http://www.exilestreet.com/Columns/Gorin/20070718GorinSuccessful.html
EXILE STREET (USA)
The 'Successful War' We Lost In Kosovo
by Julia Gorin [pundit/comedian] 7/18/07
America has itself to blame for giving terrorism a toehold in Europe
Until an Albanian plot to massacre American soldiers at Fort Dix was foiled
in May, most eyes would glaze over at the mention of the obscure, forgotten
war zone of Kosovo, currently a UN protectorate whose 90%-plus
Albanian-Muslim majority is about to be handed independence from Serbia by
the international community. Few Americans understand that, between Kosovo
gaining independence and not, America's soul hangs in the balance.
Nor is it widely known that the explosives used in the Madrid and London
bombings, as well as those used in the recent attack on the U.S. embassy in
Greece, came from Kosovo, a state-in-progress led by the violent, jihadist,
narco-terrorist mafiosos of the Kosovo Liberation Army. The KLA was supposed
to have disbanded and disarmed after the 1999 conflict. Instead, it has
continued arming itself in the event that the province isn't granted
independence this year. It is a bin Laden-trained army of local clansmen,
Marxists, university students and jihadists with whom the United States
allied itself in 1999 against Serbia, an ally both in World War I and World
War II.
Contributor
Julia Gorin
Pundit, comedian and opinionist Julia Gorin is proprietor of
www.JuliaGorin.com and is a contributing editor to
www.JewishWorldReview.com..[go to Gorin index]
"Balkan "blowback" is a term often used today to frame a problem that has
not gone away but has grown more threatening and complex, with an
independent Kosovo looming darkly on the horizon of the global war on
terrorism. The blowback includes the Fort Dix plot, Madrid and the 2005
London Tube attack that was coordinated in Bosnia. It also includes the fact
that Kosovo, like Bosnia, has become a one-stop terror shop, a haven and
thoroughfare for wanted terror suspects, a source of "white al Qaeda"
volunteers, and a world capital in drug and slave traffic. This would be
reason enough to deny the majority-Muslim Albanians independence, which
they've
threatened to seize by force in any case.
It is hardly an exaggeration to say that a Serb a day is killed in Kosovo.
Amid two million Albanians, the 100,000 Kosovo Serbs who haven't yet fled,
or have fled and returned, live in barbed-wire-enclosed, KFOR-guarded
perimeters of a few kilometers-beyond which they dare not venture. When shot
at by Albanians, NATO troops are directed to flee rather than return fire,
which would draw attention to the province as unstable, exposing that there
is the threat of violence should Albanians not get what they want. It all
leads to the question, "Why are the people we went to war for shooting at
us?"
NATO troops in Kosovo, to which a contingent of 1,500 National Guardsmen was
added in November, know to avoid doing any real policing that could result
in a firefight. This is how Serbian nuns continue to be killed and how
Serbian property continues to be seized by Albanian squatters, how churches
and monasteries continue to be destroyed, as Saudi-financed mosques take
their place. In Kosovo, we didn't fight to end racism and ethnic cleansing,
as we were told. We enabled it.
Advocates for rewarding the violence with statehood tout the Kosovo
Albanians as being "the most pro-American lot" there is. It's a dubious
endorsement for America if ever there were one.
When good will is acquired by doing someone's bidding, pro-Americanism is
won for the wrong reasons, and the gratitude will turn on a dime the moment
we stop furthering that party's agenda. In Kosovo, that began happening as
early as 2000, when the Albanians started calling for the UN and NATO
"occupiers" to get out.
When the architects of our Kosovo war brag that not a single American life
was lost in what they describe as a "successful" war, the appropriate
response is "Not yet." The Albanian strategy in Kosovo has in fact been a
replay of the Oslo Accords: accept the infidel's help as long as it furthers
your territorial ambitions, once the West is no longer willing to carry you
to the next stage, turn on it. Our continued courtship of the "Kosovars" has
been a mere postponement of inevitable enmity.
Albanians argue that their fight for Kosovo is not an Islamic movement but a
national one. Palestinians make the same claim. But the big picture is the
same: jihad. The day that Kosovo becomes "Kosova" - an invented
pronunciation used by the Muslims, nationalists and vested politicians - is
the day we've lost a key battle in the war on terror.
Meanwhile, reports have come one after the other raising questions about
what really happened in the former Yugoslavia during the 1990s. Spanish
forensic pathologist Emilio Perez Pujol went there in 1999 to report on the
claims of genocide. He told London's Sunday Times, Spain's El Pais newspaper
and other media afterward, "We did not find one - not one -mass grave.There
never was a genocide in Kosovo."
In a 2000 Washington Post article titled "Was It a Mistake? We Were Suckers
for the KLA," Christopher Layne and Benjamin Schwarz wrote:
The KLA's guerrilla campaign was a deliberate attempt to provoke Belgrade
into reprisals that would attract the West's attention. Knowing it could not
defeat Yugoslavia without NATO's military support, the KLA waged a nasty
insurgency that included assassinations of Serbian political and military
officials.Although U.S. intelligence warned the Clinton administration of
the KLA's intentions, Clinton and his advisers took the bait: Washington
placed the blame for events in Kosovo on Belgrade and absolved the KLA.
.
To date, according to U.N. reports, forensic specialists working under U.N.
auspices have exhumed 2,108 bodies. It is far from certain that all of these
victims perished as a result of Yugoslav atrocities; some may have been
combatants, others may have been civilians caught in the cross-fire between
the Yugoslav army and the KLA. Still others may have been civilians killed
by NATO bombs.
.
[D]espite the presence of U.S. and NATO peacekeepers, once Yugoslav forces
left Kosovo the KLA began a new campaign of terror, this time targeting the
province's Serbian and Gypsy populations. This campaign of ethnic cleansing
continues unabated.Meanwhile, across the border from Kosovo in Serbia
proper, the KLA - as part of its effort to carve out a greater Albania - is
waging guerrilla war in the Presevo Valley region.
The Balkans remain a taboo subject for discussion in the context of the war
on terror - even after 9/11, and even as the nightmarish security fallout
from our interventions there unfolds on an almost daily basis, with grave
implications for the West.
In December, 1999, the late Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl wrote
that the "allegations - indiscriminate mass murder, rape camps,
crematoriums, mutilation of the dead - haven't been borne out in the six
months since NATO troops entered Kosovo. Ethnic-Albanian militants,
humanitarian organizations, NATO and the news media fed off each other to
give genocide rumors credibility. Now, a different picture is emerging."
In the 1990s, the Albanian, Bosnian-Muslim and Croatian hordes found that by
hiring public-relations firms, they could market their ethnic rivalries and
blood feuds to the United States, which would join their civil wars against
the Serbs. When we bought into the PR, we repeated an ugly history, one in
which we betrayed a man whose Serbian anti-Axis guerrillas during WWII
rescued 500 downed U.S. airmen - a man whom a May 1942 issue of TIME
Magazine featured on its cover and called "one of the most amazing
commanders of World War II." It was Draza Mihailovic, whose resistance to
the Nazi forces played a significant part in the defeat of Hitler. The
United States, however, bought into communist propaganda that convinced the
Allies that Mihailovic was fighting the communist partisans as a Nazi
collaborator. Abandoned by the United States and England, Mihailovich was
executed in 1946 by the Stalin-aligned Yugoslavia. He was posthumously
awarded a long-concealed Legion of Merit, as recommended by Dwight
Eisenhower.
Western leaders acted on misinformation and rumor that would help plunge
Yugoslavia into half a century of communist darkness that outlived the
Soviet Union itself, leaving it vulnerable as a Cold War holdover. That's
precisely what happened in the 1990s, when the United States bought into
separatist/Islamist propaganda and facilitated Europe's jihadist nightmare.
The Balkans would become al-Qaeda's corridor into Europe.
In Kosovo and Bosnia, we have compounded our to-do list in the war on
terrorism, according to the 9/11 Commission, by laying the groundwork for
al-Qaeda's global ambitions. A 2005 Guardian article titled "It's Not Only
About Iraq" echoed this finding: "Tellingly, those who monitor Islamism in
Britain say the big surge in growth of extremist groups came not after 9/11
or Iraq but in the mid-1990s, with Bosnia serving as the recruiting
sergeant."
At least two of the 19 Sept. 11 hijackers were veterans of the Bosnian
jihad, as Muslims openly call it. Similarly, when an al-Qaeda recruiting
center was raided in Afghanistan soon after the invasion there, it yielded
an application from a Kosovo Albanian who boasted experience fighting
against Serb and U.S. forces, and recommended suicide operations "against
parks like Disney."
Policies and rhetoric out of Washington contradict reality on the ground in
Kosovo. U.S. soldiers serving there say it's not Albanians they have to
protect from the Serbs, but vice versa. A KLA haven that extends to the
United States has been created, as the Fort Dix plot made visible. "Even
worse," says American Council for Kosovo director Jim Jatras, "KLA
supporters in the United States have operated with virtual impunity,
collecting money and weapons to support KLA operations not only in Kosovo,
but in the neighboring areas of southern Serbia, Montenegro, Macedonia and
northern Greece."
Bosnia and Kosovo have been part of Islam's current divide-and-conquer
approach. Israeli Col. Shaul Shay, author of Islamic Terror and the Balkans,
explains the significance of Kosovo, Albania and Bosnia: "In the eyes of the
radical Islamic circles, the establishment of an independent Islamic
territory including Bosnia, Kosovo and Albania along the Adriatic Coast, is
one of the most prominent achievements of Islam since the siege of Vienna in
1683."
And yet the U.S. seems committed to reward violence and impunity, believing
that this will somehow lead lead to a normal, democratic state. In reality,
statehood will merely institutionalize the gangsterism. Meanwhile, all the
cynicism is reserved for Serbia, which has been denied by the international
community any say in its fate or about the terrorist neighbor being foisted
upon it.
When Serbia objects, it is accused of nationalism and told to start being
reasonable. The side that's willing to compromise - for example offering
"more than autonomy and less than independence" - is the intransigent one,
while the side that won't discuss anything short of full independence while
alternately threatening war is our partner for peace. U.N. mediator Martti
Ahtisaari has been repeating that independence is "the only viable option"
and warning that anything else would invite "violent opposition."
In late March, Reuters reported that the United States, NATO and the EU hope
"the U.N. Security Council will adopt a resolution endorsing Ahtisaari's
document by the summer. Delaying the move, they fear, might spark Albanian
extremist violence against Serbs and the U.N. mission in Kosovo."
During a February mission to Brussels, after getting the usual empty
assurances of protections for Kosovo's non-Albanian minority, Jatras
pointedly asked a Hungarian member of the European parliament, "Isn't all
this talk of protections for Serbs a tacit admission that among the Kosovo
Albanians are a lot of violent and intolerant people? Why would you reward
their violence with state power?"
Looking Jatras in the eye, the parliamentarian replied, "Because we're
afraid of them."
We didn't just sell the Serbs down the river; we sold ourselves. Hard-won
American values - like religious freedom, rule of law, civil rights, equal
justice - have been sold out. Serbia is the closest thing the former
Yugoslavia had to a Western society, but we have allied ourselves with the
region's most primitive elements at the same time fortifying our enemies in
the global war on terrorism.
Disingenuous politicians continue to bring up the "successful war" in Kosovo
in contrast to Iraq. It's easy to have a "successful war" when you're
fighting for the enemy.
Serbian News Network - SNN
[email protected]
http://www.antic.org/
