From the Balkans to the Balkans


For all practical purposes, the Twentieth Century began in the Balkans, what Bismarck called the hellhole of Europe (1914) and portends to end there. Has anybody read the Guns of August? Does anybody remember "The Black Hand" and Gavril Princip, the fellow who shot Archduke Ferdinand in Sarajevo? Remember the Triple Alliance and the Triple Entente? Vienna sent an ultimatum to Serbia. With Russian backing Serbia refused to acquiesce to Austria’s demand for an apology for the murder. Germany backed Austria of course (Triple Alliance). France was committed to Russia (Triple Entente). And voila, all those commitments (and all that military hardware)….nothing left but to send in the boys… C’est la vie…World War I ("the war to end all wars").

And they too thought it would be a surgical operation over by Christmas. It didn’t end in six or eight weeks did it? Is there anything familiar in all of this?

Has anybody thought about Bismarck? Probably not one in ten Americans has a clue who Otto von Bismarck was. It doesn’t really matter except that as one of the most savvy statesmen (not to be confused with being a good guy) of modern times and the architect of German unification, Bismarck would not even think of going anywhere near the Balkans. I forget exactly what unflattering epithet he used, (something like, "the entire Balkans are not worth a single Prussian soldier") but suffice it to say that he realized, a hundred and twenty years ago, that Serbs, Croats and the rest of them down there have all developed ethnic contumely and rapacious killing to a high art. No imaginable diplomatic or military surfactant could ever cleanse the centuries-old hatreds festering in Kosovo, Sarajevo and Belgrade.

Read Dame Rebecca West’s Black Lamb and Grey Falcon or Robert Kaplan’s Balkan Ghosts, and you still won’t know what is going on in the former Yugoslavia; repeat, former Yugoslavia; (why do they insist on even using the word Yugoslavia when, today we are talking about half a dozen separate countries called Serbia, Bosnia, Croatia, Macedonia, Albania and Slovenia) and yet to add to our confusion we hear, on every news broadcast the term Yugoslavia used synonymously with Serbia.

Oh well, it’s obviously more mischief of the "Tri-lateral Commission". Next we’ll hear there are unplumbed reserves of oil and huge gold deposits under those hills in Kosovo. (I remember reading some theory that the real reason we went into Somalia was to protect our petroleum interests). Seriously, not even the CIA could design a set of circumstances as Byzantine and inscrutable as exist in southeastern Europe. The only good that could possibly come of all of this would be the coincidental shooting down of Captain Ashby. That, at least, would go a long way to patching up relations between Italian and American skiers.

Of course, what is the point of reading The Guns of August and Peacemaking 1919 and the Rise and Fall of the Third Reich if not to conclude that tyranny must be cowed, crimes against humanity punished…no more holocausts. I mean, that’s the idea behind learning about Nazi Germany isn’t it?…to be vigilant about scape-goatism and genocide. At least if they – the people being genocided -- are white. (A couple million Hutsies or Tutus butchered in Africa or a few hundred thousand Indians in Guatemala aren’t cause for putting American boys in "harm’s way;" but when we’ve got regular white Europeans being genocided, that’s different).

We have a president who prudently eschewed Viet Nam; you didn’t have to be a Rhodes Scholar to stay home on that one. But the Balkans? If Bismarck and Churchill couldn’t figure out the age-old internecine hostilities down there and therefore resolved to have nothing whatsoever to do with the place, what are we doing letting a guy who can’t seem to manage a single amour without it going public, lead us into this quagmire? Maybe it was during one of "those" phone calls that he decided to exercise his authority as Commander in Chief?

And, why is this such a seemingly exclusive American venture? I have yet to hear about any of the 18 other members of this great European gun club than England and France. Only peripherally is mention made of Italian air bases, implying, I suppose, Italian collusion. I don’t mean to make light of NATO and its original role in curbing Soviet ambitions, which, we now know, were very expansive indeed, but doesn’t NATO have some sort of initiation rites-by-fire or something that would require Poland, Czechoslovakia and Hungary, the three new members in the club, to prove their democratic and humanitarian mettle by going after these Serb cutthroats?

I keep saying silly things. Are we so inured to harsh realities that we make "lite" of a major military action? But it’s true, as far as we know, the bombing in the Balkans happens only now and then between SUV and deodorant commercials. Where are the liberal-minded college students today? Is it any more legal to bomb Serbia than it was to bomb Cambodia? Well, where were we in 1962 and 1963 when Kennedy decided to back the disgustingly corrupt Thieu regime in Saigon? How could we possibly have known how malodorous that quagmire was? The Vietnamese had finally kicked out the French, why did we want to wade into the same unwelcome (civil war?) morass? Anybody for a game of dominoes?

Wait a minute; that’s what this is, a neo domino theory campaign thing. The CIA nearly went out of business (remember those sanguine post-Soviet discussions of new world order and peace dividends in which the CIA sleuths seemed destined to become global market analysts and trade in their Glocks and trenchcoats for laptops and pinstripes? …Well now they have figured out this new menace…rogue nationalism, which creates unrest, killing and instability – rogue domino terrorism -- all of which create unsatisfactory environments for Nike factories and Macdonald’s franchises and therefore are threats to our National Security! So that’s what this war is all about… National Security Interests (read that as Wall Street Security Interests).

What is it about this thing that inspires flippancy? How many of us think about the fact that everyday now we are still bombing Iraq? There was a time about ten or eleven years ago when we spoke of Sadaam Hussein as a "moderate" and something of an ally as he waged a long war against the guys we hated (but who had been our allies in the fifties and sixties – remember the Shah and his pretty wife?) even more, Iran. Then Sadaam fell from CIA graces and became the "devil incarnate" and we went to war against him when he tried to move into a piece of land historically within the Iraqi sphere of interest (lets not forget how all those disparate Arab emirates and fiefdoms were created by a bunch of know-it-all Brits after World War I.

And, by the same token lets not forget how these quelerous Croats and Serbs and the rest of them came to exist, or, shall we say, not exist, after World War II? But that is too short back…1919, 1945, 1972. It would be easy if we only had to go back a few decades but we are talking about a part of the world where people still think of yesterdays 700 years ago. This is like having a few thousand Iroquois armed with AK47’s, rocket launchers and anti-tank guns attacking New York from Hoboken. We Americans are luckily endowed with a philosophy of present and future – that was then and this is now – lets get on with it folks. But we can thank our wealth and promise for this lack of memory. In a part of the world where people still scrape out an existence with quadrupeds and live in a Cimmerian ignorance of progress, I suppose languishing on flawed pasts is all there is to do all day.

Part of what I am getting at is the indefinabillity of all this. If I am walking down a street and I see three guys attacking a woman down a dark ally and I hear her scream and see the scuffle, there is absolutely no question that I must run down to ameliorate the situation. I don’t stand at the end of the ally and shout, "Hey, would you boys please stop beating and raping that poor woman. If you don’t stop right now, I am going to call the police, you hear?" Maybe I should just throw a couple stones at them and hope they break it up? Maybe the woman is black or a thief or a whore. Shit, I can’t be risking my life for people like that can I? Isn’t that what we are doing in Serbia? If we know unequivocally that the Serbs are rapacious, murderous motherf…...s then why not run in there and "whup" their asses back to compliance with the Universal Declaration of Human Rights? Are we afraid to go down that ally or what?

The problem is, after Viet Nam, we don’t know for sure. Kosovars and Albanian nationalists after all, are not exactly a bunch of Ghandis with beards and quilted jackets. While Serbian behavior is not one to inspire tranquility is it fair to forget that they certainly got the short shrift under the Hapsburgs for a few hundred years (oops, lets not forget getting their asses kicked at Kosovo by the Turks in 13wheneveritwas) and then what about WWII? Again, the Serbs were in the Russian camp. The Nazis, the world’s best genociders so far, armed the Croats so one doesn’t need to be Stephen King to imagine what happened to the Serbs between 1940 and 1945. There are lots of Serbs today who saw wives and children killed by Croats fifty years ago. Germany killed six million totally innocent people in about ten years. Today we can’t seem to love and forgive them enough! We Anglo Saxons killed hundreds of thousands of totally innocent Indians and today we love ourselves. History evolves.

A paragraph ago I spoke impertinently about going in and kicking some butts while in reality I believe very strongly in the importance of dialogue and reconciliation. I still do not know why we eschewed the idea of sending in thousands more observers. Don’t even call them official observers; just send thousands of "tourists" into Kosova all armed with cell phones and video cameras and pay them to hang out there indefinitely. One Stealth bomber has cost us about thirty million dollars so far. That amount of money would have paid for a heluva lot of "tourists" hanging out in Kosovo as well as injecting some much-needed cash into the local economy. Then, if Milosovic had waged his barbaric scorched earth campaign we would have had incontrovertible evidence and world-wide (including Russian) support for some serious behavior modification.

I am a student of Munich and therefore reluctant to appease stupidly. But if our government did indeed try everything, I am not aware of it. Perhaps we are all paying a horrible price for dalliance in the Oval Office. Indeed, throughout the past year I often wondered what countless things were being ignored as we O.D’d on Monica-gate. We know now, embarrassingly late, that this has not been the most thoroughly conceived military operation. Are the generals really surprised that Milosovic has not run out with the white flag? Are these "experts" really surprised that of course we will have to send in ground troops to finish this job?

So how do we balance post-modern sympathies and human rights with "Real Politik"? I mean, why didn’t we step into Africa to save the Tutsis, why don’t we step in to save the Kurds? Why did we support the genocide in Guatemala? I don’t have the answers obviously, but I think we need some (honest ones please) or the young people today won’t have to play 60’s wannabes anymore. They’ll have their own mortal morass to protest about….and it won’t be with tie-dyed tee shirts and "yellow submarines" baby.