From: COMER <comerpub@comer.org> Date: Thu, 06 May 1999 12:43:38 -0400 ER9905-#2 A Cluster Bomb of Further Kosovos in the Offing? Where are the statues to the sage who remarked that the only thing we learn from history is that we learn nothing from history? You would imagine that after the humbling experience of Vietnam American politicians would have engraved in their memories the ease with which a great power too conscious of its might can strut its way into a quagmire that it has mistaken for a parade ground. In Kosovo that fateful process is already at work. Senator McCain is unable to get enough support in the Senate for presenting a bill to put an American ground force into Kosovo. But cannier politicians know that there are other ways of skinning that cat. The Wall Street Journal (5/5) reports that the groundwork has already been laid for a land invasion of Yugoslavia. Even the language for the policy slip-in has already been devised. And from here it is as simple as marketing soap or Bill Gates' latest Windows software. The NATO plan would put 60,000 ground combat troops by the middle of summer, roughly one third of them Americans. It would not be a "combat invasion" of Kosovo -- perish the thought -- but a "semi-permissive" entry of the NATO forces. Up to now we have been treated to the demonisation of Milosevic, but now that man's semi-permission to bring in NATO troops is taken seriously. Obviously that would not hamper guerrilla action in mountainous terrain. " The Alliance planners don't know how long it will take to break the Serbs' will." Nonetheless, the plan "sets a deadline of late July for NATO troops to start moving into Kosovo, so that they can mop up the region in six weeks before winter sets in. You have to be tone-deaf not to detect an echo of Napoleon and Hitler deciding that they too could beat Jack Frost and get back to their firesides in good time. Meanwhile France retreats back to its traditional role of fly in the soup where NATO is concerned. But they are having as much success as when on the basis of their own experience in Vietnam, they advised the Americans to keep out of that mess. So the war planners, secure in their feeling that the world is theirs to dispose of, are pressing on with their task. "Moving by helicopter would permit the entry force to bypass mined bridges and other bottlenecks, and instead swarm into Kosovo from several different directions. ...The politically fragile Macedonian government has said that it doesn't want to be used as a base for offensive operations against Yugoslavia, but US officials believe it ultimately will agree." As ever Big Brother knows better. "The plan suggests that NATO military leaders consider placing a separate NATO force on Hungary's border with Serbia to threaten an invasion from that direction. ...It also suggests that Bulgaria might be used for a similar feint, or even for an actual but unpublicised entry into Kosovo. Gen. Clark visited Bulgaria this week." There is a point at which a mighty superpower's innocent ignorance not only of its own history but of that of world hot spots that it is determined to set aright becomes unforgivable. The Vojvodina, the entry corridor from Hungary to Serbia was part of Hungary under the Hapsburgs and still has a numerous Hungarian population. It has been Yugoslavia's bread-basket since it acquired it after WWI and has a rich tradition of ethnic cleansing. The Hungarian occupation troops during WWII executed a reported 5,500 Jews and Serbs. The Hungarians claim that Tito's partisans, once triumphant, executed 20-30,000 Hungarians. (Svein Monnesland, Land ohne Wiederkehr, Ex-Jugoslawien: Die Wurzeln des Krieges, 1997 Wieser Verlag, Klagenfurt, p. 254.) Macedonia, Montenegro, Kosovo and indeed almost every part of Yugoslavia is an artefact distilled from a mythological past kept alive over the centuries by illiterate bards and lettered poets. From the continuum of Slavic dialects that passes almost seamlessly from Slovenian through Serbo-Croatian to Macedonian to Bulgarian, scholarly poets have chosen the best suited to their political purposes. Religion and even alphabets were pressed into service to that end. For centuries the Croats clung to the Glagolic letters of the early missionaries as a means to resist the assimilation pressures of church Latin from neighbouring Italy. But the final decision in boundary matters have always been made by the great powers. The frontiers of Montenegro and Albania were drawn to make sure that Russia, protector of landlocked Serbia, would not obtain the warm-water port on the Adriatic that it craved since Peter the Great. Given this background, ethnic cleansing, rather than patented by Milosevic, is an ancient tradition. It can flare up anew whenever violence breaks loose -- even the most sanitized cyberwarfare of the US. For centuries the Turks were the most tolerant of religion and cultural differences, and there were times when Serb refugees flocked to the Turkish-held domains from the religious and ethnic cleansing of fellow Slavs. NATO in short is playing with high explosive. And the peril is heightened by the detail that the lure of a ground war fits the needs of the New York stock market like a glove. The cyberspace stocks have lost their fizz, and it is falling to metals and other commodities to keep the market buoyant. Excess capacity is the concern in the financial press, and the costly hardware that is being dropped on the Serbs has already been a factor in the expectation of improved markets. Even the shortcoming revealed in the software and the hardware of the American arsenal holds the promise of mass investment to improve means of mass destruction. And the eventual rebuilding of the devastated areas will provide a broader base for keeping the stocks in magic ascension. The pentagon wading into a situation like that can guarantee a cluster bomb of further Kosovos, big and small. William Krehm Chairman, COMER Editor-Publisher, Economic Reform wkrehm at ibm dot net Copyright (C) 1999 COMER. May be reproduced with proper acknowledgement. "Economic Reform" is the monthly journal of the Committee on Monetary and Economic Reform (COMER), a Canada-based publishing think-tank. Annual subscription, 12 issues, is $30. COMER Publications Suite 107 245 Carlaw Avenue Toronto ON M4M 2S6 Telephone (416) 466-2642 Fax 466-5827 Subscribe: mailto:ermail@comer.org?subject=subscribe --