It should be obvious by now that the idealistic rhetoric of American and Western European hegemonists is a whitewash of their neo-imperialist ambitions, as evidenced by their reversal over the sovereignty of Kosovo. Prior to the 1999 NATO invasion of Yugoslavia, the Western allies agreed to UN Security Council Resolution 1160, which affirmed “the commitment of all Member States to the sovereignty and territorial integrity of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia.” During the bombing, the G-8 countries agreed to “an interim administration for Kosovo … under which the people of Kosovo can enjoy substantial autonomy within the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia.”
As the Russians and Serbs recognized, these assurances were empty lies, as the West in practice has shown little regard for Serbian sovereignty over the province, which dates back to the Middle Ages. After the NATO bombing, the Yugoslav army was forced to withdraw from Kosovo, resulting in the ethnic cleansing of 250,000 Serbs from the province under the intimidation of the Kosovo Liberation Army, a Muslim guerrilla organization with a history of kidnappings and reprisal killings. Historic Orthodox churches and monasteries were vandalized or destroyed, erasing much of Kosovo’s cultural legacy.
The aftermath of the war revealed that NATO accusations of Serbian war crimes were greatly inflated, but nonetheless the West relentlessly pursued the prosecution of Slobodan Milosevic, while neglecting similar crimes committed by Croats and Muslims during the Yugoslav wars. This ploy of magnifying the threat posed by a weak adversary is a common imperialist tactic used to justify lopsided military interventions.
Now, President Bush’s statement that Kosovo should be independent is nothing more than a logical culmination of Western policy designed to weaken Serbia to the point of irrelevance. Since the bogeyman of Milosevic can no longer be invoked, it is clear that the real crime of Yugoslavia was its strength and independence of the West. With its dismemberment, the West can easily impose its interests throughout the Balkans as it has done in the rest of Eastern Europe.
Putin knows better than to trust the West, which is why he had the prudence to send troops into Pristina ahead of the NATO forces. He also knows that the U.S. claim that Eastern Europe needs a missile shield against North Korea and Iran is a clumsy lie, so he has sought to defuse this claim with a counterproposal for a shield based in Azerbaijan. The destruction of Yugoslavia and expansion of NATO are an affront to Russian ambitions that will not pass without firm resistance.
Apart from exacerbating tensions with Russia, the West’s reversal on the independence of Kosovo undermines the credibility of claims to support a unified Iraq. Once again, the real goal of invasion was to squash the regional ambitions of a second-tier power, in this case rendering Iraq militarily impotent. With the systematic destruction of the Baath regime down to its lowest levels, economic chaos and sectarian violence were the inevitable results. Finally, some U.S. presidential candidates are recognizing the consequences of this destructive policy, and calling for a partition of Iraq, contrary to the long-standing assurances of the current administration. The moral of the story: when the West pretends to help your nation, prepare to be dismembered.