Category: Kosovo

Escalation Without Consequences on the Op-Ed Page

Tina Marie (Ms. Cat)

Escalation Without Consequences on the Op-Ed Page

The United States implemented two “no-fly zones” over Iraq between 1991 and 2003, at which point the US and its partners moved on to the full-scale devastation of Iraq, killing hundreds of thousands in the process. NATO created “no-fly zones” in Bosnia and Herzegovina, and later over Kosovo, during the period in which NATO was dismantling Yugoslavia. In 2011, NATO imposed a “no-fly zone” in Libya, ostensibly to protect the population from Muammar Gaddafi: The result was ethnic cleansing, the emergence of slave markets, mass civilian casualties and more than a decade of war in the country.

WSJ: State Department veteran calls for heavily-armed NATO troops in western Ukraine + Some History

Tina Marie (Ms. Cat)

The author, Ludovic Hood, identifies himself as a fifteen-year veteran of the State Department and currently Special Advisor to Vice President Harris for the Middle East and North Africa and Senior Advisor to the Office of the Special Envoy to Monitor and Combat Anti-Semitism at the State Department.

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Such forces, drawn from NATO states and possibly other allied countries, could be structured similarly to NATO-led missions in Kosovo and Afghanistan….

WSJ: State Department veteran calls for heavily-armed NATO troops in western Ukraine

Related:

Afghanistan, 1979-1992: America’s Jihad

Barack Obama is on record as advocating a military escalation in Afghanistan. Before sinking any deeper into that quagmire, we might do well to learn something about recent Afghani history and the role played by the United States.

Less than a month after the 11 September 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, US leaders began an all-out aerial assault upon Afghanistan, the country purportedly harboring Osama bin Laden and his al Qaeda terrorist organization. More than twenty years earlier, in 1980, the United States intervened to stop a Soviet “invasion” of that country. Even some leading progressive writers, who normally take a more critical view of US policy abroad, treated the US intervention against the Soviet-supported government as “a good thing.” The actual story is not such a good thing.

Afghanistan, Another Untold Story

In 1999, the U.S. national security state — which has been involved throughout the world in subversion, sabotage, terrorism, torture, drug trafficking, and death squads — launched round-the-clock aerial attacks against Yugoslavia for 78 days, dropping 20,000 tons of bombs and killing thousands of women, children, and men. All this was done out of humanitarian concern for Albanians in Kosovo. Or so we were asked to believe. In the span of a few months, President Clinton bombed four countries: Sudan, Afghanistan, Iraq repeatedly, and Yugoslavia massively. At the same time, the U.S. was involved in proxy wars in Angola, Mexico (Chiapas), Colombia, East Timor, and various other places. And U.S. forces are deployed on every continent and ocean, with some 300 major overseas support bases — all in the name of peace, democracy, national security, and humanitarianism.

The Rational Destruction of Yugoslavia