In this time of legitimate concern about counterproductive government spending and skyrocketing budget deficits, the mainstream media has been full of complaints about the amount of money and lives spent on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. In addition, more and more of the right-wing blogosphere have pointed out the folly of the Wilsonian “nation-building” strategy promoted by George W. Bush, which is an attempt to implant “democracy” in Islamic lands where most of the population considers it their obligation as Muslims to live under totalitarian shari’a law.
Curiously absent is any mention of the even greater folly of our involvement in the Balkans. Perhaps the most insane episode of that involvement is that in which the US arm-twisted NATO and, later, the EU, into intervening on the side of the Muslim jihadi-narcoterrorists in Kosovo. The KLA (under whatever names they are calling themselves now) were, and are, a terrorist drug gang that doubles as the local arm of al Qaeda in and around Kosovo, not all that much different from the Taliban in Afghanistan. The proper response to a terrorist enemy such as the KLA or the Taliban is never to negotiate with it or to attempt to reform it or to appease it, but to defeat and eliminate it.
The organ theft scandal – and the ongoing coverup of that scandal – offers proof that Washington’s policy in the Balkans is not only wasteful and counterproductive, but also truly evil. There are spiritual consequences to what we do, both as individuals and as members of a body politic. It is obvious to me that the current economic and social malaise in both Europe and North America has a great deal to do with their respective governments’ complicity with Muslim wrongdoers in the Balkans, their acceptance of a flood of Muslim immigration in the decade that followed, and their willful failure to do anything whatsoever to protect Christians, Jews, and other non-Muslims.
The Obama Administration and the US State Department, with their obvious Muslim sympathies, will never backtrack on their pro-Muslim Balkans policy, unless they are forced to do so. It is time to let our elected officials know that it is their duty to do exactly that.
Empowering the Body Snatchers: Washington’s Appalling Kosovo Policy
(h/t: Sparta)
The Skeptics
Ted Galen Carpenter | December 30, 2010The revelations just keep coming, and the evidence mounts that Washington’s policy since the mid-1990s regarding Kosovo has been stubbornly obtuse. The latest blot on America’s diplomacy is an investigative report for the Council of Europe released just before Christmas confirming long-standing rumors that the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) was involved in the trafficking of human organs, including killing Serbian prisoners to harvest their kidneys and other organs. Two aspects of the report were especially damning. First, the author and lead investigator was Swiss Senator Dick Marty, a highly respected champion of human rights. Second, the report specifically named Kosovo Prime Minister Hashim Thaci as an accomplice in those atrocities—as well as being involved in other criminal activities, including drug trafficking and politically motivated murders. Thaci, of course, has vehemently disputed the Marty report, but people who have followed his career since his guerrilla days, when he was known as “The Snake,” find the allegations all too credible.
This thoroughly distasteful situation might be a parochial issue if it were not for the high-profile role that the United States and its leading NATO allies played in the two-stage process of securing Kosovo’s independence from Serbia. During the first stage in the mid and late 1990s, Clinton administration officials and their cheerleaders in Congress, the think tank community, and the news media portrayed the KLA’s secessionist war as a stark melodrama featuring noble Albanian Kosovars and their evil Serb oppressors. The most notorious expression of that view was Senator Joseph Lieberman’s assertion that the United States and the terrorist KLA shared the same goals and values.
That grotesque oversimplification of a bitter ethnic struggle eventually led to a NATO air war against Serbia in 1999, which killed well over 1,000 Serbian civilians, and a subsequent NATO-led military occupation of Kosovo under the nominal auspices of the United Nations. Stage two of the amputation of the province from a now fully democratic Serbia was the decision by the United States and the leading European Union powers to recognize Kosovo’s unilateral declaration of independence in early 2008.
[…]
U.S. and other Western policy makers persist in portraying the Kosovo intervention as a great success. But Kosovo is an economically dysfunctional international ward with an unemployment rate exceeding 45 percent. Indeed, the legal economy—absent the extensive financial inputs from foreign would-be nation builders—is scarcely relevant at all. Instead, political corruption is rampant, and the country is now a haven for various mafia criminal enterprises. The Marty report merely lifts the lid on one aspect of an odious situation that has gone on for more than a decade.Governments are notoriously reluctant to acknowledge being responsible for a major policy blunder. But the United States and its principal NATO partners need to make such an admission regarding Kosovo. Pretending that the policy has been justified, much less that it has been successful, will not make the unpleasant reality go away.
Originally published on 1389 Blog.
