April 12, 1999    
This Date's Issues: 3235•3236  •

 
Johnson's Russia List
#3235
12 April 1999
davidjohnson@erols.com

*******

the eXile (Moscow)
http://www.exile.ru
Issue #07/62, April 8 - 21, 1999 

101 Reasons Why NATO's War Sucks 
exile.editor@matrix.ru (Mark Ames) 
exile.taibbi@matrix.ru (Matt Taibbi)

1. Now the Russians have one of our Stealth planes.

2. It wouldn't have seemed possible a few months ago, but this war has given 
Russia the opportunity to seize the moral high ground on the world stage. 
When the Serbs refused to give in, the West increased the ferocity of the air 
attacks, killing over 1,000 civilians thus far. In other words, we're doing 
what the Russians did in Chechnya, but whereas the West kept conspicuously 
quiet about the Russian mass slaughter, the Russian government and people 
have been shocked and vocally outraged by NATO's "barbaric aggression." And 
the worst thing of all is... they're right!

3. Trying to bring the Serbs to heel by making them suffer won't work; these 
people have too much practice at suffering. After their army was slaughtered 
by the Turks at the Battle of Kosovo Field in 1389, things started getting a 
little bit rough for the Serbs. Though many Serb uprisings were brutally 
suppressed, the Serbs slowly drove the Turks out, eventually "liberating" 
Kosovo in a series of blood-drenched battles. In 1914, the Serbs were overrun 
by the Central Powers.The Serbs lost one-fourth of their population during 
the war; two-thirds of its male population between the ages of 15 and 55 
perished. World War Two was even worse. After being overrun by a Nazi 
blitzkrieg, the Serbs found themselves at the mercy of the Nazis' Croat 
puppet regime, the Ustashe, who killed over a million people in death camps 
so horrible they repelled even the SS. Meanwhile, the Serbs somehow managed 
to pin down eight divisions of Nazi infantry, the Italians, a Bosnian Muslim 
SS Division--and wage a bitter civil war against fellow Serbs. In all, 
one-fourth of the Serb population died during WW II. Toss in a respectable 
number of dead Serbs since the wars in Croatia and Bosnia started earlier 
this decade, and you get the idea: bombing will not scare these people. 

4. Why do American troops have to go in at all? Why should kids from Ohio and 
New Mexico have to die in Kosovo? Kosovo is part of Europe, and every one of 
the big Western European countries has a huge, expensive army. Any one of 
these armies--French, Italian, German or British--ought to be able to take 
Kosovo on its own. After all, the ostensible goal of "preventing further 
instability in the region" is an end that would benefit any of these 
countries directly, while it benefits the United States hardly at all.

5. Even the Secretary of State isn't sure what we're doing in Yugoslavia. 
Madeleine Albright earlier this week said that NATO just wanted to "Send 
Milosevic a message." When a pool reporter pointed out that she had earlier 
said that the NATO goal was to STOP Milosevic, she hesitated and said, "That, 
too."

6. The Serbs were behaving with relative restraint in Kosovo last year (by 
Balkan standards) until we started bombing Serbia. Then they decided they had 
nothing to lose, and started driving Albanians out in earnest. Wasn't this 
what we were trying to prevent?

7. After the Gulf War, the US had everybody believing in air power again. The 
bombing of Serbia is going to destroy that belief. The USAF trains in Nevada, 
and the less a landscape resembles Nevada, the less effective American air 
power. Iraq looks just like Nevada; Kosovo looks more like Vietnam.

8. These endless comparisons of thugs like Milosevic to Adolf Hitler insult 
the public's intelligence and cheapen the special, awful legacy of WWII. 
Before America started calling Milosevic a new Hitler, it used the same 
tactic to demonize everyone from Saddam Hussein to Manuel Noriega to Osama 
bin Laden to the Ayatollah Khomeini to Fidel Castro--we at the eXile even 
found an American-owned newspaper in Africa which, in complete earnest, 
compared Kenneth Starr to the Fuhrer. Gore Vidal put it this way: "The CIA's 
demonizing process is fascinating, swift, unvarying. Each demon admires 
Hitler. Keeps a copy of Mein Kampf beside his bed." Hitler killed six million 
Jews; he made lampshades out of little children; he tried to take over the 
entire world. Milosevic is a monster, but he's not close to a record like 
that. Comparing Milosevic to Hitler proves that the U.S. government no longer 
trusts its citizens to make real moral distinctions.

9. In 1941, the Nazi puppet state of Croatia wanted to solve the Serb 
Question once and for all... not by mass expulsions, but by extermination. 
Out of 6.3 million people in the new Croat state, there were 1.9 million 
Serbs. Official documents show that the Ustashe government planned to 
exterminate or convert every one of them. Within weeks after the Nazi 
takeover, Croats set to massacring Serbs in a variety of ways, including a 
documented favorite trick: throwing Serb mothers with their children off 
cliffs, by the hundreds. By mid-1941, even the Germans started complaining. 
Here is a quote from an SS report: "The Ustashe units have carried out their 
atrocities not only against male Orthodox of military age, but in particular 
in the most bestial fashion against unarmed old men, women and children..." 
The Croats set up several concentration camps, including the infamous 
Jasenovic death camp, which is to Serbs what Auschwitz is to Jews . This camp 
is notorious not just because hundreds of thousands of Serbs, Jews and 
Gypsies were killed there (Serbs claim a million Serbs were killed at 
Jasenovic), but because of the way they were killed: butchered with knives, 
like pigs. In all, the Serbs are said to have lost some one million people 
just to Croat death camps and massacres. If it is unthinkable that the 
Bundeswehr could be called in to bomb Tel Aviv in order to force the Jews to 
sign a peace agreement with the Palestinians, then why can we order German 
bombers to attack Belgrade with a clear conscience?

10. Serbs are now comparing NATO to the Nazis. Here's why. The Nazi invasion 
of Yugoslavia in April, 1941, began with the relentless bombardment of 
Belgrade, flattening most of the city before a ground invasion by troops from 
Germany, Italy, Hungary and Bulgaria. Three of those four are now NATO 
members. Modern German bombers, ominously sporting iron cross Luftwaffe 
markings, are targeting Serb cities. And now, once again, Germans, Italians 
and Hungarians are preparing to invade.

11. The Gulf War left Western armies looking good. Kosovo is going to make us 
look very bad. Like the Israelis, the Americans and their allies in the Gulf 
War built a reputation fighting pitiful Arab conscripts who, as Sam Kinison 
said, would've surrendered to a video camera. ("Give up or I'll zoom!") Serbs 
are not Iraqis. They believe in their cause, know how to fight, and can 
operate in small units. Western armies don't do well against this sort of 
opponent.

12. The parallels of this conflict to World War I are so obvious, it's 
amazing that the West has chosen to ignore them. In 1914, a major European 
power (Austria-Hungary) declared war on Serbia after it refused to acquiesce 
to its demands; a group of similarly powerful nations bound by alliances 
(Britain, Russia) then decided to back Serbia; and in a flash, millions of 
people were dying all over Europe. Wasn't the whole point of that chapter in 
the history textbook to teach kids how not to start a World War--to learn to 
back off when a minor regional conflict threatens to escalate into an 
irreversible global nightmare?

13. Here's a trick question: which idiotic theory sucked America into 
Vietnam, and sucked the life out of the country for the next twenty years? 
Here's a clue: the theory's metaphor is based on a really shitty game that no 
one plays, the name of which was later picked up by an even shittier pizza 
delivery company that can only count on the most desperate, resin-scraping, 
munchie-jonesing dirtheads to order its pizzas. That's right: the Domino 
Theory! And guess why we're going to war with Serbia? You guessed again! The 
Domino's Pizza Theory! Hey, if tasted so good the first time, why not order 
another, huh? Albright sure is. Just read this excerpt from the Washington 
Post, dated Monday, April 5th: "Led by Gen. Henry H. Shelton, chairman of the 
Joint Chiefs of Staff, the commanders challenged in particular the 'domino 
theory' being pressed in interagency discussions by Secretary of State 
Madeleine K. Albright." ("Joint Chiefs Doubted Air Strategy" by Bradley 
Graham).

14. We've made an enemy of Montenegro, the strategically vital junior 
republic in Yugoslavia. In presidential elections last year Montenegrins 
elected Milan Djukanovic, an enemy of Milosevic who reached out to the West. 
His victory meant a majority of Montenegrins wanted to move away from 
Milosevic and towards the West. They opposed the crackdown in Kosovo and 
encouraged locals to desert units serving there. How did NATO exploit this 
division in Yugoslav society? Well, actually they bombed the shit out of 
Montenegro, to the point that now thousands are pouring into the streets 
daily in order to denounce NATO as the second coming of Hitler. Today, 
Montenegrins are solidly behind the Serbs and Milosevic.

15. How many Americans could find Kosovo on a map of the world? There should 
be entrance exams for warmongers.

16. Because Nostradamus predicted (or so they say) that the third World War 
would start in the Balkans, every crystal-gazing New Age American moron, as 
well as every quack-cure-loving, horoscope-is-a-science believing, 
insufferably superstitious Russian will have a captive audience in the 
rational rest of us until this thing blows over, and we can tell them to shut 
up again.

17. The owner of the single biggest pro-war propaganda organ in the world, 
Ted Turner, is married harmoniously to Jane Fonda, who thirty years ago was 
running around in khaki shorts publicly embracing the Viet Cong. Apparently 
being a liberal means not having to say you're sorry, so long as your 
civilian bombing victims are white and taller than you are.

18. Journalists love wars. Even the most vacuous, uninspired accountant can 
wrap himself up in other people's tragedy and suddenly acquire depth. This is 
what happened in Bosnia. And it'll happen in Kosovo too, guaranteed. The 
Bosnian war nurtured some of the worst, most maudlin, dishonest "war 
journalism" of all time. We quote: "Tragedy and absurdity were moons circling 
the Bosnian war." (Peter Maass, Love Thy Neighbor). "Words are my tears." 
[Ibid.] "The typewriter keys went bang-bang-bang, like shots from an old 
revolver." [Ibid.] And of course what would a war book be without the dark 
sexual angle: "Sarajevo was a temptress, and it was hard to know which was 
more seductive, the half-mad look in her dark eyes, or the scarlet drops of 
blood on her extended hand." [Ibid.] Kosovo can expect to be taken to the 
mall for some makeup and a long black dress by every soulless Western 
journalist hunting for a metaphor.

19. Nuke Alert! Russian General Anatoly Kvashnin, Yeltsin's Chief of Staff, 
announced last week that Russia was prepared to use tactical nuclear weapons 
to stop NATO aggression.

20. In 1991, your Western passport made you a demi-god in Russia. Most 
Russians, particularly the younger ones, admired Westerners and listened to 
what we said: restructure your economy like so; keep Chubais in charge of 
things; NATO is a defensive organization whose goal is to unite Europe into 
one peaceable kingdom; we mean you no harm. And then the Russians woke up. 
They had to: we'd stolen their wives, their blankets, their sheets, their 
beds, the roofs over their heads... IMF advice destroyed Russia's economy 
faster than you can say "Gary Peach", millions have gone to their grave 
early, the country is fucked for at least a generation to come, and to top it 
all off, NATO is unilaterally scrapping the ABM treaty, enlarging NATO so as 
to completely surround and isolate Russia, and now, ruthlessly bombing 
Russia's oldest historical ally and slaughtering its citizens. It would be as 
if a victorious Soviet Union were to bomb London and destroy its bridges 
because they didn't allow Warsaw Pact troops to occupy Ulster. All this might 
explain why, over the past few months, the number of Russians who believe 
that they should fear a NATO attack has soared to 63 percent, up from the low 
twenties just a few months ago, according to a poll recently conducted by the 
Russian Center for Public Opinion and reported on CNN on April 3. Numerous 
expats, who at one time were treated like royalty here, are now complaining 
about "incidents" of being harassed by Russians. It's like we said: Does the 
West know how-ta make friends or what?!

21. We're going to be flooded with annoying Vietnam analogies from pompous 
leftists everywhere. And the worst thing is that they'll be right.

22. Has anyone thought about the peculiar logic behind NATO's "peace mission" 
in Kosovo? They dragged the warring parties to some two-bit pastry 
shop called Rambouillet, held a gun to their heads, and said, "If you don't 
sign our peace deal and allow us to protect ethnic group #1, then we're going 
to bomb and kill ethnic group #2!" After arm-twisting the Albanians into 
signing a deal that they didn't believe in, we carried out our threat. We 
bombed the Serbs on behalf of the Albanians, assuming, like Dr. Evil, that 
everything would go to plan. No contingency planning at all. For example, no 
plan on how to counter the obvious and natural reaction of the Serbs to take 
all of their Tomahawk-inspired fury out on a totally defenseless Kosovar 
population. NATO's reply? "They were going to do it anyway." In fact, CIA 
leaks show that Clinton was warned that bombing could spark mass ethnic 
cleansing.

23. NATO bombing is making a hero out of Milosevic. Similarly, there once was 
a guy named Dzhokar Dudayev. The Russians blamed him for all their problems 
in Chechnya. By 1994, Dudayev's popularity was declining. Then the Russians 
invaded, bombed, slaughtered... and Dudayev became a national hero. So the 
Russians figured all they'd have to do is kill Dudayev, and the war would be 
over. So they killed him, and made him a national martyr. And then got their 
asses slaughtered in Grozny, and had to surrender to the Chechens. So far, 
we've made Milosevic, whose popularity was shaky at best, into a national 
hero, an achievement which stands exactly counter to our stated objective.

24. If ethnic massacres bother us so much, why didn't we send troops to stop 
the massacre of a half-million Tutsi in Rwanda? Why did we back the Russian 
bloodbath in Chechnya? Why did the US defend Pol Pot when the Vietnamese 
interrupted his autogenocide? What's happening in Kosovo is a parking-lot 
scuffle compared to these horrors, so why are we going in?

25. The Albanian partisan group we're promoting, the Kosovar Liberation Army, 
has been identified by several sources as a mafia-backed gang of heroin 
dealers. According to a March 24th article in the Times of London, "police 
forces in three Western European countries, together with Europol, the 
European police authority, are separately investigating growing evidence that 
drug money is funding the KLA's leap from obscurity to power..." Police 
sources in Germany have made plain their suspicions: the sudden ascendancy of 
Kosovan Albanians in the heroin trade in Switzerland, Germany and Scandinavia 
coincides with the sudden growth of the KLA from a ragamuffin peasants' army 
two years ago to a 30,000-strong force equipped with grenade launchers, 
anti-tank weapons and AK47s.

26. The KLA seeks total independence for Kosovo from Serbia, and the creation 
of a Greater Albania incorporating parts of Montenegro and Macedonia. NATO is 
firmly opposed to that, pushing instead for Kosovar autonomy. Nearly every 
nation in the Balkans, from NATO ally Greece to Bulgaria, Rumania and 
Macedonia, also opposes any change in borders. However, the bombing and 
subsequent ethnic cleansing means that today, you couldn't find a single 
Albanian who would support our position of Kosovar autonomy within Serbia. 
Which is to say, we are opposed to the ultimate goal of the people we're 
ostensibly protecting, and closer to the position of the people whom we're 
bombing.

27. Every commentator agrees that the dangerous rise of far-right wing 
parties in Western Europe this decade coincides with refugee influxes. NATO 
was warned in-advance that its bombing could ignite a massive refugee flight. 
Now we've got refugees by the buckets, and quasi-fascist politicians like 
Jean-Marie Le Pen and Joerg Haider will only grow in power and popularity. In 
other words, NATO bombing of this supposed Hitler in Belgrade could help real 
Hitler devotees come to power.

28. The U.S. knowingly destroyed the biggest maternity ward in all of the 
Balkans. On April 3, Clinton and NATO, clearly frustrated at the 
ineffectuality of their surgical-strike air campaign, decided to get nasty by 
sending three cruise missiles into the Yugoslav and Serbian Interior Ministry 
buildings. Those buildings had long since been emptied--ever since Tito, 
Yugoslavia's basic war plan is based on decentralized partisan warfare--but 
there was a huge maternity ward full of people just 30 meters away. Now, 
think about it. It was no secret that a maternity ward was located next door 
to the target. It was no secret that the target had been emptied long before 
the strike. Kinda muddies up that whole moral high ground thing a little, 
doesn't it? Or did we intend to show, Kurtz-like, that we could play just as 
cold and mean as the next quasi-Hitler?

29. We'll have to listen to more crap from fat armchair hawks like Tom 
Clancy. They'll bore their wives and clog the internet with coaching 
metaphors and tech jargon. Clancy will also get another Waffen-Twerpen novel 
out of it, just when the dork had finally run out of scenarios. Do you really 
want that?

30. Last Tuesday, Bill Clinton give the entire world still one more visually 
compelling and obvious reason to loathe America when, at the very moment 
American bombs and missiles were raining down on Serb civilians at his order, 
he took the afternoon off to play golf. Then, as if that wasn't enough, some 
Americans saw fit to portray the Balkan war as a tiresome interruption in the 
President's golfing schedule. The Washington Post had the unbelievable balls 
to phrase it this way: "The president tried to return to a more normal 
schedule, playing golf in Virginia and preparing for two domestic [i.e. real] 
events Tuesday..."

31. A few decades ago, Bill Clinton didn't seem to worry too much about the 
fate of American POWs in Vietnam when he first burned his draft card, then 
snagglepussed his way across the Atlantic to smoke joints and beat off in 
bathroom stalls at Oxford. Now he may soon expect us to believe that he feels 
so outraged by the sight of those three bloodied American POWs that his 
administration would feel comfortable, and even duty-bound, to commit legions 
of college-age Americans to a savage ground war with no end in sight.

32. Arguments about Serb vs. Albanian demographics just invite analogies to 
the secession of Hispanic-majority parts of the US. This excites really 
horrible people like Pat Buchanan.

33. Name one Albanian!

34. If we lose this war, there will be Oliver Stone films about damaged vets, 
with collagen-lipped stars crying on Oscar Night as they vault to the stage 
to cop their award for playing paraplegic survivors. If we win, there'll be 
Chuck Norris movies where "Serbian" extras in fake moustaches get mowed down 
by a one-man American army. Even Stallone could return. Rambo in Kosovo--can 
we risk that?

35. Americans like ourselves who live abroad are now in considerably more 
danger than they were before as a result of a violent swing of opinion 
against our government's policies. In Moscow alone, our embassy has been 
attacked, and a bar has been busted up just because its name is "Uncle 
Sam's". The embassy in Montenegro was attacked by 2,000 protesters, who 
bombed cars parked outside the embassy grounds and set the first floor of the 
embassy building on fire-- forcing Marines to fight to secure the area. As a 
result, expats around the world are living out the old Woody Allen joke: "My 
draft status? I'm a C-6, which means that in the event of war, I'm a hostage."

36. Until a few weeks ago, Western men in Moscow could always count on being 
given special attention by that most precious of God's creatures, the Russian 
dyevushka. Nerds became lady-killers; chronic masturbators acquired fluffers; 
guys who hadn't been laid more than three times in thirty American years 
suddenly found themselves living like low-rent Sultans. Not now. Thanks to 
the NATO airstrikes, the White God has become the White Devil. All bets are 
off. If you do get lucky, expect to get reamed. Now that we're looked upon as 
duplicitous barbarians, expect all relationships to be like a game of 
3-dimensional chess. The days of E-Z sex and multiple partners in a 
consequence-free environment are over, thanks to America's sexually-demented 
president. Now, dyevs don't swallow. They just spit. All because your stupid 
country had to go 'n' bomb the Serbs. Think about that the next time you're 
getting a skull shine, will ya?!

37. We bombed Serbia on Easter Sunday, needlessly offending about 500 million 
Christians worldwide. Now the Serbs are offering an Orthodox Easter 
ceasefire, which we've pledged to ignore with reckless abandon.

38. If we're doing this to score some points with the Islamic world, why 
invade Kosovo, which means nothing to Muslims? Why not liberate Jerusalem and 
blast the Israelis off the Dome of the Rock?

39. After a brief shift toward reason earlier this decade, when Americans 
slashed their defense budget in the wake of the Cold War victory and elected 
a President who at least made an attempt to pass national health insurance 
legislation, the defense budget is rising again, while the percentage of 
Americans covered by health insurance continues to decrease.

40. In 1809, the Turks built a tower in the town of Nis. It was made of the 
skulls of Serbs who had tried to rebel. The Turks first skinned and stuffed 
the heads as souvenirs, then used 1,000 skulls for the tower. This kind of 
thing has happened to the Serbs rather often. Remember it when you judge them.

41. Some more perspective on the American perception of unilateral Serbian 
aggression: in 1915, during World War I, the Serbian army, having been 
overrun by a combined Austro-Hungarian, Bulgarian and German force, was 
forced to retreat through Kosovo. Over a quarter of a million Serb troops and 
refugees, weak from cold and hunger, passed through Albanian village after 
village, and they weren't exactly treated to Gatorade and crushed ice. An 
eyewitness account, published in 1920, records: "The Albanians killed those 
who had become isolated, chopping their heads off with axe blows. Then they 
seized the uniform of the dead man and, disguised as Serbian soldiers so as 
to allay any suspicion, they killed other unhappy men by luring them into 
ambushes." Of the quarter million soldiers and refugees on the run through 
Kosovo, over half died.

42. America is once again indiscriminately bombing civilian populations when 
its ostensible grievance is with one particular individual foreign tyrant, 
who could be killed and done with. We could just assassinate Milosevic, of 
course, just as we could have killed or captured Saddam Hussein, or Osama Bin 
Laden, or Manuel Noriega, instead of bombing and killing mass numbers of 
civilians in each of their respective countries and leaving them alive. But 
we won't assassinate Milosevic, because a 1974 law written in response to 
revelations of CIA excesses prohibits the assassination of foreign leaders. 
Which sounds like not such a bad law, on the face of it...But as far as the 
eXile is concerned, if you're committed to killing people, you might as well 
start with your real target--and stop once you've hit him. You kill fewer 
people that way, right?

43. The Brits. You know they couldn't care less about the Albanians. They're 
just tagging along for the chance to hurt somebody, like the smallest, 
meanest guy in a gang. And since their toy Harrier jets--expensive, useless 
'70's military exotica--can't handle guided weapons, they're loading them 
with cluster bombs, the cheapest, fastest way to maim large numbers of people 
indiscriminately.

44. The Greens Party of Germany has long been famous for its pacifism-- until 
this war. Today, the Greens Party is part of the coalition that rules 
Germany. The Green's platform had been total demilitarization and a 
withdrawal from NATO. When Green leader Joschka Fischer was named Foreign 
Minister, he decided, aw, to hell with it! Although he insists he's still a 
pacifist, he wholeheartedly backs the Luftwaffe's bombing of Belgrade. 
Fischer has sold out in every way possible. He no longer opposes nuclear 
power, no longer wants to tax energy, no longer wants to lower the speed 
limit to 100km/hr... hell, he doesn't even wear casual wear anymore, proudly 
trading in his trademark sneakers and leather jacket for brogan wingtips and 
a pinstripe suit. The unleashing of the tree-hugging lesbian nazi yuppie: 
just another reason to oppose NATO bombing.

45. Javier Solana, elected NATO Secretary-General in 1996, was the leader of 
a 1980s movement protesting Spain's entrance into NATO.

46. This bombing has done more to enhance the legitimacy of Russia's 
communist party than the combined effect of our entire public policy and 
private commercial presence here in Russia since 1991-and we screwed up a lot 
during that time. Russia's dispatch of ships to the Adriatic more or less 
officially puts the US and Russia in military confrontation again, a horrific 
blunder considering that we Americans spent forty years and hundreds of 
billions of dollars to achieve the neutralization of the Russian military 
threat. Now it's all back, for the sake of...Albania?

47. Tom Clancy is probably too old to draft. And it's such a pity, because no 
doubt he'd be the first to parachute into Kosovo with the Rangers if he could.

48. As if one ancient Nostradamus wasn't enough, the Clinton administration 
has willed two more neo-Nostradami into being by following almost exactly the 
plot of the box-office failure Wag the Dog in its bombing of Yugoslavia. 
Because they wrote and produced a movie about a scandal-plagued President who 
starts a war on behalf of an oppressed Albanian minority, Hollywood 
journeymen Barry Levinson and David Mamet have become the oracles of our age.

49. If we send ground troops, it will be a NATO operation, which means 
American troops will die under Eurotrash command. Do you want your cousin to 
walk into an ambush under Belgian orders?

50. The war is distracting the American public from a number of serious 
investigations of allegations of corruption in the Clinton administration, 
not the least of which being the reported acceptance of a $300,000 donation 
from China's Chief of Military Intelligence, Gen. Ji Shengde, into the 
account of Democratic Party fundraiser Johnny Chung (not to be confused with 
our Johnny Chen), which was then funnelled into the 1996 Clinton re-election 
campaign fund (April 4, L.A. Times).

51. This war has revealed the American media to be a more effective conduit 
for state propaganda than the state-controlled press of the Soviet Union. See 
PRESS REVIEW.

52. Educated Westerners are supposed to be opposed to imposing their moral 
rules on other cultures. The Balkans are a distinct cultural area, within 
which inter-ethnic war has always been the norm. This is the single most 
indisputable fact about Balkan culture. If what we're seeing in Kosovo is an 
expression of a basic cultural pattern, why are we entitled to judge it, let 
alone kill thousands of Serbs to stop it? What is the deal here--are we 
supposed to be cultural relativists only as long as nothing serious is 
involved? Are we supposed to give up on cultural relativism the moment 
another culture does something which makes us really uncomfortable? Or are we 
just going to drop the whole pretense of relativism and go back to simple 
Victorian arrogance, imposing the moral rules of the English-speaking world 
everywhere our navy and air force can reach? You can't have it both ways. 
Either you accept that other cultures have their own moral rules (some of 
which involve different ways of making war) which are not subject to our 
judgment--or you take up the white man's burden and recolonize in earnest.

53. NATO committed a series of rhetorical blasphemies to drum up support for 
the action. Here's one word they shouldn't have used, but did:

Genocide. (n) The systematic, planned extermination of a racial or ethnicgroup. (Greek: genos, race + -CIDE, Latin: caedere, to kill).

On March 29th, British Defense Minister George Robertson said: ``We are 
confronting a regime which is intent on genocide," while German Defense 
Minister Rudolf Scharping said on the same day that the Serbs were committing 
a genocide. Folks, in a genocide, you don't let a single refugee go. You kill 
every single one of them, either out of hatred or because you fear they might 
come back some day. The Serbs don't qualify.

Just so we don't forget, "genocide" means to kill everyone in a race. The 
Serbs are doing something else: savagely expelling a hostile ethnic group 
from territory it claims as its own. There are many precedents for this. In 
1945, the Czechs expelled over two million ethnic Germans from the 
Sudetenland, causing horrific human tragedies in the name of ethnically 
cleansing their nation. No one called that a genocide. It was evil and 
horrible, but it wasn't a genocide. As of this past Tuesday, the UN was using 
words like "extreme brutality and ruthlessness," and "mass deportations" to 
describe the Serb actions, while Britain had toned it down to "brutal ethnic 
cleansing." This week, now that the West might be forced to take in refugees 
exactly because they've falsely raised the moral stakes so high, the word 
"genocide" has been dropped, meaning we can intern them behind barbed-wire at 
Guantanamo Bay with a clear conscience.

54. We have driven Ukraine back into alliance with Russia. Prior to this 
bombing, Ukraine was still officially in the running for acceptance into 
NATO--an expansion of the alliance which would have represented an enormous 
coup for the West, and a nearly insurmountable obstacle to any conceivable 
Russian aggression. Now Ukraine is back in the Russian huddle. Ukraine for 
Albania--even Al Davis wouldn't make that trade.

55. NATO's bombing violates both the UN charter and NATO treaty itself. 
Article 2, section 7 of the UN Charter expressly forbids UN intervention "in 
matters which are essentially within the domestic jurisdiction of any 
state...." Both the United States and NATO are signatories to the UN Charter 
and bound by it under international law. By bombing Serbia without first 
getting Security Council approval, NATO broke the law. Making them war 
criminals. Not that we expect NATO to try itself in the Hague...

56. Every Serb has a rifle and knows how to use it. Serbs were trained in 
guerrilla warfare all through the Tito years, and there are bunkers, arms 
caches and shelters hidden all over Serbia. If NATO invades and occupies 
Serbia, the trouble will just be starting.

57. The United States insisted that the air force of Turkey participate in 
the attack, demonstrating a remarkable lack of both military wisdom and 
cultural sensitivity. Because its 14th-century massacre at the hands of the 
Turks represents the central event in Serbia's history, one which has imbued 
Serbs with a desperate craving for revenge that has not spent itself in 600 
years, the U.S., by shoving Turkey into its ranks, has virtually guaranteed 
that Serbs will fight this war at a fever pitch of ethnic hatred, with 
maximum determination, resolve, and sacrifice.

58. The Kosovo attack has revealed America to be a country in a cultural 
abyss.

Nothing means much at all to Americans. But there are some things that mean 
everything in the world to the Serbs. And it shows. Consider this poem about 
Kosovo, written by King Nikola late last century:

Over there, o'er there, beyond those hills,
Where the heavens bend the blue sky,
Toward Serb fields, toward martial fields,
Over there, brothers, let's prepare to go!
Over there, o'er there, beyond those hills,
One can find they say, Milos's tomb...
Over there!... My soul will receive its rest 
When the Serb no longer will be a slave. 

Contrast this to the one song most associated with American tragedy: the 
inevitable captured soldier's white trash family house, sickly trees in the 
front yard adorned with cloying yellow ribbons. Join hands and soak in the 
hallowed verse of Tony Orlando & Dawn:

Tie a yellow ribbon round the old oak tree
If you still want me
It's been ten long years, if you still want me
If I don't see a yellow ribbon around the old oak tree
I'll stay on the bus
Forget about us
Put the blame on me
If I don't see that yellow ribbon
Ro-o-o-und that o-o-old oak tree!

59. The world hates America more than ever, as evidenced by a spontaneous 
series of anti-American demonstrations on a scale not seen since the 
seventies. Here's a small list of all the anti-American demonstrations since 
March 24th.

Formerly Western-leaning Montenegro last weekend brought out 30,000 
demonstrators, or 5% of the republic's population, to rally against NATO and 
for Serbia 
Skopje, capital of Macedonia, was the scene of violent demonstrations on the 
first night of the bombing. Demonstrators burned vehicles and tried storming 
the embassy, forcing US ambassador Chrisopher Hill to hide in the basement. 
Riot troops broke it up. Security has since been beefed up by the addition of 
Macedonian police, 40 Marines and an American anti-terrorist squad. 
On April 1st, over 10,000 people demonstrated in Paris calling for a return 
to the peace talks, Patras, Greece saw 4,000 people chanting anti-U.S. and 
anti-NATO slogans, and in Prague, 300 Czech and Serb residents demonstrated 
against the air strikes. 
On March 31st, some 2,500 Serbs demonstrated in the Slovenian capital 
Ljubljana against NATO air strikes; approximately 3,000 people demonstrated 
in front of the U.S. Information Center in Podgorica, Montenegro, denouncing 
both the U.S. and the Montenegran governments. 
some 5,000 people pelted the U.S. consulate in Greece's second largest city, 
Thessaloniki, with stones, firecrackers, and eggs on the evening of March 29, 
in protest of NATO air strikes in Yugoslavia. It follows other major 
demonstrations last week in Athens and on March 28 outside the U.S. military 
base on Crete. 
On March 27, several thousand people, mostly supporters of the reformed 
communist party, PDS, demonstrated against NATO in Berlin. About 700-1,300 
people demonstrated in The Hague and some of them were arrested for throwing 
rocks at the German embassy. In Italy, several thousand people participated 
in demonstrations in Milan and Rome. Also, about a thousand demonstrators 
demolished the U.S. embassy in Cyprus. In Romanian Timosoara, about 1,100 
people, mostly Romanian Serbs and supporters of far-right Romania Mare party, 
demonstrated against NATO attacks. About a thousand Serbs also held a protest 
at the gates outside Downing Street in London. 
Not to mention Moscow...

60. Desperate to keep "democratic" Russia afloat and out of the hands of 
communist or nationalist extremists, the U.S. has been forced, once again, to 
engineer a loan to the Yeltsin government through the IMF. Since the Russian 
government has pledged to help the Serbs, the U.S. will therefore be pledging 
military assistance to its own enemies.

61. There is no compelling economic interest at stake for the United States 
in the Balkan conflict. Do you know anyone who bought a Yugo?

62. There are a lot of cheap, shoulder-fired antiaircraft missiles floating 
around these days, many of them sold by the Afghans after delivery by the 
CIA. They work.

63. Carol J. Williams is covering Yugoslavia and the war for the L.A. Times.

64. The Clinton administration, as it has done several times in the last few 
years, will almost certainly use the Balkan conflict as the justification for 
a series of ambitious new "security" or "anti-terrorist" bills which will 
further scale back and threaten domestic civil rights. A counterterrorism 
bill passed in 1996 already enhanced the Federal government's fight against 
arbitrarily-designated foreign "terrorist" organizations by allowing the 
government to bar entry to any alien they say is associated with a terrorist 
group. Furthermore, in a provision which directly counters the individual 
American citizen's constitutional protection against the doctrine of guilt by 
association, the bill gives federal law enforcement officials the right to 
wiretap, search, perform surveillance upon, even prosecute as accessories any 
American shown to have supported any of the terrorist organizations on its 
list. It is worth noting, incidentally, that Nelson Mandela's ANC was 
designated as a terrorist organization by the U.S. government throughout 
Mandela's incarceration. The 1996 bill also allowed for immediate 
deportations based upon secret evidence, a manifestly unconstitutional 
provision. Meanwhile, this year, on January 25, the Clinton administration 
announced that it would be sending to congress a broad new antiterrorist bill 
that would create a domestic military "commandante"--we're not making this 
up--under whom soldiers would serve in a role combating domestic terrorism. 
If it passes, this new anti-terrorism bill would repeal the Posse Comitatus 
act of 1878, which decreed that the government may not deploy members of the 
military as a domestic law-enforcement personnel. All of these measures were 
instigated, mind you, BEFORE the NATO attack began, before the U.S. embassies 
in Russia and Montenegro were attacked, before there was a real live enemy to 
threaten U.S. security. Are you ready for what's next?

65. NATO was formed to help Western Europe repel a massive conventional 
attack from the Warsaw Pact. Its armies are still configured for that task, 
and its most important purpose is to make it unprofitable for anyone even to 
contemplate attacking Western or Central Europe. NATO forces have no mandate 
to police little provincial skirmishes like those going on in Kosovo. NATO 
forces aren't likely to be very good at that sort of job, either. And when 
the NATO campaign in Kosovo fails, NATO will become too timid to act in a 
real crisis of the kind the alliance was designed to confront.

66. By needlessly making a show of our utter disrespect for Russians by 
leaving them out of the decision-making process prior to the bombing of their 
former satellite state, the United States forced Russia to either publicly 
admit to its geopolitical irrelevance, or else take a stand and defy the 
United States militarily.

67. From the vantage point of pure self-interest, the bombing is a disaster 
for foreigners doing business here in Russia. Now that NATO has made us all 
look like unpredictable cowboys who speak with forked tongue, forget about 
making money here. No one will trust you anymore, your "Made In The USA" is 
no longer a sign of distinction, and some may even be looking for sweet 
revenge. Bombing Russia's friends is bad for business.

68. Kosovo was the cradle of Serb civilization before it was cleansed by Turk 
invaders who dispersed the Kosovo Serbs throughout the Balkans. While the 
Albanians have been a majority for quite some time, it hasn't come without 
its spells of mass ethnic cleansing of Serbs. In 1941, after the Italians 
took control of Greater Albania, the Kosovo Albanians immediately set about 
slaughtering Serbs, forcing the Italians to intervene. It is estimated that 
100,000 Serbs fled their homes in Kosovo in 1941 alone. Also, the Albanians 
have the highest birth rate of any people in Europe, while the Serbs seem to 
have been slaughtered at a greater rate than any people. This might help 
explain the ethnic imbalance between the two in what is claimed to be 
Serbia's heartland.

69. The KLA are diehard Marxist-Leninists who have been linked to Osama bin 
Laden, the terrorist we launched two ineffective missile attacks to stop. A 
January 21st article in the French newspaper Liberation claims that KLA 
frontman Adem Demaci is an unabashed disciple of Mao, and that the KLA 
leaders are all deep admirers of the late Albanian dictator Enver Hoxha. 
Furthermore, in almost the only instance of American reporting on the KLA, 
the March 28th edition of The New York Times wrote that the KLA was 
"originally made up of diehard Marxist-Leninists, as well as by descendants 
of the fascist militias raised by the Italians in World War II." The U.S. has 
fought two lengthy shooting wars and one 45-year Cold War to contain 
communism; now we're fighting alongside them to depose a 
democratically-elected leader.

70. It sounds like an old issue, but it's still valid: the United States 
Constitution prohibits the use of military force without a 2/3 majority vote 
in both houses of congress, except in cases of emergency. That Presidents 
have in this half of this century done so in Korea, Vietnam, the Dominican 
Republic, Grenada, Panama, Iraq, Afghanistan, and Sudan, among others, does 
not make it right or even legal. As congressman Tom Campbell (R-CA), a former 
Stanford law professor, said last week in voicing his objections to yet 
another "undeclared" war: "Previous constitutional violations do not justify 
subsequent ones."

71. Despite its moral posturing about Serb ethnic cleansing, NATO itself has 
provided air cover for the same kinds of atrocities it now accuses the Serbs 
of committing. In 1995, NATO planes, responding to what many now suspect was 
a Bosnian-government-staged massacre of Muslim civilians, attacked and 
crippled the Bosnian Serb army with punishing air assaults. At the same time, 
a massive two-pronged ground assault was unleashed on the Serbs both from 
Croatia into Serb-populated Krajina and from the Muslim-Croat alliance into 
Serb-populated regions of central and west Bosnia. Nearly all of Croatia's 
600,000 Serbs were brutally expelled, fulfilling Ante Pavelic's Ustashe 
dream. Several hundred thousand more Bosnian Serbs were uprooted in the 
Croat-Muslim offensive within Bosnia. Altogether, in a matter of weeks, up to 
a million Serbs were ethnically cleansed. No one knows how many died.

72. The Serbs are one of the tallest, most beautiful European tribes. 
Somalis, too, are tall and elegant, as are the Tutsi, who actually call 
themselves `'The Tall People." Why are the most beautiful tribes being wiped 
out by the squat and ugly?

73. When President Clinton first asked Congress over three years ago to 
authorize sending American troops to Bosnia as part of SFOR peacekeeping 
troops, he promised they'd be home in six months. According to Congressman 
Ron Paul (R-TX), "The years have passed, more than $20 billion has been 
spent, and our soldiers are still there. Very few seriously ask anymore when 
these troops are coming home - or even what it is they are supposed to be 
accomplishing."

74. The war marks the return of liberal warmongers. You thought they became 
extinct in 1968, but you were wrong. NATO head Javiar Solana was a Marxist, 
Socialist and anti-NATO demonstrator up to the mid-80s; Tony Blair leads the 
once-left-wing Labor Party; Clinton burned his draft card; Gerhard Schroeder 
is a Socialist, and his Foreign Minister a Greens Party sellout; French 
Premier Lionel Jospin is a Socialist; and vermicelli-spined hawk Italian 
Prime Minister Massimo D'Alema heads the most left-wing government in Italian 
history. A horrifying bunch of Eurofags trying to pass themselves off as 
pinstriped "realists". In other words, meet the New Left, same as the Old 
Left. America has plenty of its own liberal war groupies, too. Ever on the 
Easter Egg hunt for an easily-defeatable Hitler to smash, America's liberals 
thought they'd found it in Milosevic. Now that the air war has failed (no 
duh!), they're crying for a ground war. Among the more conspicuous: Former 
avuncular nice guy Mark Shields, who now praises Clinton for showing 
"courage" in flouting popular opinion by bombing the Serbs, and called on him 
to prepare Americans for some serious slaughter. Other pampered liberals 
screaming to throw American kids into a Kosovo ground war include Sen. Joe 
Biden, Joseph Lieberman and Charles Robb. What these liberals never 
understand is that no matter how bravely they rattle America's military 
saber, they'll never, ever be feared or respected by anyone but their page 
boys.

75. Ask five people you know if they've heard how many Serbs have been killed 
or maimed so far in the bombing.

76. Then ask those same five people if they've seen the videotape of the 
three captured American POWs.

77. Poetry slams. They're going to pop up like herpes in every college town 
in the US, giving every English major the chance to compose a safely 
ambiguous rant against the horrors of war and perform it in front of other, 
likeminded people, increasing his/her chances of mating. These people should 
not be encouraged to breed.

78. Because the NATO action comes on the heels of a year-long sex 
scandal/impeachment process which tied up virtually the entire government for 
a year, the bombing campaign in Serbia means that the most powerful and 
influential nation in the world will continue to be paralyzed after having 
done virtually nothing of substance except bomb Iraq and provide fodder for 
blowjob jokes for the last 15 months.

79. Bill Clinton reportedly said "We can't lose this one" at a White House 
policy meeting a few nights into the bombing, providing an ugly insight into 
the extent to which Americans view the entire world, and their role in it, as 
a sports contest. This is just one more reason why the rest of the world has 
gradually come to hate America's guts--because military action is a game for 
Americans, who have nothing but their careers on the line, while for people 
in other countries-not just for Serbia, but for Albania, Montenegro, Croatia, 
Macedonia, even for Italy and the rest of the countries neighboring the 
Balkans- this is a life-or-death situation. How do you think people in these 
countries like to see Clinton fretting about losing "this one"?

80. Here's how you die in the kind of war we're starting: you're standing in 
the hatch of your APC as it rolls through a wooded valley in Kosovo when 
suddenly your head jerks to the right and pops like a zit, splattering your 
brains over the hood of the APC. About a second later, your crewmates hear 
the crack of a hunting rifle from somewhere in the woods. Your APC can't get 
up there. You call for air support, but the Apaches don't go in close to 
sweep the woods anymore because they've been taking too many hits from 
shoulder-fired SAMs. Your unit has two choices: do nothing, or blow the 
nearest Serb village to bits in reprisal. Either way, the Serbs get stronger 
and the NATO occupying army gets weaker.

81. In the sixties, Martin Luther King, Jr. told blacks to oppose U.S. 
involvement Vietnam because it was a war whose human cost was being 
disproportionally paid by the poor, i.e. by them. The same will be true if 
the U.S. commits to a ground war in Serbia, but the American black leadership 
apparently isn't what it used to be in terms of watching out for its own. 
Jesse Jackson, expressing his unequivocal support of The Man, said last week 
that the risk of American lives was acceptable because "the military is meant 
to be used". Meanwhile, the Final Call, the Nation of Islam's newspaper, came 
out Monday with an editorial which began as follows: "The fiercest battle 
being fought today is not the battle in Iraq, nor is it the fighting in 
Kosovo or Sierra Leone." So what was the most urgent and outrageous issue of 
the day, according to the Final Call? A political cartoon in the Village 
Voice, depicting, to the paper's horror, the Minister Farrakhan being 
attended to by Jewish doctors.

82. Why haven't Nobel Peace laureates Elie Wiesel, Nelson Mandela, Yassir 
Arafat, Desmond Tutu, and the rest spoken out more volubly against this war? 
For that matter, where are one-joke acts like Bob Geldof? Sally Struthers? 
Yoko Ono? If nothing else, this war has proven that it's passe to be a 
peacenik. Last week, at the California State Democratic Convention-the 
traditional Mecca of America's most fervent peace/love hippie anti-war 
political activists, the home to the delegate contingent that throughout the 
1960s picketed national party meetings with chants of "Stop the Bombing"--the 
solidly pro-Clinton proceedings were only interrupted once, by a single 
heckler, who shouted at Tipper Gore, "Bring them Home!" before being dragged 
away. As for the rest of the participants, they were mostly ex-hippies and 
ex-lefties who in the process of becoming establishment players in the 1990s 
had acquired a new fluency in the language of elitist cop-outs-- and were on 
hand at the convention to show off their skills. ''I never believed I'd have 
to go back and vote on airstrikes,'' wondered aloud Senator Barbara Boxer. 
''But human rights belong to everyone in the world,'' she added, and ought 
not to be denied ''because of ethnicity, religion, or background.'' (Boston 
Globe, March 31, 1999)

83. We'll get tired of the whole mess and leave--and when we do, the 
Albanians will suffer alone. There won't be a single photo of their suffering 
in any of the Western media, because they will be old news.

84. Does anybody miss the Mekong Delta? We lost that and managed to survive. 
We'll lose Kosovo for the same reason: we don't care about it, and the people 
we're fighting do.

85. If there is a ground war, it will almost certainly inspire the production 
of at least one grossly over-funded, falsely soul-searching film about a 
crippled war veteran that will star a healthy, nautilus-trained hunky tanned 
American actor. Coming Home and Born on the Fourth of July were only 
appetizers...Are you ready for Brad Pitt in a wheelchair? Leo De Caprio with 
"Kosovo syndrome"? Keanu Reeves as a blinded field surgeon, shown thirty feet 
tall in theaters all around the globe, confidently mispronouncing "Kosovo 
Polje" with a hard "j"? You'd better be. These are our next ambassadors to 
the world.

86. America's top brass was against the bombing. According to the April 5th 
edition of the Washington Post, the American military's top command argued 
against Madeleine Albright's reasoning that "losing" Kosovo would eventually 
destabilize the entire Balkans. They also said bombing Serbia would likely 
lead to a sharp escalation in the war against the Kosovo Albanians.

87. Slobodan Don't Surf! There are no beaches in Serbia.

88. What's all this "we," anyway? Are you planning to join up in time to take 
part in the first wave of the attack on Kosovo? If not, then drop the "we" 
stuff. One of the worst verbal consequences of the war is that people who 
have no intention of volunteering to fight in Kosovo will use the pronoun 
"we" to describe the NATO forces, saying things like "We kicked some ass!" 
when discussing the war. Anyone using "we" to describe the NATO forces in 
Kosovo should be forcibly inducted and sent to the front.

89. Now that Ukraine and Belarus have been forced back into alliance with 
Russia, the three countries are talking about redeploying nuclear weapons 
which were withdrawn to Russia in Ukraine and Belarus.

90. Among all the announced and expected year 2000 U.S. presidential 
candidates, none-- with the possible exception of semi-lunatic right winger 
Pat Buchanan--are against this action. In this sense, the bombing proves how 
few real political choices Americans have. Not only can President Clinton 
commit troops without bothering to secure full congressional approval, he can 
do so without having to worry about dissent within his party obstructing Al 
Gore's path to the nomination.

91. Even U.S. toadies like Yegor Gaidar are against this thing.

92. We've just about smoked our last pack of cruise missiles, and our bag of 
stealth planes is dented. Guess who's paying for the next trip to the store? 

93. Inevitable Pulitzer Prizewinning photo of weeping worn-torn Albanian 
civilian.

94. America cares so much about Albanians, they're taking in 20,000 
refugees-and putting them in a barbed wire compound on Guantanamo Bay, Cuba...

95. The Germans initially pledged to accept 40,000 Albanian refugees. Now 
they say they'll only take 10,000.

96. In contrast, tiny Macedonia has been saddled with over 130,000 refugees. 
Its prime minister, Llubco Georgievski, accused NATO of dumping the whole 
refugee problem on Macedonia and called NATO "completely irresponsible" this 
past Tuesday for ignoring warnings that NATO airstrikes would trigger a 
humanitarian disaster.

97. There is a great deal of evidence that points to pre-ordained war 
strategy on the part of the Clinton Administration. An August 12, 1998 
analysis by the U.S. Senate Republican Policy Committee (RPC) noted that 
"planning for a U.S.-led NATO intervention in Kosovo is now largely in 
place.... The only missing element seems to be an event - with suitably vivid 
media coverage - that would make the intervention politically salable, in the 
same way that a dithering Administration finally decided on intervention in 
Bosnia in 1995 after a series of 'Serb mortar attacks' took the lives of 
dozens of civilians - attacks which, upon closer examination, may in fact 
have been the work of the Muslim regime in Sarajevo, the main beneficiary of 
the intervention."

"That the Administration is waiting for a similar 'trigger' in Kosovo is 
increasingly obvious," observed the RPC report.

During the negotiations at Rambouillet, American negotiators very openly 
entreated the KLA representatives to just sign the damn agreement so that all 
the blame would be put on Serbia, and bombing could commence. The day after 
the war began, the London Telegraph reported that General Clark, NATO's 
supreme military commander, "received his activation order for hostilities 
last October....The supreme commander does not need new permission from 
politicians or diplomats whenever he wishes to change tactics, or increase or 
scale back operations."

98. The KLA may have duped the United States and Serbia both to serve its own 
Machiavellian domestic agenda.The guerrilla tactics of Marxists like the KLA 
call for the terrorist group to kill enough enemies (in this case, ethnic 
Serbs) in order to trigger reprisals so terrible that life for the average 
Kosovar becomes unbearable, thereby radicalizing the situation. Now that the 
situation is suitably radicalized, KLA military police are now forcing, at 
gunpoint, male Kosovar refugees into service, according to an April 1 
Associated Press wire. The KLA is even forcing refugees in Albania and 
Macedonia into service. In other words, the U.S. bombing and the subsequent 
Serbian reprisals against Albanians have both perfectly served the KLA's 
domestic agenda, providing it with defenseless refugees to fatten its rolls. 
This is yet another example of why the "ethnic cleansing" issue is not as 
black and white as the American press would have you believe.

99. Despite all of the above, the U.S. hopes to increase the influence of the 
KLA. On March 26th, the Global Intelligence Report claimed that "several 
foreign policy-makers, including Senators Mitch McConell, R-Ky. and Joe 
Lieberman, D-Conn., are reportedly promoting the idea of increased support 
for the KLA." Yep, we sure know how to pick 'em.

100. The strength of the KLA would seem to belie President Clinton's claim 
that the Serbs planned to ethnically cleanse Kosovo this spring "all along 
anyway." The KLA only appeared in February of last year. They announced 
themselves by launching terrorist attacks on Serb police and villagers. By 
early-mid summer, some estimates were that the KLA had controlled up to 
two-thirds of Kosovo. The big powers only got involved when the Yugoslav 
forces retaliated and retook most of Kosovo, which is, after all, 
internationally recognized as an integral part of Yugoslavia. Furthermore, 
although the operation was by no means civilized, the number of 
casualties-roughly 800 dead total on both sides during last year's 
battles-was remarkably low compared to the opening months of the Bosnian war, 
when it's estimated by some that tens of thousands were slaughtered and raped.

101. "America does not need to go abroad in search of monsters to 
destroy...America... well knows that by once enlisting under other banners 
than her own, were they even the banners of foreign independence, she would 
involve herself beyond the power of extraction, in all the wars of interest 
and intrigue, of individual avarice, envy and ambition, which assume the 
colors and usurp the standard of freedom. The fundamental maxims of her 
policy would insensibly change from liberty to force... She might become 
dictatress of the world. She would be no longer the ruler of her own spirit."
- John Quincy Adams; Address, 4 July 1821

******