So is the Balkan area really a riddle wrapped in an enigma? Hardly.
There are undoubtedly other considerations and peripheral issues that will impact on this NATO war. Let me enumerate a few.
1. Never underestimate the influence of the powerful industrial military complex of Western democracies with their powerful lobby influence on law- and policy makers. The entire bomb arsenals of NATO and the USA will be severely depleted. Billions and billions of dollars will be spent on replacing all the spent cruise missiles and worn-out jet bombers and fighters. Jets and bombers are sophisticated machines and have only a limited life span and need to be replaced at high costs. If this campaign continues at the present rate, the working people of the Western world will soon have to pay for it through ever higher taxes to rebuild their arsenals and to help rebuild what's left of Kosovo and Serbia.
2. Do not underestimate the greed by the military establishments of most Western nations to try out their sophisticated high-tech hardware and to give their soldiers and airmen a taste of real battle-field experience.
3. Do not underestimate the hunger and need for billion dollar contracts, handed out to huge multi-national conglomerates and construction companies to rebuild all the bridges, roads, railways, airports, towns, houses, power stations, factories, oil refineries and chemical plants after the war is over in Yugoslavia. By participating in the slaughter, NATO Alliance members are guaranteeing themselves a place at the feeding trough. Guess who will pay for it?
4. There might also be buried in NATO flexing its muscle a not-so-hidden warning to the Red Army, which is still very much a power factor if not the biggest single threat to the current secret societies' gangster-run system in power in Russia, the message being: "Be careful! Do not putsch against Yeltsin and his crowd!" The message might well be: "Look what we can do to you if you should dare to try to shake your monkey off your back - we with our stealth and B-2 bombers operating from bases as far away as England and even South Carolina! We will bomb you back into the stone age with impunity!"
5. Don't underestimate the fact that NATO has expanded to the East. If the campaign against the Serbs should be successful, and tens of thousands if not hundreds of thousands of US and NATO ground troops should be permanently based in Yugoslavia or what remains of it, that must be perceived as a threat by the Russians at their border. After all, that would put hostile forces into an area where there were no hostile forces to Russia for over half a century after the German Wehrmacht left in 1944. That will have consequences!
6. At present, Western planners count on Russia's current impotence. Russia always was a giant - with clay feet, to be sure, but a giant nonetheless! Who is to say that genuine volunteers will not leave Russia by the tens of thousands to help their Slavic brothers in their hour of need - on the ground, with a Kalaznikov over their shoulder, where this struggle will ultimately be resolved?
7. Take also into the equation that Eastern Central and Southern Europeans have an endurance and capacity to suffer and take setbacks and punishment unfathomable for the spoiled, mollycoddled, video-game-playing, Coca Cola drinking "modern armies" of the West. All they need is a common theme, a common goal not yet articulated clearly by any political movement or leaders in the region - and the West might regret its ill-advised action.
So what is to be done? I take no pleasure in the following. I am not privy to all the intelligence analysis available to the NATO planners and to President Clinton and his advisors. I base my thoughts on what I have learned from studying history books, memoirs, articles and what I read and see and hear daily in the controlled press - and such study allows only speculative advice at best.
In my opinion, the only quick solution for the West, now that they embarked on this scheme, would be a putsch engineered by Yugoslav Army officers - undoubtedly with whom they already have contacts - from within the current power structure, much like it was done by those who toppled Ceausescu in Rumania. The scenario would look something like this:
A group of Army officers putsch and take Milosevic and some of his ministers prisoners. Other ministers and military commanders join them. They offer to turn Milosevic and family plus cronies over to them as war criminals. They contact NATO and call for a total cease fire. They immediately begin a troop withdrawal from Kosovo - all along accepting the conditions of Ramboulett and allowing an international peace-keeping force in, without opposition on the ground.
NATO and the Clinton administration would leap at such an offer so fast it would make the world's head spin! By now, these war mongers are looking for any way out, for the specter of having to send in their motley non-battle-tested troops of 19 different countries' armies into actual combat must be a nightmare for any military planner!
Since the Albanian-Kosovars will have nothing to return to by that time except rubble, many will choose to stay in the more civilized countries and less violence-prone societies of Germany, France, England, Canada and America, for even life as refugees will be far better than what they left behind. Many of them will reinforce the already existing drug smuggling rings run by Albanian thugs in Western countries.
Kosovo will be split up. There will be hundreds of thousands fewer Albanians/Moslems in the region, and the low birth-rate Kosovo Serb population will not feel as threatened by the population explosion. The pro-Marxist KLA will be involved in the government of a "statelet" of Kosovo, a poor country which will take decades to be supported by the West and will take ages to dig itself out from under the rubble.
Should that scenario not take place, and should Milosevic hang tough and hang in there by laying low long enough for various splits in NATO to develop - which will take place as soon as the TV images of weeping Kosovar refugees are replaced by body bags and flag-draped coffins coming home - a whole new scenario could develop.
Based on history and what German soldiers and civilians, Croats and Hungarians have told me about Serbian toughness and proverbial cruelty as guerrilla fighters, a second Vietnam is possible. It will be bloodier than the first! The terrain and population are ideally suited for that kind of warfare!
Only a quick overthrow of Milosevic from within can save NATO and ultimately the USA from a very costly and painful experience! All that talk about "avoiding another Holocaust" is crap! Rhetoric and nothing else!
I am no military man. However, I can read and think and draw some obvious conclusions. As a German who has studied earnestly and tried to understand what happened in the years of 1933-1945, I conclude as follows:
1. In the last analysis, this NATO war is a vindication of Adolf Hitler's policies. The difference is that Hitler did what he did for the right reasons, whereas NATO does it for the wrong reasons. German ethnic minority existence in the Balkans and other parts of Eastern Europe was one of constant humiliation, deprivation, insecurity and persecution and even physical extermination - while the fatherland or motherland of Germans, Germany proper, was weak and militarily powerless. From 1919 - 1939, millions of Germans were forced to flee and leave behind all that their ancestors had built and created over centuries of hard work in Poland, the Baltic States, Soviet Russia and Czechoslovakia - and to a lesser extent, the Balkans. Diplomacy got very little relief or improvements for these Germans trapped in those countries! Hitler tried, but ultimately failed, to get justice for them the diplomatic route route and by moral persuasion, appeals by him for fairness and decency to various bodies and governments failed hopelessly. Everyone was deaf to the plight of those unfortunate trapped German people - millions and millions of them!
2. Hitler was only able to give these Germans protection by military force - which was why war ultimately came to Europe. When tens of thousands of Germans were killed in Poland in an orgy of ethnic chauvinism, only Hitler's swift, massive and decisive action on the ground, in the air, and by sea, put an effective end to the untenable situation and genocidal actions against the ethnic Germans. Hitler's takeover of the Sudetenland, and later the Balkans, in equally swift, decisive actions by land and air forces saved millions of lives for both sides blinded by ethnic rivalries caused by generations of skirmishes and problems, turf wars, envy and chauvinism.
3. Hitler achieved these pacification campaigns with a minimum of destruction of property and loss of life, compared to later attempts by the Allies in Korea, Malaysia, Algiers, Vietnam etc. The Western World would do well to learn the lessons of the Hitler times. Ask the Germans from the East, or from Yugoslavia, Hungary, Russia, Poland and Czechoslovakia about their fates and their experiences. Only an overwhelming, quick German Blitzkrieg campaign saved them - and even their enemies. Ask them also what happened to them, once the German forces - in other words, their sword and shield, the German military might - was no longer there. The mass murders, rape, robbing, persecution and expulsion began and continued until most Germans and other nationalities were dispossessed, driven out, reduced to insignificant numbers, in labor camps, or dead. Are there lessons for today's military and political leaders? You bet!
4. The Western media have so demonized Hitler and his government that they have shut themselves off from the valuable lessons and thus the only effective options open to them. We, today's generations, could learn from those times. What do these lessons mean? Do they really mean the following - that all you have to do is to wipe out and drive out your enemies? Take possessions of their lands and property? Rename the streets, the towns and the provinces in the ethnically cleansed captured areas like the Sudetenland, Silesia, East Prussia, the Banat etc? Level their graveyards - and accuse them shrilly and forever of having been "war criminals" with a murderous ideology and gas chambers in their hearts? Bomb them back into the stone age, destroy their morale, try and hang their leaders? And then, let's not forget, rewrite their history and, to make sure that they will never see the truth, install vassal governments who will persecute and jail all those who remember their real history as well as their real past?
In other words, you can succeed if you are NATO or some communist regime - but only if you can destroy Revisionism and Revisionists.
Which is why we fight on.
Back to Table of Contents of the April 1999 ZGrams