Ending the Balkan Quagmire at American Thinker
By Julia GorinFor the past eight years, I've been in a lonely place politically. I don't mean the kind of lonely that conservatives generally find themselves in. I'm talking about utter desolation, for there are just as few conservatives as liberals where I've been. One of the only non-Serbian Americans to do so, I watched with steady interest for the better part of a decade the clockwork predictability of the fallout from our forgotten Kosovo intervention, a bombing campaign against an emerging post-Communist democracy rooted in Judeo-Christian values--on behalf of tribalistic, blood-code-following nominal Muslims claiming oppression and no less than genocide and ethnic cleansing.
Watching the Albanians predictably move on to terrorize Macedonia within a few months of our intervention that would "contain" the conflict, and then watching Albanians turn their weapons on NATO peacekeepers within 18 months, I wondered what it would take to get a national discussion going about that huge, self-destructive debacle. What would it take to have the debate that, it must be said despite my hobby of mocking Europeans, the German public had in 2001 when it put its politicians' feet to the fire after learning the hoax that their country had been party to, thanks to a German documentary unapologetically titled "It Began with a Lie."
In sharp contrast to every other cynically reported war, this time not only were our peacenik presses on board, but conspicuously they didn't try to ingratiate us to the enemy perspective by letting us hear incessantly from the other side, as they're otherwise fond of doing. Something was off. Even the evolving "alternative media"-self-tasked with policing the mainstream press and usually very wary of "facts" coming from the mainstream media and of cause celebres--were either silent on this or on precisely the same page as the New York Times, with its Sontag yentas for the first time explaining the concept of "just war". I found that, aside from Serbian-Americans (and Serbian-Canadians), who would later describe 1999 as a surreality they observed as if outside themselves, the only other people who as a group understood that our action meant something awful for the free world were the Russian-Jewish community that I myself had come from-a cartoonishly patriotic and capitalistic immigrant group with less than zero feeling for "Mother Russia" (if we're talking about the 70s and 80s wave).
Every now and again, a glimmer of hope that the fraud would be revealed surfaced, first in March, 2000 with a Washington Post article titled "Was it a Mistake? We were Suckers for the KLA" and then in April, 2001, with a Toronto Sun article titled "The Hoax that Started a War". Now, I thought, the story of the century-a fabricated genocide and PR campaign starting a war-would finally "break."
But the silence persisted, and none of the rare newspapers giving the occasional op-ed space to the dissenting perspective was interested in actually investigating...
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