The Truth Leaks Out About Kosovo

The embarrassing truth is starting to come out that the Clinton Administration lied to us about Kosovo atrocities which were supposed to justify the bombing of Yugoslavia. In five months of investigation and exhumation of the dead in Kosovo, United Nations war crimes investigators have found only 2,108 bodies. That's the figure confirmed and reported to the UN Security Council by the chief prosecutor for the UN war crimes tribunal, Carla Del Ponte. (New York Times, Nov. 11, 1999)

Before the bombing, Clinton and Defense Secretary William Cohen repeatedly tossed out figures of 100,000 dead, and the State Department even claimed that up to 500,000 Kosovars were feared dead. (New York Times Nov. 11, 1999)

Pathologist Emilio Perez Pujol, who led a Spanish forensic team looking for bodies, found only 187, mostly in individual graves. He calculated that “the final figure of dead in Kosovo will be 2,500 at the most. This includes lots of strange deaths that can't be blamed on anyone in particular.” (London Sunday Times, Oct. 31, 1999)

The British, who seem to be more interested in getting to the truth than Congress, are pressuring Foreign Secretary Robin Cook to answer claims that Tony Blair's government misled the public over the scale of deaths in order to justify NATO's bombing of Belgrade. Alice Mahon, the Labor MP who chairs the Balkans committee, said that the Kosovo deaths were tragic but did not justify the killing of Belgrade civilians by NATO's bombing. (London Sunday Times, Oct. 31, 1999)

Lacking a constitutional or national security basis for his Yugoslav adventure, Clinton relied wholly on the humanitarian argument. That rationale has fallen apart because the numbers of Milosevic's crimes in Kososo were so grossly inflated, the indiscriminate damage done by the Clinton/NATO bombing raids was so vast, and all the people he said he was helping are far worse off than before the bombing started.

The Clinton/NATO bombing was carried on for 78 days with total disregard for human life. The bombs killed thousands of innocent civilians and even destroyed hospitals and schools. (New York Times, April 14, 16, 20, 1999)

Children play in the ruins of one of many Serbian Orthodox churches destroyed in Kosovo, as an elderly ethnic Albanian walks by.

The Clinton/NATO bombing decimated Yugoslavia's economic infrastructure and created an environmental nightmare. Not only are water and power systems destroyed, but the lifeline of the region, the Danube River, is polluted and largely impassable because of destroyed bridges.

Repeated air strikes on the Serbian town of Pancevo [Panchevo] enveloped the area in clouds of black smoke and flames for ten days and unleashed tons of chemicals into the air, water and soil. The fish, produce and water are all contaminated. (New York Times, July 14, 1999)

What was advertised as an air war against Yugoslavia's military capabilities was really a war directed against the Serbian people. Dropping cluster bombs from 15,000 feet and firing missiles from many miles away guaranteed “mistakes” and “collateral damage” and prove that the targets were civilian as well as military. US Air Force Commander Lt. Gen. Michael Short admitted that the goal was to break the will of the Serbs and make them so miserable that they would force Milosevic to pull out of Kosovo. (London Daily Telegraph, May 25, 1999, quoted in Cato Institute's Policy Analysis, Oct. 25, 1999)

Estimates of the cost to rebuild the damage range up to $100 billion (you can bet that American taxpayers will ultimately be called upon to pay this bill, and the costs in human misery are incalculable.

The situation in Kosovo, the province Clinton was supposed to be protecting, is even worse. The danger from unexploded British and American cluster bombs and mines is at alarming levels, according to international aid agencies. (New York Times, 8/6, 1999) Before the bombing began, there was no humanitarian crisis in Kosovo. It was only after the US and NATO air strikes began that the Serbs started to expel Albanians from Kosovo.

The NATO “peacekeeping” force in Kosovo is completely unable to restrain the revenge-seeking Albanians who are beating and murdering the Serbs, even targeting grandmothers (Washington Times, August 13, 1999), and burning their homes and churches. (New York Times, August 2, 1999, Nov. 22, 1999) More Serb civilians have been slaughtered in Kosovo than ethnic Albanians before the bombing began. (David Hackworth column, August 24, 1999)

The daily violence continues even though there are now more NATO troops in Kosovo than Serbs. According to Human Rights Watch, 164,000 Serb civilians have been driven out of Kosovo. (New York Times, August 2, 5, 1999, Sept. 13, 1999, Oct. 29, 1999, Nov. 22, 1999)

The Clinton-Albright policy is based on the absurd fantasy that America and NATO can force the Serbs and Albanians to live together in a multiethnic society. Neither side wants that, and the attempt to impose our will means that US troops will play the costly roles of global cop and social worker indefinitely into the future.

The only people happy about the Yugoslavia debacle are the globalists who want America to be perpetually engaged in foreign conflicts. In a speech to the Canadian Parliament, Czech leader Vaclav Havel praised the Yugoslav war as “an important precedent for the future,” saying that “state sovereignty must inevitably dissolve” and that nation-states will be transformed into “civil administrative units.” (The Responsive Community, Summer 1999)

When Clinton's National Security Adviser Sandy Berger spoke to the Council on Foreign Relations on October 21, he described Clinton's foreign policy as grounded in the policy of “engagement.” America will now be “engaged” in Yugoslavia for the rest of our lives.

Jewish Thinking

“What has happened since World War II is that the American mentality has become part Jewish, perhaps as much Jewish as anything else … The literate American mind has come in some measure to think Jewishly. It has been taught to, and it was ready to. After the entertainers and novelists came the Jewish critics, politicians and theologians. Critics and politicians and theologians are by profession molders; they form ways of seeing.”
—Walter Kerr, “Skin Deep is not Good Enough,” The New York Times, April 14, 1968, pp. Dl, D3.
Quoted in: Kevin MacDonald, The Culture of Critique (Praeger, 1998), p. 243.

Collapse of a Culture

“The historian is not trying the men and women of the past; he is contemplating them; he has to see them as in truth they were and to present them as such to others, and a man, as a man, cannot be seen truly unless his moral worth, his loveworthiness, is seen.”
—David Knowles, The Historian and Character, and Other Essays. Quoted in Thomas C. Reeves, A Question of Character (1992), p. vii.