Byzantine Blog

S., regarding picture from San Francisco Examiner.

I'm curious to read more about this story as the picture looks interesting, do you have a link maybe?

Thanks

Hi, Alex!

Unfortunately, I just have the picture someone emailed awhile back - it's much bigger though, so when I resized it some of the letters got blurred... I can only assume this goes back to the time of bombardment/war against Albanian Muslim insurgents in Kosovo province, and would also be interested to read the whole article (since it's obviously written by an exceptionally intelligent reporter).

Ako Srpska vojska ima pravo da udje na Kocobo pod UN rezolucijom, onda neka udje i to sto pre. Sto se duze prica i diskutuje o tome, NATO i SAD ce da nadju vise razloga da Srbija nema pravo na to. Prava se ustanove kroz akcije a ne kroz dugacke diskusije.

I believe this may be the article in question…

By the cruise missiles' green glare
ROB MORSE, EXAMINER COLUMNIST

Friday, March 26, 1999

(03-26) 04:00 PDT KOSOVO; YOGUSLAVIA -- THERE WAS President Clinton on TV, pointing to a map of Europe, showing Americans where Serbia and Kosovo are.

It reminded me of a rule of war many of us have learned over the last half-century: Never go to war with a country you can't find on a map.

Clinton was pronouncing Kosovo as "Kasava," reminding me of the way Lyndon Johnson pronounced Vietnam as "Vit-nam."

Never go to war in a place you can't pronounce.

Clinton gave a brief lesson in Balkan history, but he didn't go back as far as 1389 to the battle of Kosovo Field, when the Turks slaughtered the Serbian nobility, leading to a takeover of Serbia that lasted five centuries.

Never go to war with a country whose national holiday celebrates a defeat suffered in 1389. These are people ready to take some punishment.

Our national holiday is the Oscars, and we can barely remember who won last year.

Let's see if we remember some other things we should have learned.

Never start a war without clear objectives. Never start a war you don't plan on winning. Never promise everybody, including your enemy, that you won't send in ground troops.

Although please don't. They'd never get out of that place.

Clinton and Secretary of State Madeleine Albright compare stopping Milosevic to stopping Hitler, but they're only willing to stand off and shoot our whiz-bang technology at him.

Once again we're treating missiles and bombs as if they're messages - laser-guided 2,000-pound high-explosive e-mail.

If anyone deserves a cruise missile in the eye, it's Serbian president Slobodan Milosevic. But he's hiding deep in some concrete bunker.

Milosevic has slaughtered, raped and pillaged non-Serbs to maintain his power. He cynically claims he is creating a "Greater Serbia" with successive attacks on other provinces.

Maybe Milosevic will be cowed by cruise missiles the way his forebears never were by invading Turkish, Austro-Hungarian and Nazi armies. I certainly hope so, but I doubt it.

Air raids raise national cohesiveness. In Britain, Germany and North Vietnam, bombings raised morale. The Strategic Bombing Survey after World War II showed that Germany's production of war materiel increased under the bombing.

Vietnam was hit by American raids much larger than the ones in Serbia, day after day and year after year, yet we lost.

America is the land that invented the airplane and built rockets for all imaginable purposes. We love gadgets - all the more if they're packaged in the deadly shapes of war.

We've never recognized that aircraft never won a war. They certainly can't do it in a country with the topography of West Virginia, with no target worth more than the price of a single bomb.

News programs devoted more time to the wonders of the B-2 stealth bomber than to the history of the Balkans. Never mind that just two of these sluggish billion-dollar bombers labored all the way from Missouri to Serbia to dump their loads.

The word "inefficient" doesn't do justice to the B-2 mission, especially since the strategic aim was to stop a bunch of thugs in camouflage uniforms from shooting up peasants' homes with mortars and AK-47s.

Now members of the Albanian minority in Kosovo are all the more frightened. Just before the bombs arrived, Dukagjin Gorani, editor of the KD Times in Pristina, Kosovo, wrote:

"The fear is that once the airstrikes begin, "the massacre' many of us feared will finally come."

The Serb army is acting like beasts already. What better way to get back at Clinton than to kill those he's trying to protect?

You can't stop a massacre with a B-2.

Serbia is a country that has borne grudges for 600 years. It was a Serbian nationalist who ignited the First World War and in the Second World War hundreds of thousands of Nazi troops were tied down by guerrillas.

We don't have any idea what we're getting into. We certainly have no idea how to get out.

Milosevic has maintained his power by conjuring threats from outside enemies in Croatia, Bosnia and Kosovo. Now he has the biggest threat in the world working for him.

There was Clinton telling the country, "Now, I want to be clear with you. There are risks in military action . . ."

Since when do people have to be told there are risks in military action? Well, ever since presidents decided that they couldn't stand the political risk of losing even one American life in action.

War is now a recurring show on CNN, with stock footage of aircraft and ships, and bright lights in a green sky. Like everything else in this country, it's mass entertainment.

The Serbs don't seem to be treating this war like a show, though. They confiscated foreign journalists' equipment and ordered them out of the country.

Don't they know this is supposed to be a media war?

Sometime in the future, somewhere in Serbia, there will be a memorial to the battle of 1999. The only question is whether the Serbs will celebrate it as a victory or as a defeat.

I hope the war is short enough so we'll forget even faster than usual.

This article appeared on page A - of the Examiner

Thank you, Alfred E. - very intelligent indeed.

Too bad Mr. Morse swallowed the whole CNN/KLA propaganda about Milosevic and Serbian army beforehand, though. Yugoslav army at the time (Vojska Jugoslavije, VJ, which included ethnic minorities and even a unit consisting of ethnic Albanians that were an integral part of the "Serbian army" during the Kosovo war) never behaved "beastly" - they're just way too good for cowardly, ambush-seeking KLA for them to ever stand a chance in a single battle. They couldn't win ONE in a year and a half, even with mighty NATO cover and CIA support, let alone win the war.

But the main points Morse made were spot on and exceptionally insightful.

And yes, Serbs won that one too.

Interesting pieces of information indeed, one can't help wondering whether the bashing of Milosevic and the then Yugoslav army is the prerequisite for getting published. It is a pity that some otherwise good articles embody that practice giving legitimacy to the aggression itself.