How We Lost the War of Juanita's Lip;
Or, Return of the Balkan Tar-Baby

by Victor Milan
[email protected]

Exclusive to TLE

           Inasmuch as Job Number One for the US military, going into the 21st Century, will be disarming and subjugating the American people, it behooves would-be free folk to understand one fact about the recent military adventure in Kosovo.
           Militarily the US and NATO lost. President Slobodan Milosevic and Yugoslavia won.
           Here's how.
           It's a fundamental military principle, universally accepted since at least the days of von Clausewitz, that war must by definition have a clear-cut goal, some point the attaining of which will signal victory. The necessary corollary is that should war fail to attain that goal at reasonable cost, it's not a victory. While draws -- lose/lose situations -- are anything but uncommon in warfare, if one side attains its goals and prevents its enemies attaining theirs, it wins. It's that simple.
           (Of course, anyone who's ever played a game of capture the flag, or chess, or virtually any other competition already understands this.)
           So in what way did Yugoslavia win? And how did they wind up so screwed? How did the entire non-Albanian population of Kosovo, along with every Kosovar who isn't the KLA's bitch, wind up getting ethnically cleansed with the happy approbation of jackals like Tony Blair and Madeleine Albright and the unsighted acquiescence of a grotesquely marsupial "war crimes tribunal"?
           First, the NATO military campaign against the Yugoslav army in its province of Kosovo was a flop. With the air campaign in progress, the Yugoslav army attacked the KLA and rapidly, decisively defeated it on the ground.
           This is worth an instant replay: under one of the most intensive bombing campaigns in history, despite moral and almost certainly material support from NATO to the KLA, the Serbs whipped the separatists in short order. Strike one.
           When the war ended, the Yugoslav Army pulled out in good order, its men riding tanks, waving their fists and shouting defiance. That's no beaten army. And, oh, yes, those tanks -- NATO's claims for the destruction it wrought on the Yugoslav Army were as fraudulent as its claims of 100,000 murdered Kosovars: only a handful of actual fighting vehicles were destroyed. In fact, so excellent was NATO's intelligence-gathering, including its vaunted spy satellites, that more tanks openly rolled out of Kosovo at the conclusion of hostilities than NATO ever knew were there.
           Strike two.
           Ever dim, NATO did at least realize something was wrong with an overwhelming air assault whose objects fought and won an offensive campaign as if the bombs were sleet -- although, of course, no such thing was ever hinted at in the lie-sewage that gushed nonstop from the mouths of Jamies Shea and Rubin to be disseminated via those dutiful sewers, our Western media. NATO did adjust its manifestly losing strategy. It concentrated instead on civilian targets, attempting to destroy not just Yugoslavia's industrial base but also its civilian infrastructure, in hopes of torturing the populace into surrender. NATO also attacked, probably deliberately, targets such as buses and passenger trains, incinerating dozens of noncombatants to orgasmic howls of delight from the American right and left.
           After the war, certain NATO spokesvermin tacitly credited the attacks on civilians with ending the war. So impressed were the corrupt Communist thugs who ran Russia that they deliberately, and avowedly, emulated NATO's genocide strategy in Chechnya.
           But no terror-bombing campaign in history has ever produced victory. Nor did this one.
           Because of course, NATO lost.
           As foreplay to the Kosovo war, NATO presented Yugoslavia with a treat called the Rambouillet Accords. Although marketed as a peace agreement, the Accords could not rationally be considered anything but a provocation meant to drive Yugoslavia into war. Two clauses in particular make this undeniable: first, a demand that Yugoslavia cede Kosovo's independence, which even Milosevic's opponents rejected. Second, that Yugoslavia submit to plenary military occupation by NATO, allowing NATO troops total freedom to move anywhere in the country at any time, while enjoying total legal immunity from Yugoslav criminal and civil law.
           I'm not one of these self-pronounced freedom-lovers everywhere apparent who nonetheless sing the praises of the sovereign state: government is murder, plunder, enslavement, and rape. All government at every level is evil. Nor am I a fan of Slobodan Milosevic, another Commie dirtbag.
           But no unconquered nation-state could accede to such abject terms. Had the democratically elected president of Yugoslavia done so, he'd have been promptly killed by his own people, like Moctezuma. The second condition alone would have rendered Yugoslavia a colony of NATO: a penal colony, whose inmates enjoyed less recourse than American prisoners in a maximum-security facility.
           Milosevic was prepared to accept Rambouillet's other points. But the two that amounted to utter surrender he was willing to fight rather than give in to -- as NATO knew he would be, and manifestly intended.
           So: the Kosovo War was fought to force Milosevic to accept two particular clauses of the Rambouillet Accord. Your tax dollars at work.
           The fighting ended when NATO (which really means the US and a pack of miserable sock puppets) agreed to drop its insistence on Kosovo independence and the military occupation of Yugoslavia. The very issues war was fought over.
           NATO exactly failed to achieve its war aims. Milosevic did attain his. He won.
           Strike three. NATO lost the war. But it won the peace, and in a way entirely appropriate to Bill Clinton, that coke-whuffling, cigar-twiddling, civilian-butcher bumpkin Omnibomber with the voice of a goosed sow and the morals and sexual proclivities of a televangelist: they lied.
           Like Wilson, Lloyd George, and Clemenceau in the First World War -- who did at least defeat if not destroy the German armies -- Clinton and his punks talked their opponents into laying down their arms with a peace treaty they never meant to keep.
           And we all know how well that turned out the first time, eh?
           How sweet is victory. Juanita Broaddrick's credible allegations of rape are forgotten -- which is victory, for Clinton. We may yet find ourselves back toe-to-toe in newclear confrontation with the Rooskies, which means America's pro-war conservatives have won reward for their latest Lewinsky impression: a chance at re-igniting their beloved Cold War. Everybody in the world brighter than Tony Blair -- six billion of us, give or take -- fears they may be the next victims of a random American drive-by bombing. Our armed forces are adding another black mark alongside their having connived at the genocide of the Krajina Serbs of Croatia in the 1990s. And here we are with another foot stuck irreclaimably into the Balkan Tar Baby.

Victor Milan
"Smart guns" and mandatory "safety" locks aren't meant to save children. They're meant to kill gun owners.

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