ANALYSIS/OPINION:
Like a political cult’s fantasy park, a 10- foot statue of a waving Bill Clinton leers over Bill Clinton Boulevard not far from the Hillary clothing store. A metal bust of President Clinton’s previous secretary of state, Madeleine Albright, prowls in the park nearby. Out of town, near an American military base, a 20- mile stretch of road is named after Joe Biden’s late kid. A congressman from the Bronx, Eliot Engel, not just got his own boulevard but earned his face on a postage stamp.
It seems like a freak show for The Swamp, and it’s real. All enabled with $2 billion of the American taxpayers’ money. Add an additional big costs for American troops there– not to safeguard the place from foreign invaders or to secure American important interests– but to keep the locals from eliminating one another. The freak program is called Kosovo.
Kosovo is a continuous mess. Its own people, a mishmash of irreconcilable cultures, traditionally can’t get along without some kind of totalitarian or military occupation. Each side ethnically “cleanses” itself of the other in a civil war horror between ethnic Albanian Muslims and ethnic Serbian Christians. The Albanian majority forced out most of the Christians– hardly anybody worldwide cared– and declared independence from Serbia.
The breakaway landlocked province has absolutely no strategic value to the United States. Less than half the location of Vermont, Kosovo is house to a population almost the size of the Bronx. Kosovo’s most famous exports are jihadists.
Just over twenty years ago, Kosovo’s bloody civil war against the Christians and the Christian Serbs’ hard reaction prompted Congressman Engel to convince Ms. Albright and Mr. Clinton to utilize American force to beat the Christian side. Mr. Clinton utilized NATO as a fig leaf to run a battle campaign affectionately called “Madeleine’s War” allegedly to stop the bloodshed.
The humanitarian battle brought autonomy to Kosovo, but the bombs weren’t enough: An Islamist revolt, the Kosovo Freedom Army (KLA), ran guerrilla operations on the ground to form the brand-new rebel government. That probably helped earn Mr. Engel his photo on a Kosovo postage stamp.
After the war, the locals proved as soon as again that they could not get along and required an armed babysitter.
With the United States and allied ground forces supplying militarized child care, a “peace process” dragged on for many years, throughout which the secessionist province broke from Serbia in 2008 and stated independence thanks to U.S. troops, who made sure that the peace procedure would continue stalling constantly.
Seeing that Russia had taken advantage and renewed its centuries-old ties with Serbia, with the Chinese in pursuit for a European foothold, the Trump administration has actually been trying to pull the United States out of the Kosovo mess and woo Serbia westward. Serbia, though small, remains a center connecting southeastern and main Europe, and a partial land bridge from central Europe far from the Russian- and Turkish-dominated Black Sea, toward the Mediterranean.
But Kosovo-backers desire absolutely nothing of it. Just recently in pandemic-shuttered Washington, scripted talking-point recyclers are bleating for attention to conserve the Clintonian status quo. One of them took a break from the lockdown to call Kosovo “the most pro-American country in Europe.” Another hailed the microstate as “the most pro-US country on the world.”
That might be real as long as the stupid Americans continue to pump in cash and provide military protection from the disliked Christians. It does not rather fix up with Kosovo’s status as the West’s biggest per-capita recruitment ground for jihadist terrorists.
Now, long time partisans of the Clinton machine are regreting that “America’s Kosovo technique is melting down.”
It has to do with time.
– J. Michael Waller is senior analyst for technique at the Center for Security Policy in Washington, DC. Follow him on Twitter @JMichaelWaller.
