning buildings and wounded people in Yugoslavia on Monday to step up a media campaign against the West over the Crimea crisis.
State television and newspapers used the anniversary of the start of the bombing campaign to depict the West as hypocritical for saying Crimea has no right to secede from Ukraine when NATO used force to help Kosovo escape Slobodan Milosevic’s clutches.
A special program on state TV called “The Serbian Tragedy: 15 Years” hammered home Russia’s message that the United States and NATO are to blame for redrawing global borders, encouraging separatism and flouting international law.
Illegal actions come back to haunt you. The US/NATO’s illegal war on Serbia has now come back to bite them in the Crimea.
Tags: Andrew McCarthy, Crimea, Ukraine
