The Fiction that is Kosovo Revealed in the Arts Page

Apparently when it appears in the arts section the editors at The New York Times aren't as vigilant in censoring political content that veers from the official narrative. Case in point is the thoroughly damning "Can a Music Festival Make Kosovo Cool?" by Alex Marshall, which appeared in Tuesday's national edition.

Dukagjin Lipa, the father of pop singer Dua Lipa, recently staged a major musical festival in Pristina, the capital of Kosovo, with his daughter headlining.

What emerges from Marshall's reporting is a confirmation of one of the main criticisms of the NATO air war in support of the Kosovo Liberation Army 20 years ago: There is no such thing as a "Kosovar," a person with a unique national identity rooted in Kosovo's political independence; it was a creation of the Western powers to justify a war of aggression against Serbia. Kosovars are Albanians and identify as such. The putative Kosovo war of liberation was really a NATO campaign to further dismember the former Yugoslavia; for Albanians, it was a big step down the path towards "Greater Albania."

According to Marshall,

A strong sense of ethnic Albanian identity was everywhere at the festival. Dua Lipa wore red and black, the colors of the Albanian national flag, when performing her 90-minute set. She spoke almost entirely in Albanian between songs. Later, she held the Albanian flag aloft to screams from fans.

Many of the acts, who ranged from Albanian rap stars like M.C. Kresha to Jericho, a band widely seen as Kosovo’s answer to Rage Against The Machine, drew cheers from the crowd by making a double-handed sign that represents the black eagle on Albania’s flag. The American rapper Action Bronson, whose father is Albanian, also made the gesture during his set. 

Kosovo’s blue flag, which features six stars to represent the country’s main ethnic groups, was nowhere on display.

You won't find such hard truths on the front page.

Kosovo is ghastly experiment which highlights the preferred method of U.S. power projection. Splinter a state, cow it into submission with air power, and then erect a huge military base.

Blow Back from Syria Mounting, U.S. Begins About-Face while Insisting on the Righteousness of Its Big Lie

Last Monday I began the week with a few thoughts devoted to what a profound failure Obama has been -- a feckless, brittle nincompoop whose legacy is shaping up to be a new Cold War with Russia.

Today there is proof that perhaps these thoughts are not so alien in the hallways of U.S. hegemony. The New York Times publishes this morning an unsigned editorial, "Mr. Putin’s Mixed Messages on Syria," that amounts to a qualified about-face; qualified because the principal canard, that Assad -- and because Assad has been steadfastly supported by Russia, Putin -- is to blame for the disintegration of Middle East. Nary a word is mentioned about the role of U.S. allies Turkey and nations of the GCC in shuttling foreign jihadis to Syria and Iraq. But the gist of the Gray Lady's message is that an agreement between Russia and the U.S. is necessary to address the crisis in Syria:

The truth is, both men are in a bind. America’s fight against ISIS is failing; a stark indicator was the Pentagon’s admission that its $500 million program to train moderate Syrian opposition forces to fight ISIS has only four or five fighters who are actually on the battlefield. Meanwhile, Mr. Putin’s ally, Mr. Assad, is in danger of falling, which would destroy the last threads holding the state together, open the door to a takeover by the Islamic State and jeopardize Russia’s last foothold in the Middle East. Mr. Obama and Mr. Putin should be able to find common cause in battling the Islamic State, which is destabilizing the region and training a generation of foreign fighters, some of whom have already returned home to Europe, Russia and Central Asia.

The Islamic State cannot be confronted effectively unless there is a political settlement in Syria between Mr. Assad’s regime and opposition forces. The main impediment has been Mr. Putin’s insistence that Mr. Assad remain in power. But Russia previously agreed on the need for a transition in Syria and a compromise seems obvious.

It is interesting how the troubadours of U.S. full-spectrum dominance will insist on the righteous of their propaganda even when it contradicts itself, as the two paragraphs above obviously do. The U.S. position is that the havoc, the refugees flocking to Europe and overrunning Lebanon and Jordan, are Assad's creation, and that if he would only absent himself all would right itself.

But if Assad were to leave, with whom would the remaining Baathists of the Syrian Arab Republic share power? The Pentagon has just spent half-a-billion dollars to train moderates, only four or five of whom are actually on the battlefield. The answer then is that the only meaningful possible partners in a power-sharing deal with the Syrian government would be foreign-backed jihadists, and they don't even believe in secular government.

In other words, the U.S. position, as we have seen time and again, is nonsense; it is an obscene lie.

Another way to approach this issue is by looking at the composition of the refugees flocking to Europe. The majority identify themselves as being Syrian, but there are also Afghans, Libyans, Iraqis, and Albanians from the failed U.S. experiment in Kosovo -- all countries that have been ministered to by the American war machine. What does Putin have to do with Albanians fleeing Kosovo for the northern climes of Germany and Norway? Give the Gray Lady a day or two and she will fabricate some poppycock.

U.S. Prefers New Cold War and a Ukraine Modeled on Kosovo

Fighting continues in Slovyansk. Both the Associated Press and David Herszenhorn of the New York Times turn once again to putsch interior minister Arsen Avakov's Facebook page for the details. According to the AP account:

Ukrainian military operations that began Monday to expunge pro-Russia forces from the city of Slovyansk were the interim government’s most ambitious effort so far to quell weeks of unrest in Ukraine’s mainly Russian-speaking east. 4 government troops and 30 militants were killed in the gun battles, Ukraine’s interior minister said Tuesday. The pro-Russia militia said 10 people were killed, including civilians. There was no immediate way to reconcile the figures. Interior Minister Arsen Avakov gave the death toll on his Facebook page Tuesday, adding that 20 government troops were also injured during fighting in Slovyansk. He said about 800 pro-Russia forces in and around Slovyansk used large-caliber weapons and mortars on Monday. By Tuesday morning, Ukrainian forces had taken hold of a key checkpoint north of the city, dealing a blow to insurgent lines of communication.

Herszenhorn's story, "As Ukrainian Election Looms, Western Powers and Russia Campaign for Influence," outlines the West's attempt to push through the May 25 Ukrainian presidential election despite an active military campaign in the southeast:

Russia has made clear that it wants the election to be delayed. Foreign Minister Sergey V. Lavrov pressed the point again on Tuesday, insisting that the interim government end bloodshed and amend the Constitution to devolve power to the regions — and that it do so before Ukrainians are asked to choose a new leader. 

Such changes would presumably address the demands by some pro-Russian separatists in eastern Ukraine for a new system that would weaken the central government and expand the authority of regional and local officials. 

“Holding elections in a situation where the armed forces are being used against part of the population is rather unusual,” Mr. Lavrov said at a news conference in Vienna, where about 30 foreign ministers met under the auspices of the Council of Europe to discuss the situation in Ukraine. 

“The criteria of any process involving citizen choice are well known to all,” Mr. Lavrov said, according to the Interfax news service. “Elections and referendums must be free and fair, and they must proceed in a situation excluding violence and under objective and unbiased international monitoring.” 

At the Vienna meeting, the British foreign secretary, William Hague, said that Russian worries about violence were disingenuous as the Kremlin had fed the conflict in Ukraine to undermine the presidential election. “Russia is clearly intent on preventing or disrupting those elections,” he told reporters, according to The Associated Press. He added that the foreign ministers at the meeting supported the vote being held without outside interference.

I suppose Hague doesn't consider the United States underwriting the Ukrainian presidential election to the tune of $11 million as "outside interference."

The U.S. is threatening Russia with another round of sanctions if it doesn't support the May 25 poll and if it does support the upcoming autonomy referendums in Donetsk and Lugansk. The noxious Victoria Nuland appeared yesterday before uber-corrupt Bob Menendez's Senate Foreign Relations Committee.

Let's recall here what the United States and its EU toadies are trying to accomplish. You have a Kiev junta that came to power via a violent putsch led by neo-Nazi organizations. An interim government, the current junta, was hastily slapped together with input from the U.S. It is a combination of corrupt Fatherland Party politicians and neo-Nazis from Svoboda and Right Sector. The May 25 election is meant to confer legitimacy on the putschists.

The problem with this is Ukraine is historically divided between a Ukrainian-speaking west and a Russian-speaking east. The junta has no representation from the east. To deny this, to argue that an election can proceed while a western-dominated Kiev junta is attacking with heavy armor "Occupy"-type protests rocking the country's east is delusional.

My feeling is that the U.S. suffers from this delusion because for decades it has been able to rely on unchallenged force, usually air power, to terrorize its enemies into submission. The overarching precedent here seems to be Kosovo and the bombing of Belgrade. USG planners forever seem to be returning to that NATO campaign as a template for success. It was the model for Libya, and it was constantly being bandied about in the run up to the aborted attack on Damascus last summer.

But the reality of Kosovo is that it was not a success. The Chinese embassy in Belgrade was blown up, risking relations with China, and NATO Commander Wesley Clark almost began World War III when he ordered troops to attack Russian forces at the Pristina airport. And, after near cataclysm, at the end of the day, today, you have a tiny, criminal rump state that exists at all because of United Nations administration. Is this the future we want for a large, important state like Ukraine? Apparently the U.S. does.

But it is not clear that the important member states of the European Union do. The Kosovo template breaks down immediately when you try to apply it to Ukraine. First, and critically, Putin is no Milosevic, a politician that was easily cowed. Second, the citizens of the Donbass will never agree to be subjects of the Kiev junta. A real federalized system for the regions, along with Ukrainian neutrality, is the only way forward. The U.S. is unwilling to let this happen. It prefers a New Cold War and a dysfunctional Ukraine on the Kosovo model.

Duopoly Disintegration

Democratic politics in big industrial oligarchies like the United States is a game of manipulating public ignorance. Republicans electorally feast on fear -- fear that big government is going to rob you blind or make you live with black people or round you up in an internment camp. Democrats peddle hope as well as fear -- hope that wars of choice will not be embarked upon, that jobs will be created, that government will be administered fairly. For both branches of the duopoly to function effectively, public ignorance needs to be not only dominant but ascendant.

Barack Obama convinced a lot of Democrats that it was no longer so irrational to hope that the duopoly might actually be able to address some of its systemic woes -- income inequality, unemployment, wage stagnation, climate change, militarism, etc. What is happening now is a significant number of people (one might say the critical strata of the Democratic Party electoral base) are waking up to the realization that it was irrational to believe that Obama represented a break with the past and a possibility of renewal.

Obama's appeal has always been his ability to seem as if he was speaking honestly. His supporters could point to Republican obstructionism to explain why his deeds never matched his words. But what happens when his words no longer ring true? We're seeing that now, for instance, with his lie-bloated speech yesterday in Brussels. Obama told some whoppers: Kosovo was not precedent for Crimea; Iraq was invaded by working within the international system; and the United States did not conspire with fascists to topple the elected government of Ukraine. All lies, and acknowledged as such by people who pay attention to the issues.

But Obama isn't playing to people who pay attention; he's cutting against the grain of his appeal -- the intellectual truth teller -- to bang the drum of public ignorance. And it is going to cost him.

Democrats will lose the Senate. Obama, never a tough customer, will spend the last two years in office having to be tough and veto and a lot of bad bills.

The rapid erosion of the Democratic Party as a national electoral force has commenced; hopefully, this will be more than a cyclical phenomenon. Hopefully, the duopoly will begin to disintegrate.

Threat of EU Sanctions on Russia Already Falling Flat

After an ennui-drenched Friday, a wonderful weekend.

Saturday was spent throwing a football with a coworker's sons, marching and chanting for "$15 Now!" The speeches at the post-march rally were actually good/informative. James Bible, former head of the Seattle NAACP, spoke about the class warfare being waged on the poor. Then Kshama Sawant laid out the plan for dealing with plutocratic opposition to the $15/hr. minimum wage -- agreeing to a three-year phase in for small business and non-profits to neutralize the plutocrats' tactic of hiding behind small business and then full speed ahead on gathering signatures to bring the $15/hr. minimum wage to the ballot as an initiative. I topped off the day by streaming two good movies: Out of the Furnace (2013) and Inside Llewyn Davis (2013). Both hard-luck stories.

Sunday I ran the annual St. Paddy's Day Dash, which I do every year. I enjoy the course, which is up 99 from Seattle Center until just before you get to the bridge over to Wallingford; then you turn around and come back to Seattle Center. I was worried my time would be worse than it was, but it wasn't, despite being waterlogged by a steady rain. The rest of the day after the morning race I relaxed. Good weekend.

And one of the reasons the weekend was so good, in addition to a welcome decline in number of the usual threats emanating from Great Satan's orifice, was the result of the referendum in Crimea went smoothly. According to a story this morning by Alan Cowell, "Lawmakers in Crimea Move Swiftly to Split From Ukraine":

The referendum — in which 96.77 percent of voters supported breaking from Ukraine and joining the Russian Federation — was greeted as a triumph in Moscow on Monday, and lawmakers there promised to move quickly to adopt legislation to absorb Crimea into the Russian Federation. “Crimea returns to Russia!” a headline in Komsomolskaya Pravda said, while Nezavisimaya Gazeta declared that “Kiev lost Crimea.”

A member of Parliament announced that President Vladimir V. Putin would deliver an address to lawmakers on the situation in Crimea on Tuesday. Mr. Putin told President Obama on Sunday that the vote was legal and cited the independence of Kosovo — which Russia has not recognized — as the precedent for Crimea’s secession, the Kremlin said in a statement.

“The referendum was organized in such a way as to guarantee Crimea’s population the possibility to freely express their will and exercise their right to self-determination,” the Kremlin’s statement on the latest of a series of conversations between the two leaders said. 

Mr. Putin also continued to raise the issue of violence and protests in other parts of Ukraine, which have stoked fears that Russia could move forces beyond Crimea. He told Mr. Obama that “the current authorities in Kiev have so far failed to demonstrate the ability and desire to rein in the ultranationalist and radical groups that are destabilizing the situation in the country and terrorizing ordinary people, including the Russian-speaking population and Russia’s compatriots,” the Kremlin statement said.

The putschists in Kiev called up reservists (which they have done before, to little effect) and added another 20,000 to a new national guard being put together under the direction of the neo-Nazis in Right Sector.

Now the ball is in Brussels' court. So far the sounds emanating from the European bureaucracy are meek:

In Brussels, foreign ministers of European Union countries met on Monday to weigh a first response to Moscow’s unfolding strategy in Ukraine, including possible economic sanctions. 

One of the ministers attending the European Union meeting in Brussels, Sebastian Kurz of Austria, gave a strong indication that the punitive European measures under debate would not initially reach into the highest echelons of Russia’s powerful energy companies, which are close to the Kremlin.

In a radio interview, Mr. Kurz said Sunday’s ballot in Ukraine would trigger an array of measures including visa bans and the freezing of assets held by political and military figures who orchestrated Russia’s intervention in Crimea, Reuters reported. 

Asked whether the list would include the heads of the energy giants Gazprom and Rosneft, as reported on Friday in Germany, Mr. Kurz replied: “This is not expected at this time.” 

He added: “I think picking business bosses indiscriminately would be a wrong step.” 

The foreign ministers meeting in Brussels, he said, would draw up a list of people to be subjected to the measures. The ministers have been reported to be trying to reduce a tally of up to 130 names to a smaller number.

Western tough talk on sanctions already appears to be falling flat.

But before we leave to discuss briefly the long, to-be-expected hand-wringing think piece about the tarnished luster of U.S. hegemony by David Sanger, a statement from British Foreign Secretary William Hague:

As he arrived in the Belgian capital on Sunday, Mr. Hague called the Crimea referendum “a mockery of proper democratic practice.”

But a lethally violent insurrection in a nation's capital that sent the elected president fleeing in order to avoid being lynched by neo-Nazis brandishing weapons from a looted armory, this is "proper democratic practice"?

Western rulers and their court ideologues have turned the world upside down in defense of unilateralism. This is on full display in the aforementioned David Sanger analysis, "Global Crises Put Obama’s Strategy of Caution to the Test." Sanger runs through the standard "Neocon vs. Realist" debate. There is not much to recommend taking the time to read it. Public opinion -- what the voters in the "Greatest Nation on Earth"™ think about endless warfare to police the entire planet -- rates only a brief, indirect mention out of a lot of column inches of copy:

Not surprisingly, the testing of administration policy at a time the president is politically weakened at home has sparked a critical question. Is it Mr. Obama’s deliberative, pick-your-battles approach that is encouraging adversaries to press the limits? Or is this simply a time when exercising leverage over countries that defy American will or the international order is trickier than ever, and when the domestic pressure to stay out of international conflicts is obvious to overseas friends and foes alike?

This is obviously the question to explore, but Sanger ignores it. How long can governing elites continue to act as if they exist in a free-floating cloud above the masses who elect them?

How the Snipers on the Maidan Figure in the Kosovo Precedent

The big Ukraine story that the Gray Lady is featuring this Sunday is actually a good one. Written by Peter Baker, "Sovereignty vs. Self-Rule: Crimea Reignites Battle" explores the applicable precedents of the Wilsonian doctrine of self-determination. The one that gets the most ink, and the one that makes Obama's national security public relations man Benjamin Rhodes defensive, is Kosovo. If Kosovo can secede from a democratically elected government why can't Crimea?

Kosovo declared independence in 2008. The United States under George W. Bush recognized it, as did Britain, France and Germany, but Russia adamantly rejected it, as did Spain. The International Court of Justice later ruled that Kosovo’s declaration was legal. 

“We never saw it as setting a precedent, but there were some nations that saw it that way and still do,” said James W. Pardew, who was Mr. Clinton’s special representative for the Balkans.

John B. Bellinger III, who was the top lawyer at the State Department under Bush, said: “We were very careful to emphasize that Kosovo was a unique situation. We were fond of saying it was sui generis — and it did not create a precedent that would likely be replicable anywhere else.” 

That is not how the Kremlin sees it. Ever since, Russia has cited Kosovo to justify support for pro-Moscow separatist republics in places like Georgia, where it went to war in 2008 and recognized the independence of Abkhazia and South Ossetia over Western objections.

But here is the "money" passage:

“Kosovo is very much a legitimate precedent,” said Dimitri K. Simes, president of the Center for the National Interest, a Washington research organization, agreeing with Moscow’s argument. “Independence was accomplished despite strong opposition by a legitimate, democratic and basically Western-oriented government of Serbia.” By contrast, he said, the new pro-Western government in Kiev “lacks legitimacy,” since it came to power by toppling a democratically elected president.

The Obama administration maintains that the cases cannot be compared. Serbia, White House officials said, lost its legitimacy and right to rule in Kosovo by its violent crackdown. Despite Russian claims, there has been little, if any, independent evidence of such a campaign against the Russian-speaking population in Crimea. 

“There’s no repression or crimes against humanity that the government in Kiev has committed against the people of Crimea,” Mr. Rhodes said. “There’s no loss of legitimacy.”

But what if the "legitimate" government in Kiev came to power by means of a violent crackdown, a putsch? This is obviously what happened. And it is getting trickier for the Obama administration since a leaked phone call between Estonian Foreign Minister Urmas Paet and EU foreign affairs representative Catherine Ashton reveals that the sniper fire that killed both the protesters and police on the Maidan had the same "handwriting," meaning it came from the same snipers.

Why would the snipers, if they were Yanukovych goons, as the Obama administration prefers, gun down police? They wouldn't. Therefore the sniper fire was an act of provocation designed to create mayhem, mayhem used by the putsch leaders and their Western allies to delegitimize the Yanukovych government.

The Guardian ran the story last Wednesday. Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov is now pressuring the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) to investigate. Agence France Presse has the story. Lavrov is making his request because the putsch government refuses to investigate.

I assume the Gray Lady will maintain her blackout of this story for as long as she can, even up to and including the OSCE actually conducting an investigation (maybe then she would assign it a sidebar). In any event, add this sniper issue to the March 16 Crimea vote to align with the Russian Federation (not to mention the enormous funding issues facing the putschists, ably outlined in a story by Steven Erlanger, as well as the political rise of anti-EU-integration Right Sector) and you have a train coming round the bend that is sure to fly off the rails.

What Kosovo (Not to Mention Western Business Interests in Russia) Reveals About the Crisis in Ukraine

There is a price to pay for backing a putsch. Hopefully that is a lesson that elites in Western capitals will have learned once the dust settles in Ukraine (though right now it is unclear when that will occur).

An important historic parallel for what is happening today is the 1999 NATO war against Yugoslavia. President Vlad Putin brought it up today in connection with Russia's defense of the Crimea: This from "Citing ‘Coup’ in Ukraine, Putin Reserves Right to Use Force" by Steven Lee Myers, Ellen Barry and Alan Cowell:

[Putin] said Russia is not considering annexing Crimea, but said Crimean citizens should be allowed to determine their own future, presumably as part of Russia or Ukraine. 

“We are not considering this possibility,” he said. “It’s up to people living in a certain territory, if they can exercise their free will, and determine their future. For example, if Kosovo’s Albanians were allowed to do that, self-determination, which according to U.N. documents is a right, but we will never instigate it, never support such trends.” 

“Only the people who live in a certain territory have the right to decide their own future,” he said.

Hence, one destabilizing U.S. precedent come home to roost, and not just in terms of international norms; Obama should be mindful of the fate of the Democrats post-Kosovo. Clinton took his high approval ratings coming out his Republican impeachment trial in the Senate and used them to mobilize support for bombing a European capital, Belgrade, on behalf of a criminal organization, the Kosovo Liberation Army. The result? Approval of Clinton quickly dropped and his vice president, Al Gore, lost to the scion of a none-too-popular conservative political family dynasty, and this despite Gore being able to boast of a leadership role in an administration that presided over the creation of a full-employment economy.

Obama should be very careful. He has neither the support of European allies nor the public that Clinton had. In terms of the former, consult this passage at the end of Peter Baker's story, "Top Russians Face Sanctions by U.S. for Crimea Crisis":

Russia is effectively the world’s biggest energy supplier, exporting more natural gas than any other country and more oil than any other nation after Saudi Arabia. Russia is also the biggest exporter of industrial metals and the fifth-biggest consumer market globally. 

“The biggest argument for severe economic sanctions not being imposed is that the European countries don’t have much of an alternative to Russian energy supplies,” said Jens Nordvig, the New York-based managing director of currency research at Nomura Holdings Inc. 

Several of the biggest Western energy companies have major investments in Russia, including B.P. and Royal Dutch Shell. 

It may also be difficult for Mr. Obama to sell sanctions to the American business community if it is being cut off while competitors still have access to Russian markets. Russia is Pepsi’s second-largest market and a significant market, too, for companies like Boeing, General Motors, John Deere and Procter & Gamble. 

ExxonMobil, the largest American oil company, has a joint venture deal with the state-controlled oil company, Rosneft, to explore what may be a very rich Arctic area called the Kara Sea. ExxonMobil is also working with Rosneft on drilling in the Baltic Sea and on other projects. 

But congressional leaders said they would move forward with sanctions as well as aid to Ukraine. A Senate Foreign Relations Committee bill would use $200 million in aid and loan guarantees to leverage $1 billion in international economic assistance. An additional $50 million would be steered from existing State Department accounts for electoral administration.

While governmental elites are immune to the entreaties of their constituents asking for an end to constant foreign wars, they do listen to their corporate benefactors, many of whom have their snouts in Mother Russia's lap. The PepsiCo and ExxonMobil connections lead one to draw the conclusion that for all of Obama's tough talk about economic reprisals nothing substantive will come of it. Maybe a few Russian officials will be banned from travel to the United States. Also, don't expect Europe to join the tough talk charade. Even if the EU embraces fracking immediately, it will still be dependent on Gazprom for decades to come.

I continue to believe that time is on Russia's side. Obama's approval will continue to drop. The putsch government will fracture as soon as the IMF austerity mandates are publicized.

Comparing Syria to Yugoslavia

Putin takes flak at the G-8 summit for his support of Syria, and the rebels, in a story that doesn't sound authentic, purportedly killed 60 government troops in a suicide bombing of a military base near Aleppo.

But what I found noteworthy this morning was an opinion piece, "To Get a Truce, Be Ready to Escalate," by Wesley Clark, former U.S. presidential aspirant and NATO supreme allied military commander for Europe. It is noteworthy because it is an excellent illustration of the weakness and rot in pro-interventionist thinking prevalent in the U.S. foreign policy establishment.

It goes something like this: Inaction is not an option. And though it is likely that a U.S.-enforced no-fly zone would lead to full-scale military engagement and even though it is unclear what Syria would look like after Assad, we should nonetheless escalate the use of force to bring al-Assad to the negotiating table.

Proof of the success of such a strategy? NATO's 1999 bombing campaign against Yugoslavia. We're hearing this argument made frequently these days. Bill Clinton made it last week in his criticism of Obama for not doing more to aid the rebels.

Some points to keep in mind:

• Kosovo is not a viable state. It is an Albanian rump rife with criminality. It is held together by means of United Nations support. Do we want this in the heart of the Middle East? Do we want Afghanistan in the heart of the Middle East? (Take a look at this analysis, provided by Syria expert Aron Lund, of the Islamist nature of the opposition.)

• The NATO campaign against Yugoslavia could have led to war with Russian (Pristina airport incident) and China (bombing of Chinese embassy in Belgrade). Is there any doubt that the spin-offs of a broad Western intervention in Syria would be much worse?

• It is not the Syrian government that is unwilling to negotiate. It is the opposition and the GCC and the West who insist that al-Assad agree to relinquish power as a precondition of any talks. In other words, victory before any bargaining begins. Absurd. The West is engaged in an absurdity.

Here's Clark's wished for outcome:

The formula for diplomacy is clear: a cease-fire agreement; a United Nations presence; departure of foreign fighters; disarmament of Syrian fighters; international supervision of Syria’s military; a peaceful exit for Mr. Assad, his family and key supporters; a transitional government; and plans for a new Syria.

It's absurd. It's delusional. It's a desire for anarchy in the Middle East. It's a clear prescription for disaster. And this passes for interventionist prevailing wisdom?

Organ Trafficking in Kosovo

I made the work-week commute in the late afternoon yesterday. The occasion was a retirement party for the business manager of the local where I work.

Riding the train out to SeaTac on a Saturday -- the party was held at the local's first-floor meeting hall -- was not something to which I was particularly looking forward. But the weather was perfect and the change of pace turned out to be enjoyable. The train was chock full of weekend shoppers and sightseers. Fathers out with their families and single women carrying bags from the department stores. I used the hour trip to read the lengthy The New Yorker piece by Nicholas Schmidle on Kosovo's criminal organ-harvesting enterprise. It's a sordid tale but one that needs to be learned. Too many supposedly knowledgeable people point to Bill Clinton's NATO war on Yugoslavia as a successful example of Western military intervention. But it must be remembered that during the spring of 1999 when the United States was leading the attack, the Chinese embassy in Belgrade was bombed and Wesley Clark almost fired on Russian forces in Pristina. Both incidents could have led to a much wider and more devastating conflict. Today Kosovo is not a viable state absent United Nations assistance; it is an Albanian criminal enterprise.

Schmidle spends the first half of his story constructing a rigorous brief on the criminal nature of the Kosovo Liberation Army. Then he pisses in his own punch bowl the second half by speculating that Serbs have suborned perjury in their obsession to secure convictions of former KLA leaders at the ICTY. He concludes his essay with a sympathetic account of Hashim Thaci.

In the end, Schmidle can't break out of the official mindset: evil Serbs, innocent "Kosovars." At the time Schmidle's article appeared in April he made the following blog post, "An Organ-Trafficking Conviction in Kosovo":

In this week’s issue of The New Yorker, I investigate allegations that, around the time of the 1999 Kosovo war, the Kosovo Liberation Army trafficked prisoners across the border into Albania, killed them, and harvested their organs. Hashim Thaci, the current Prime Minister of Kosovo, is among those accused of being responsible; a 2010 report, published by the Council of Europe, accused him of being the “boss” of a “network of unlawful activity,” which included prisoner abuse and organ harvesting. Thaci strongly denies the allegations and, despite all of these nasty insinuations, not a single case of suspected organ trafficking has gone before a judge and yielded a verdict.

That changed Monday, when an international panel of judges from the European Union Rule of Law Mission in Kosovo issued multiple convictions of human trafficking and organized crime. The charges don’t relate directly to the war years, or include Thaci or his close associates; they are centered on Medicus, a transplant clinic in Pristina, Kosovo’s capital. The prosecution argued that, in 2008, a urologist named Lutfi Dervishi began performing kidney transplants there for money. (The sale of organs is outlawed everywhere in the world except Iran.) In its 2010 report, the Council of Europe cited Dervishi’s clinic as evidence of an organ trade that began during the war and continued afterward, “albeit in other forms.”

The investigation continues. So expect more revelations of the true nature of the state created out of the smoke of Bill Clinton's stunning military-intervention success story.

U.S. Says al-Assad Used Chemical Weapons

Based on a reading of this morning's story by Mark Mazzetti, Michael R. Gordon and Mark Landler, "U.S. Is Said to Plan to Send Weapons to Syrian Rebels," which is definitely worth checking out, yesterday's announcement that U.S. analysts have concluded that the Assad government has used poison gas and that military support for the Syrian opposition will now commence is not as dire as first imagined. It appears that Obama has only signed off on small arms and ammunition with the possibility of antitank weapons. No antiaircraft weapons will be supplied; a no-fly zone is all but ruled out.

This will please neither the Arab monarchies, nor the war pigs in the State Department and the U.S. Senate. To be charitable to Obama, a weakness to which I am susceptible, he appears to be trying to deftly defuse a lot of unseemly war lust. Reading the statement by Benjamin Rhodes, Obama's deputy national security adviser wunderkind, one finds that it is pretty tepid. Here's the part that deals with the allegation that chemical weapons were used by the Syrian government:

Following a deliberative review, our intelligence community assesses that the Assad regime has used chemical weapons, including the nerve agent sarin, on a small scale against the opposition multiple times in the last year. Our intelligence community has high confidence in that assessment given multiple, independent streams of information. The intelligence community estimates that 100 to 150 people have died from detected chemical weapons attacks in Syria to date; however, casualty data is likely incomplete. While the lethality of these attacks make up only a small portion of the catastrophic loss of life in Syria, which now stands at more than 90,000 deaths, the use of chemical weapons violates international norms and crosses clear red lines that have existed within the international community for decades. We believe that the Assad regime maintains control of these weapons. We have no reliable, corroborated reporting to indicate that the opposition in Syria has acquired or used chemical weapons. 

The body of information used to make this intelligence assessment includes reporting regarding Syrian officials planning and executing regime chemical weapons attacks; reporting that includes descriptions of the time, location, and means of attack; and descriptions of physiological symptoms that are consistent with exposure to a chemical weapons agent. Some open source reports from social media outlets from Syrian opposition groups and other media sources are consistent with the information we have obtained regarding chemical weapons use and exposure. The assessment is further supported by laboratory analysis of physiological samples obtained from a number of individuals, which revealed exposure to sarin. Each positive result indicates that an individual was exposed to sarin, but it does not tell us how or where the individuals were exposed or who was responsible for the dissemination.

There was a prompt push back from Syria and Russia. And it is important to keep in mind that the UN fact finding mission does have evidence of rebel use of chemical weapons. We know this from Carla Del Ponte's statement in May. The portion of Rhodes' statement that deals with this is ridiculously weak. "We believe that the Assad regime maintains control of these weapons. We have no reliable, corroborated reporting to indicate that the opposition in Syria has acquired or used chemical weapons." One can easily imagine a situation where a deserter grabs a cache of canisters on his way out the door.

No, it appears that this is all just status quo. And the status quo favors the Syrian government. The opposition has no answer for the more highly motivated fighting forces of the government and its Hezbollah allies. Antitank guns will not change this; a no-fly zone would, but this does not appear to be in the offing.

An interesting portion of the Mazzetti et al. story is the growing impatience of the rancid Arab monarchies with Obama:

But the president’s caution has frayed relations with important American allies in the Middle East that have privately described the White House strategy as feckless. Saudi Arabia and Jordan recently cut the United States out of a new rebel training program, a decision that American officials said came from the belief in Riyadh and Amman that the United States has only a tepid commitment to supporting rebel groups. 

Moreover, the United Arab Emirates declined to host a meeting of allied defense officials to discuss Syria, concerned that in the absence of strong American leadership the conference might degenerate into bickering and finger-pointing among various gulf nations with different views on the best ways to support the rebellion.

It's safe to assume that Obama's approval of small arms will be followed by Saudi Arabia and Qatar moving to provide the jihadi heavier weapons.

On top of this there is the filthy spectacle of the flaccid Bill Clinton doing his Gulf paymasters' bidding and shilling for more rebel weapons. (See also Colum Lynch's Turtle Bay blog.)

Adding to those voices was former President Bill Clinton, who earlier this week endorsed a more robust American intervention in Syria to help the rebels, aligning himself with hawks like Senator John McCain, Republican of Arizona, who fault Mr. Obama for his reluctance to get entangled in the war. 

Speaking on Tuesday at a private session in New York with Mr. McCain, Mr. Clinton said, “Sometimes it’s best to get caught trying, as long as you don’t overcommit.”

Clinton has a knack for fomenting war. Think about Yugoslavia in 1999. Clinton took his high approval ratings following the GOP impeachment and went to war against a country trying to put down an internal uprising that was stoked by foreign intelligence agencies. Today Kosovo is a failed state held together by UN assistance; it is known for exports of harvested organs and prostitutes.

Agreement Reached on Mitrovica

Kosovo was in the news again. On Friday Prime Minister Hashim Thaci, "The Snake," former head of the Kosovo Liberation Army, reached agreement with his Serbian counterpart, Prime Minister Ivica Dacic, on the administration of Mitrovica. The EU's Catherine Ashton acted as mediator. Serbia can now begin negotiations on entry into the European Union.

The story, "Serbia and Kosovo Reach Agreement on Power-Sharing," written by Dan Bilefsky, can be found in this past Saturday's paper:

The agreement hinged on how much autonomy Kosovo was willing to cede to Serb municipalities in the north, in return for Serbia’s recognition of Kosovo’s authority in the area. Until now, Serbia has had de facto control over the small Serb-majority area in the north, which does not recognize Kosovo’s authority. 

Tensions have lingered since Kosovo declared independence from Serbia in 2008, nearly a decade after NATO bombs helped push out the forces of the Serbian strongman, Slobodan Milosevic. For Kosovo’s ethnic Albanian Muslim majority, independence was the culmination of a struggle for self-determination after a brutal ethnic civil war with Serbia. 

Kosovo is now recognized by more than 90 countries, including the United States and a majority of nations in the European Union. But five member countries, including Spain and Cyprus, have refused to recognize Kosovo. 

Serbia has also refused to recognize Kosovo, arguing that its declaration of independence breached international law. Serbia’s staunch ally, Russia, has blocked Kosovo’s membership in the United Nations, a hurdle to its economic and political progress. 

Under the agreement, municipal bodies in the Serb-majority north will retain autonomy in matters like health care and education. In return, the police and courts will apply the Kosovo central government’s laws. The Serbian municipalities will be able to appoint a regional police chief. 

Petrit Selimi, Kosovo’s deputy minister of foreign affairs, said Kosovo agreed not to deploy its security forces in the Serbian region for an unspecified number of years, except during emergencies like earthquakes. Even in that event, a senior NATO official said, the security forces would need authorization from NATO peacekeepers in Kosovo. 

The accord conspicuously omits any Serbian recognition of Kosovo’s independence. But analysts said the agreement was nevertheless a breakthrough.

For the straight dope on all Balkan matters I strongly suggest reading Nebojsa Malic who appears on Antiwar.com. His writing is clear and his arguments are forceful. There is an inherent bias in mainstream Western media against Serbia.