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Putin’s Balkan Offensive

The Truth About Gallipoli

Woodrow Wilson’s Great Folly

Could the US break apart like post-Tito Yugoslavia?

Sobering Before you say ‘no, of course not’ read this assessment and warning from XX Committee.

Yugoslavia’s Warning to America

Only a fool or a charlatan will deny the ominous parallels.

Note—the author is warning, not predicting: He believes there is still time to avoid Yugoslavia’s fate.

Yet the collapse of Yugoslavia offers several cautionary tales to Americans today, and if they are wise they will heed them and set the United States on a correction course before it is too late. As one who witnessed the dreadful collapse of Yugoslavia and its terrible aftermaths — including the seemingly permanent impoverishment of Southeastern Europe, mired in crime, corruption, and extremism — I would very much like America to discover a far happier fate.

++++++

The fate of Yugoslavia was anything but preordained. The United States, whatever its problems, is a far richer and better-run state than anything created by Tito. But the same threats lurk, particularly those of economic degradation caused by debt and made impossible to fix thanks to toxic racial politics. America need not become a vast Balkan horror show — I think it’s more likely in coming decades to become a huge nuclear-armed Brazil, with entrenched economic inequality, often among racial lines, that I find noxious and unworthy of our country — but the fate of Yugoslavia must be avoided at all costs. Our next Civil War would be much more vicious and protracted than the last one, have no illusions.

I also found this discussion interesting but also a little scary:

after the early 1950s, the repressive state apparatus didn’t have to throw many dissidents in prison, as public shaming, including threats of unemployment and loss of housing, cowed most would-be complainers into towing the party line, at least in public.

Related:

Orwell meets Sartre

A Totalitarian Wind

Yes, it is a stupid decision

Is this crazy, or is this crazy?

The decision by Britain, America and certain other European countries to recognise Kosovo as an independent state is mind-blowingly stupid and suicidal and of a piece with their obvious determination to capitulate in the war for civilisation.

Siege of Vienna

Originally posted 9-12-2003

In the summer of 1683 the Ottoman Turks advanced up the Danube, occupied Hungary, and, in July, laid siege to Vienna. They had 200,00 men and over 300 cannon. The defenders of the city numbered less than 22,000 only 6,000 of whom were regular soldiers; the remainder were civilians pressed into service at the start of the siege.

The relief of the city was complicated by European politics. Louis XIV of France hoped to gain German territory on the Rhine while the Hapsburgs were occupied in the east. To that end, he worked to create am anti-Hapsburg alliance with Hungary and Poland which would deny Austria aid against the Turks. (Incidentally, the Ottoman artillery were commanded by a Frenchman, a former Capuchin no less).

By September, conditions were desperate inside the city- low supplies, disease, and weakening defenses. The Hapsburgs had raised a relief army of only 21,000. But, fortunately, Poland had spurned Louis's maneuvers and sent an army of 24,000 under their King John Sobieski.

On September 12, the two relief armies and the forces inside the city attacked the besiegers. The critical moment came in mid-afternoon when Sobieski sent his cavalry into the heart of the Ottoman camp. The battle became a rout. The next day the Polish king wrote his wife: "the Vizer took such hurried flight that he had time to escape with only one horse."

He also noted the Turks "left behind a mass of innocent Austrian people, particularly women; but they butchered as many as they could." Separate from that slaughter, the Ottomans had sent 67,000 Austrians east as slaves and 14,000 girls to the harems of Constantinople.

Sobieski's troops captured the Ottoman battle flag ("The green standard of the Prophet") in the fighting. This he sent to the Pope with the message "Veni, vidi, Deus Vicit" ("I came, I saw, God conquered").

The lifting of the siege is usually marked as the turning point for the Ottoman empire. For centuries they had advanced against Europe, conquering the Byzantium empire, capturing lands in the Balkans and islands in the Mediterranean. After 1683 they began 250 years of retreat. (Funny how many of these critical turning points find the Poles fighting on the right side).

Today is the 324th anniversary of the lifting of the siege.

Balkan echoes in Salt Lake City

More Bosnian Lies from Utah

Utah Shootings: Yet Another Case of Sudden Jihad Syndrome, After All

I'm not sure why the authorities treat jihad and mental illness as mutually exclusive. Do they really believe that someone with mental illness would be rejected as a suicide bomber recruit? Seems to me, they would make the BEST recruit: they could be manipulated more easily and they have already crossed a long way to the idea of suicide

Here are two recent articles on the Balkans

Radical Islam's Dupes

The Straight Story On Yugoslavia

In Iraq, CNN covered up the crimes of Saddam Hussein. In Yugoslovia, they went all out to condemn the Serbs and grossly exaggerated their crimes. At the same time, they covered up and minimized those of their opponents. (As they do to this day.)

Clinton, the Balkans, and al Qaeda

The Bosnian story mentioned below touches on an important historical issue.

Police also confirmed they are keeping close tabs on dozens of mujahedeen _ Islamic fighters who came to Bosnia to fight on the Muslim side in the 1992-95 war. Although most left for other conflicts in Afghanistan, Chechnya, Iraq and elsewhere, some stayed and married local women.

The vast majority of Bosnia's Muslims rejects the mujahedeen's fiery brand of Islam. Yet young, restless men frustrated with 40 percent joblessness and angered by real or perceived insults to Islam can be open to hard-line dogma, the Prague-based think tank Transitions Online said in a recent report.

And

The U.S.-Croatian report says infiltration actually dates back long before the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks. It says Islamic militants with ties to al-Qaida and other terrorist organizations have been crisscrossing the Balkans for more than 15 years, financed in part with cash from narcotics smuggling and coming from Afghanistan and points further east via Turkey, Kosovo and Albania.

Since the Sept. 11 attacks, evidence has emerged that extremists have been trying to carve out a beachhead in the Balkans. The region is home to 8 million Muslims, roughly a third of Europe's Islamic faithful, and arms and explosives are easily obtained in what Lukac calls "a kind of El Dorado" for criminals.

When Clinton went to war against the Serbs, he brought the US into a tacit alliance with al Qaeda and other terrorist groups. That was not his intention, but it was the messy reality given the facts on the ground. It is one more reason why the Balkan war was not the clear-cut Good War II that CNN thought it was.

Let's also be clear on this. CNN covered the Balkans with all the objectivity that Hearst displayed in Cuba in 1898.

Ethnic profiling

I'm no fan. Last year I asked:

When it comes to ethnic profiling, why do some conservatives insist on playing Charlie Brown to the MSM's Lucy? Why, when the issue is ethnic profiling, do they insist on defending the ineffective while pretending that it in no way deepens the impression that conservative=racist?

It might be worth it if ethnic profiling would make us safer. Unfortunately, terrorists come in all shapes and colors. Law enforcement cannot announce that anyone is immune to scrutiny. The moment you say that people in wheelchairs will not be questioned or searched, you incent the terrorists to find a way to put a bomb in a wheelchair. Give a pass to oriental females and you tell al Qaeda who to recruit, trick, or bribe in their next operation.

and also wrote this

I think this whole debate is dangerous. Not just because it pointlessly increases ethnic tension, but also because it helps the terrorists learn how to defeat our defenses. By forcing the police to discuss and defend their screening procedures, the pro-profiling side is providing intelligence fodder for al Qaeda. It would be better if the police just said, "We are using a combination of random checks and behavior profiling" and left it at that.

This story suggests that terrorists are thinking in just those terms:

Terrorists Recruiting 'White Muslims'

SARAJEVO, Bosnia-Herzegovina -- His code name was Maximus, and he held secret meetings in a shabby room at the Banana City Hotel on the outskirts of Sarajevo.

Bosnian police put him under surveillance, and in a raid last fall on his apartment on Poligonska Street, authorities seized explosives, a suicide bomber belt and a videotape of masked men begging Allah's forgiveness for what they were about to do.

What they planned, investigators believe, was to blow up a European embassy. But compounding their concern, they say, was the ringleader's background: Maximus turned out to be Mirsad Bektasevic, a 19-year-old Swedish citizen of Serbian origin with ties to a senior al-Qaida operative.

Terrorists have been working to recruit non-Arab sympathizers _ so-called "white Muslims" with Western features who theoretically could more easily blend into European cities and execute attacks _ according to classified intelligence documents obtained by The Associated Press.

A 252-page confidential report jointly compiled by Croatian and U.S. intelligence on potentially dangerous Islamic groups in Bosnia suggests the recruitment drive may have begun as long as four years ago, when Arab militants ran up against tough post-9/11 security obstacles.
"They judge that it is high time that their job on this territory should be taken over by new local forces ... people who are born here and live here have an advantage which would make their job easier. By their appearance, they are less obvious," the report reads.

Arabs, it adds, "have become too obvious, which has made their job difficult."

Balkan echoes

Dimitri K. Simes, "Jihad, Uninteded," The National Interest, Winter 2005/2006

One would have thought that the World Trade Center bombing in 1993, the simultaneous attacks on U.S. embassies in Africa in 1998 and the strike on the USS Cole in 2000, among other incidents, would have alerted policymakers that a new major challenge to American interests and American lives was in the making. However, instead of combating this threat, the United States focused on "wars of choice" and haphazard attempts to "nation-build" in the Balkans.

The architects of this tragic diversion are unrepentant and even proud of what they have done. As Richard Holbrooke, the person largely responsible for shaping a flawed U.S. policy in the Balkans, wrote in the Washington Post in July 2005, "Was Bosnia worth it? As we approach the 10th anniversary of Dayton, there should no longer be any debate."

Holbrooke's claim that there should be no debate about Bosnia demonstrates his chutzpah, but it does not pass even minimal analytic scrutiny. If the United States had wanted to stop the war, it could have supported the Vance-Owen plan-rejected by the Clinton Administration at the time as allegedly too favorable to the Serbs. And given the administration's inaction on genocide in Rwanda, it is not surprising that major powers like China and Russia found it difficult to accept that humanitarian considerations alone motivated the United States to act, first in Bosnia, then in Kosovo, especially when American protŽgŽs engaged in ethnic cleansing operations of
their own.

The "unintended consequences" of the Kosovo war in 1999 were to poison U.S. relations with Russia and China alike, leading eventually to the Clinton Administration's contemptuous rejection of Russian proposals for joint action against the Taliban and Al-Qaeda-proposals that resurfaced after 9/11 and eventually contributed to removing the Taliban from power.

*********

Mr. Holbrooke wants the United States to support independence for Kosovo, whether the democratic Serbian government accepts it or not. But what if ignoring Serbian objections discredits the moderate and pro-Western politicians now leading the country and results in a rabidly nationalist government there, reopening the Balkan can of worms? What if Russia takes the predictable position that what is good for Kosovo should be good for other unrecognized but de facto independent states such as Nagorno-Karabakh or the transdniester Republic? What of separatist regions like South Ossetia and Abkhazia, which share borders with Russia and where local populations overwhelmingly do not want to be a part of Georgia? In the latter case, the United States would face a series of unpleasant choices. Would the United States, in the name of principle, compel a pro-American Georgian regime to abandon its desire to restore the country's
territorial integrity? Or would Washington side with Tbilisi, especially if it decides to use force to recapture these regions? If the latter, the United States could find itself embroiled in a major dispute with Russia that could effectively end cooperation on other matters of vital importance to the United States. And how would the United States force a resolution granting independence to Kosovo through the UN Security Council over probable Chinese objections, without offering guarantees that Taiwan will never become a separate, independent state? Or argue that Kosovo deserves full independence without setting a dangerous precedent that the Kurds of Iraq and Turkey may seek to emulate? The potential for trouble seems serious and real.

More on the Balkans


Croatian President Franjo Tudjman
The Balkans' (not much) lesser evil

In 1995, Tudjman again showed his talent for limiting his brutality just enough to get away with it. That summer, he invaded the Krajina, the Serb area captured by Milosevic in 1991. The 200,000 Serb residents fled to Serbia rather than fight. Tudjman punctuated the arguably justified invasion with a vicious exclamation point. He had his troops burn down 70 percent of Serbian houses, passed laws to confiscate Serb property, and allowed gangs of Croat thugs to murder the few elderly Serbs who remained. "What he did after the invasion was inexcusable," says Peter Galbraith, then U.S. ambassador to Croatia.

Even so, Tudjman again restored himself to the West's (semi-) good graces by signing the Dayton Peace Accords and agreeing to let Serbs return to their burned homes. But he has not allowed them to return in fact. Only a handful of the 200,000 Serbs have come back to the Krajina. (He has also refused to extradite the Croats indicted for war crimes to the Hague, perhaps fearing they would implicate him.)

The War against Serbia: Illusion Versus Reality

In the Krajina region of Croatia, the United States tacitly accepted Croatia's ethnic cleansing of 300,000 Serbs because the killing weakened the Serb position in that country and in neighboring Bosnia. Because Turkey is a U.S. ally, the United States not only accepted the Turkish regime's brutal repression of the Kurdish minority (another conflict in which casualties have been much greater than those in Kosovo) but actively aided Ankara by helping apprehend the Kurdish leader Mohamad Ocalan.

Michael Kelly: A Perfectly Clintonian Doctrine

Finally, (4), it is at bottom a fraud. Note the use of the term "world community." There is no world community. The war against the Serbs in Kosovo was an exercise not of any global village but of the great powers, and the great powers pick and choose their moral causes. The great powers stood complacently by in the summer of 1995, when the Croats ethnically cleansed their turf in Bosnia of 300,000 Serbs, and they are standing by now, as the Kosovo Liberation Army and returning Albanian refugees rapidly cleanse Kosovo of 200,000 Serbs.

The emerging all-Albanian reality of Kosovo underscores the underlying fraud of the Clinton Doctrine, which is the idea that what the West is forging in the Balkans is a triumph for pluralism and democracy. It was a very good thing that the United States finally acted to stop the Serbs' slaughter in Kosovo, as it was a very good thing when it finally acted to stop the Serbs' slaughter in Bosnia. But it is nonsense to pretend that these accomplishments gave rise to a reversal of ethnic cleansing or anything like a pluralistic democracy.

Consider the reality of Bosnia-Herzegovina, as detailed in a searching article by Gordon N. Bardos in the April issue of the Harriman Review. As Bardos reports, four years and two missed deadlines for troop withdrawal after the Dayton Peace Accords, Bosnia is a protectorate of NATO divided into what Bardos calls three "ethnities" -- the Serbian entity of Republika Srpska, and a Croatian territory and a Bosnian territory that are uneasily federated under Dayton. Each is run by nationalist hard-liners backed up by ethnically pure military forces.

U.S. gave green light to terrorists in Bosnia

Yugoslavia policy helped build base in Europe for Hezbollah, others

The Dutch government has released a report that details the alliance between the United States and the Islamic effort to help Bosnian Muslims. The report determined that the United States provided a green light to groups on the State Department list of terrorist organizations to operate in Bosnia. This included the Lebanese-based Hezbollah. For the European Union, the U.S. effort marks a stain that calls into question Washington's war on terrorism.

For nearly a decade, the Clinton administration helped Islamic insurgents aligned with Chechnya, Iran and Saudi Arabia destabilize the former Yugoslavia. The insurgents were allowed to bring weapons and explosives to Bosnia-Herzegovina and fight Serbs and their allies. The insurgents also were allowed to move further east to Kosovo.

The United States was helped by a range of Muslim countries – from Iran and Saudi Arabia to Turkey. In short, the Clinton administration thought that the stronger the Muslims in Bosnia, the weaker the Serbian hold over Yugoslavia.

Today, there are tens of thousands of Islamic insurgents throughout such countries as Bosnia, Croatia and Kosovo, and many of them are moving west to Austria, Hungary, Germany and Switzerland.


A Massacre in Kosovo

A member of the United Nations police force murders his American colleagues.

ON APRIL 17, as reported in THE WEEKLY STANDARD, two American women and an American man were slain in Kosovo, and eleven people were injured when they came under armed attack by a Palestinian from Jordan. The killer was a member of the same body in which they served: the United Nations police force in the territory.

The male American, who died of his wounds, was Gary Weston, of Vienna, Illinois. The Palestinian, Sergeant Major Ahmed Mustafa Ibrahim Ali, was killed when members of the contingent in which the Americans were traveling returned fire.

In the days since the first reports of the crime were received, more details have emerged, which make what was already a scandal for the United Nations in Kosovo even more alarming. First and most disturbing is that the dead assailant, Ali, is being investigated for connections with Hamas, the Palestinian terror organization. Second is that the same Ali had visited the kingdom of Saudi Arabia, home of the Wahhabi Islamic sect that produced al Qaeda, only a month before he was sent to Kosovo in March.

[snip]

Because Kosovo media operates under heavy U.N. censorship, the whole truth about this atrocity may not be known for some time.

Another reason why Steve Sailer may be the bravest man in the blogosphere

The Official Bad Guy of the Balkans is dead:

"A Massacre in Kosovo"

Did you know a Palestinian terrorist killed three Americans on 17 April?

Probably not. The killing didn't happen in Iraq so it lacked "newsworthiness." And the Palestinian was not fighting with the Iraqi "resistence" so it did not fit the pre-fab reporting template.

This article gives the outline of the story. It also raises some serious issues.

Why does the United Nations police force enjoy "immunity from prosecution"? Isn't that a recipe for thuggery? What is the UN equivalent of the US military justice system?

What genius thought it was a good idea to allow radical Muslims with ties to Hamas to work as "neutral" policemen in Kosovo? For the Serbs, Kosovo is the symbol of their resistance to Islamic conquest. Sending radical Muslims there as policemen is no way to win them over.

Why does the UN impose heavy censorship in Kosovo? More importantly, why does the US media tolerate this? After all the whining about Pentagon news management it turns out that they accept outright censorship from Kofi Annon.

UPDATE: Justin Katz comments here.

Siege of Vienna

In the summer of 1683 the Ottoman Turks advanced up the Danube, occupied Hungary, and, in July, laid siege to Vienna. They had 200,00 men and over 300 cannon. The defenders of the city numbered less than 22,000 only 6,000 of whom were regular soldiers; the remainder were civilians pressed into service at the start of the siege.

The relief of the city was complicated by European politics. Louis XIV of France hoped to gain German territory on the Rhine while the Hapsburgs were occupied in the east. To that end, he worked to create am anti-Hapsburg alliance with Hungary and Poland which would deny Austria aid against the Turks. (Incidentally, the Ottoman artillery were commanded by a Frenchman, a former Capuchin no less).

By September, conditions were desperate inside the city- low supplies, disease, and weakening defenses. The Hapsburgs had raised a relief army of only 21,000. But, fortunately, Poland had spurned Louis's maneuvers and sent an army of 24,000 under their King John Sobieski.

On September 12, the two relief armies and the forces inside the city attacked the besiegers. The critical moment came in mid-afternoon when Sobieski sent his cavalry into the heart of the Ottoman camp. The battle became a rout. The next day the Polish king wrote his wife: "the Vizer took such hurried flight that he had time to escape with only one horse."

He also noted the Turks "left behind a mass of innocent Austrian people, particularly women; but they butchered as many as they could." Separate from that slaughter, the Ottomans had sent 67,000 Austrians east as slaves and 14,000 girls to the harems of Constantinople.

Sobieski's troops captured the Ottoman battle flag ("The green standard of the Prophet") in the fighting. This he sent to the Pope with the message "Veni vidi, Deus Vicit" ("I came, I saw, God conquered").

The lifting of the siege is usually marked as the turning point for the Ottoman empire. For centuries they had advanced against Europe, conquering the Byzantium empire, capturing lands in the Balkans and islands in the Mediterranean. After 1683 they began 250 years of retreat. (Funny how many of these critical turning points find the Poles fighting on the right side).

Today is the 320th anniversary of the lifting of the siege.