SIT-REP 4-5; April 5, 1999

In this Issue: Kosovo and Ground Troops; Raising my Hackles

This map of Greater Albania may be found at www.aacl.com.

Radio and television work remains intensely busy for me and for many colleagues. It is difficult to write when a full-bore media campaign is being waged by the US, NATO and others. But FoxNews and CBS radio stations continue to push me to think forward, while my many correspondents fill my inbox with further news. I have also gotten a couple of threatening e-mails from KLA supporters, but am not concerned.

Letters from a World War II pilot and from an OSS officer testifying to the honor of their Serb comrades have been added as an archive "Americans&Serbs-WW2.html. Readers will have seen the effect these archives have made on some news reportage here and around the world. I wish to thank my SIRIUS colleague, Michael B. of Colorado for retrieving 12 Washington Post reports from 1982-1987 which are contained in the archive "Kosovo-1980s.html" along with 2 New York Times articles from 1982 and 1987. In the initial posting of that archive, forgot to give Mike his fair credit in the haste of work here.

Here are some others who do not believe in this mission: David Hackworth, Charles Krauthammer, AM Rosenthal, Thomas L Friedman, Arianna Huffington and Tony Snow. Newspapers are increasingly skeptical, though they cannot contest the visible evidence of ethnic cleansing and lurid rumors of genocide. It is a growing honor roll of dissidents.

Just after the first battle of El Alamein, and bout a year before his father-in-law, Mussolini, had him executed for treason, Count Ciano scribbled in his diary: "As always, victory finds a hundred fathers but defeat is an orphan."

There are very interesting developments as most of you may already have seen. The Washington Post reported the very serious misgivings about bombing from the Generals comprising the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

"The Domino Theory" has been invoked. Their very legitimate concerns raise the hackles on the back of my neck, they clearly do not wish to share the blame for this possible "orphan" campaign. The Serbs did not cave in to NATO bombing; but what did our political leaders think the Serbs were made of, sugar candy?

Jamie Rubin of the State Department and Jamie Shea at NATO seem to think that President Djukanovic of Montenegro is in danger of a Milosevic-coup, but if you look at the "Greater Albania" map, it is clear they aspire to take Djukanovic's capital district. I think all the gossip about Djukanovic may be a deliberate disinformation plant from Belgrade and Podgorica; just a hunch.

It concerns me that the US intends to station AH-64D Apache Longbow attack helicopters, MLRS barrage rocket launchers and armored infantry in Northern Albania, in proximity to Kosovo and amidst Sali Berisha's KLA strongholds there. Introduction of ground-to-ground missiles so close to the border, and with too few troops to protect the choppers and missile launchers seems provocative to the Yugoslav Army and an invitation to their commandos, when there are so many rumors of NATO commandos operating behind the lines in Kosovo. Rangers died in Mogadishu because Clinton's government would not return a company of tanks and armored infantry as a "SWAT" team. Are we again trying to run a mission "on the cheap?"

It also became clear that Saddam has been quiet in the No Fly Zones because General Wesley Clark transferred the EA-6B Prowlers and other important aircraft from Incirlik to Italy to sustain Operation "Allied Force." The Kurds have to trust to luck just now, the US is not there to protect them, patrols have not flown for 16 days now. Our armed forces are stretched thin and in working them hard, General Clark is demonstrating that his NATO command can only handle one mission at a time. This raises my hackles; competence? Asset management or manipulation? And we are very low on air-launched missiles, so 90 more will be converted from nuclear versions at a cost of about $570,000 each.

The Danube River, which flows through Belgrade, is even more important, as a barge route, to the commerce of Central Europe than the Mississippi is to America's commerce. The Danube ships and barges serve the role of America's railroad and tractor-trailer traffic handling as well as commodity cargoes. So by the middle of this now-14 day-old campaign, NATO aircraft blocked the shipping channel, and traffic for Hungary, Austria, Slovakia, Czech and Germany will now have a harder time getting to destinations and this will persist for months. This raises my hackles again; stupidity or a part of a larger plot?

It is instructive to watch press conferences during this crisis; the British Labourites are particularly enjoying the chance to out-Thatcher the Iron Lady. Hence it is Brits handling the NATO briefings, the principle source of NATO propaganda. Jamie Shea, an Anglo-Irishman, has proved himself to be a particularly effective spin-doctor. This raises my hackles again. A foreign PR flack is telling us in America why our troops have to risk their lives. NATO's defense and foreign ministers, elected and unelected --but none elected by American voters-- have committed our troops to a campaign that is of very questionable legality and questionable strategy. US theater commanders such as Norman Schwarzkopf and Anthony Zinni never needed a civilian press officer for their mission briefings. This time it's a voluble Brit who has clearly "kissed the Blarney Stone."

Sunday Mr. Shea tried to discredit last week's meeting between Mr. Rugova and Mr. Milosevic, so today, the Russian Ambassador was present to meet Mr. Rugova and confirm his well-being even as Rugova flatly contradicted Shea's Sunday pitch. But since no member of the established Western Press was present, Reuters filed a rather gamey version of the meetings, trying to throw Rugova's words and deeds in doubt. More hackles rise on the back of my neck.

As to refugees on the borders, they are real and the suffering in the Macedonian no-man's land is undeniable. In northern Albania, the KLA's operations base, there has been a state of chaos for two years, cultivated by the real leader of all this, Sali Berisha. There, one hears from creditable reporters, the mountain bandits are again robbing Kosovo refugees (this happened last summer) despite the fact that the refugees are mostly from KLA clans and families. . This is where Yugoslavia needs to clarify what is going on through objective neutral observers; if it is not systematically destroying documents and not ejecting all Albanians, let others bear witness.

People consider a ground war against Yugoslavia because, when looking at those refugees --women, small girls, the elderly-- it is heart-rending and appalling. Dependents in every Civil war get displaced and it is always heart-tugging. But we have seen much staged footage from cameramen angry at Milosevic, and heard many lurid tales of slaughter that have not panned out. I am sympathetic to all the innocent and support providing all necessary humanitarian relief, but I do not find the KLA's cause worthy of a ground war, when the alleged atrocities are stripped back down to the real circumstances and events.

I will also observe that though allied sanctions on Yugoslavia have prevented the flow of important medicines to the entire country for the last eight years. Now they have innocent victims too; will NATO at least allow some humanitarian relief for Serb and non-Serb victims of its actions throughout Yugoslavia? I should hope so but do not expect that just yet.

Now the NGOs were always ready to get food to refugees in Kosovo or elsewhere and they have already shifted their flows to Tirana and Skopje; though NATO only tasked troops to the job of refugee relief on Saturday, when the problem had been glaringly evident for days --my favorite, AmeriCares, has been flying medicine and shelter materials in to Tirana and Skopje almost daily. Where, as in war and politics, force and fraud are the cardinal virtues, propaganda serves to make our emotions overwhelm our reason, to cover up bad causes and bad campaigns. We are getting spin non-stop from NATO and Washington --and truth remains the first casualty-- and we are getting heart-rending visuals from Macedonia. But Macedonia, by forcing those KLA families to remain in no mans land is sending a message to the Albanians and to NATO --the KLA has already its campaign to carve off a third of Macedonia, including the capital city of Skopje. So Macedonia has given these people an extra two days of discomfort while insisting the may not remain on its soil to reinforce the "Greater Albania" conspirators already at work there. Macedonia has already told NATO it will not play host to an invasion force, now requires that the NATO members take in these refugees, and the US will lodge their 20,000 at Guantanamo and Guam.

Yugoslavia clearly operates without a media campaign to counter NATO and KLA allegations of holocaust-scale atrocities, yet most of the worst stories have been debunked after a few days, though the refugee flood, which began back on Day 2 (March 25) peaked over the Western Church Easter Weekend. Yugoslavia has never made it clear that there are Catholics, Muslims and Jews in Belgrade, along with a few Protestants, I suspect. There are even Albanians in Belgrade who are not being ethnically cleaansed. So though it was not Orthodox Good Friday and Easter, it was Passover and the Catholic Easter which did feel bombs fall on what is the most tolerant and pluralistic city in Central Europe. Catholics in Pristina and around some villages in Kosovo, also heard bombs --Mother Theresa was an Albanian Catholic, by the way and the Catholics are not favored by the extremist Muslim elements within the KLA.

American politicians are vigorously debating the proposition that a ground campaign is necessary to assure NATO's credibility; I would argue that as a mutual-defense alliance its credibility is not in jeopardy. Its credibility as a coercive "posse" outside its treaty limits is only in jeopardy because political leaders thought out a nifty way to outflank the people of the US, and other member countries. In the Parliamentary system of Britain and most other members, the defense and foreign ministers are elected and sit in the majority anyway, so their constitutional niceties are not as complex as America's checks and balances. That's why they can get away with launching a NATO campaign, and that is why Clinton marketed the bombing as a NATO decision to Congress and the people. That leaves NATO poised to take the blame if it fails. That puts several governments in jeopardy of a vote of no confidence. Hence, more spin-control and propaganda as the mission continues; and more talk of committing ground toops, though militarily that is both unrealistic to the stated purpose of the mission, and dangerous considering Yugoslavia can field 500,000 guerrilla fighters. It all raises my hackles.

Who does the Clinton Administration expect to enlist for this prospective war?Not the children of the liberals banging the war drum.

© Copyright 1999 by Benjamin Works - SIRIUS www.siri-us.com