Let me first emphasize that I have lots of sympathy for the ethnic Albanians. I wish there were sensible things we could do to help them. But, in reality, this war takes on other dimensions besides a "humanitarian" bombing campaign against the "evil Serbs." As we have seen, the NATO attacks might only have exasperated the situation and motivated the Serbian paramilitary hicks to shoot more innocent people in the head. Surely our policy analysts must have foreseen this tragic outcome, or at least planned for it. I am thus extremely suspicious that it's being conducted for *less than human* motivations. As a case in point, American forces didn't do a single thing for Rhwanda, whose people had suffered from violence 2-3 orders of magnitude greater than in Kosovo.

Somebody's getting rich from all this bombing and it sure as hell ain't me. It sure as hell ain't the poor, 18-25 year old boys who our going to have to spill blood and lose their lives, their arms, their legs, their eyes, and their minds when we commit ground troops.

So who's getting rich? Here are my ideas.

1) Clinton himself. An obvious target verbal abuse, but let's face it. Much of it he deserves. I haven't heard much about the transfers of missle technology to the Chinese lately, or for that matter, about Juanita Broaderick. Wag the Dog, part Deux (or I should say, part 4)? Could be!

2) Cruise missle makers. I hear that our latest cruise missles have hardware that must be replaced in order to comply with the GPS rollover this August. Repairing each missle will take almost as much time and money as firing them off. Might as well "use em or lose em!"

3) The military industrial complex. As much as I respect the bravery, motivation, and competance of men and women in our armed forces (hey, my father's a nam vet), let me humbly suggest that they have been abused time and time again by our leaders and those who profit from war. It was Dwight D. Eisenhower--perhaps one of the 20th century's BEST presidents and brilliant military administrators--who warned us of a Military Industrial Complex. If you want to know more about how it works, read Chomsky. Read about how our the government benefits from arms manufacturers and how arms manufacturers benefit from tht government. Read about how they exert considerable pull in the news media.

4) Generals and strategists who want to test out new weapons and tactics. Maybe that's what all these excercises in "urban warfare" are about...a protracted conflict in the Balkans. Or if you are paranoid enough as per E. Coli, a protracted conflict on our own soil. EMP weapons are now being honed and tested, as are the B-2 bombers. So are all kinds of "all weather" imaging equipment. I speculate that for the first time, we are quietly fighting a cyberwar with the Yugoslav govt. Maybe we'll have to draft our 18-year old hackers pretty soon.

5) Revenge for the Yugo. That's a joke. I heard it on "Whaddya Know," NPR.

6) Maybe there's oil out there.

7) Maybe it has something to do with oil, but not directly. Reportedly Turkey and Greece are getting ready to go at it again and ignite their ancient animosity. If this were to happen, the Greeks would side with the Serbs and leave NATO. We have already quietly decided that Turkey is more important than Greece, strategically, and thus we're choosing a battle that they would have a lot of sympathy for. We are patronizing them. In doing so, we keep Turkey in the Alliance and get to use her as a base of operations from which to bomb Iraq and monitor the 'Stans and the Persian Gulf.

8) Maybe it really does have something to do with y2k, but I'm not that creative to find a conspiracy there. Any ideas?

-- coprolith (coprolith@rocketship.com), April 02, 1999

Answers

>Who profits from Kosovo?

We do.

There are no aircraft, cruise missles, smart bombs, or any other type of advanced weaponry currently in production. It will take a very long time to get those production lines going again. We have fewer than 200 tomahawks left.

If Billy Boy uses up the our inventories of "smart" weapons in Kosovo, or anywhere else for that matter,then there will be nothing left for him to enforce martial law with at the turn of the century.

-- Scott (duhelmet@aol.com), April 02, 1999.

Coprolith,

Your quote: "Wag the Dog, part Deux (or I should say, part 4)? Could be!"

Give it a rest, man. From now on I guess everything Clinton does will be considered "wag the dog". If that is the case, then I guess a majority of the Senate is also wagging their dogs:

http://cnn.co m/US/9903/23/us.kosovo.05/index.html (article clip) "WASHINGTON (CNN) -- The U.S. Senate voted Tuesday evening 58-41 in favor of a resolution supporting U.S. participation in NATO military operations in Kosovo, just hours after Secretary-General Javier Solana gave the go-ahead for air raids in Yugoslavia."

Your quote: "I am thus extremely suspicious that it's being conducted for *less than human* motivations. As a case in point, American forces didn't do a single thing for Rhwanda, whose people had suffered from violence 2-3 orders of magnitude greater than in Kosovo."

http:/ /cnn.com/WORLD/africa/9903/31/rwanda.01/index.html (article clip) "France, which was a close ally of the Hutu government in Rwanda, has been accused of sending military support to Rwanda both before and during the genocide. A French parliamentary inquiry last year deflected blame on U.N. and U.S. policy."

"The Americans were interested in saving money, the Belgians were interested in saving face, and the French were interested in saving their ally, the genocidal government," said Alison Des Forges, a scholar on Rwanda and author of the report."

I'm getting sick of everyone whining "but we didn't help them in Rwanda." First of all, the actions we are involved in are not actions of the U.S. but of NATO, and it is only by their agreement that we enter into these actions. In order to do anything about Rwanda, we would have had to engage in conflict with France, a NATO member, and we would have had to use ground troops. The United States cannot police the World by itself, so we have to choose which conflicts we can engage in. Clearly since most of NATO are European members, there is much more at stake in the conflict in Kosovo. Milosevic is a virus that left unchecked, will spread and disrupt much of Europe, and ultimately destroy the solidity of NATO itself, which in fact he has already started to do. It would have been nice to help in Rwanda too, and most nations that might have been able to help now regret that they didn't. We have learned from that mistake, and this is part of the reason we could not look the other way this time:

http://c nn.com/WORLD/9803/25/rwanda.clinton/index.html (article clip) "KIGALI, Rwanda (CNN) -- U.S. President Bill Clinton on Wednesday told Rwandans that the international community had failed to act to prevent the country's genocide in 1994, and he urged measures to prevent such a tragedy from happening again."

Some people keep saying that we shouldn't even be involved, and why didn't we help Rwanda. Well, it has to be one or the other, but you can't have it both ways. If the United States and NATO countries had to dedicate their forces to constantly guarding the entire world, they would have very little money left for their own defense. Decisions do have to be based on realistic concerns and it is naive to believe otherwise.

-- @ (@@@.@), April 02, 1999.

Here's who gains:

Next Step = Combat Troops in Kosovo. Bet on it!

Bilderbergers Planned Kosovo War in 1996

1998 Bilderberger Meeting - War Planned on Cyprus if Kosovo Crisis Stalled

) Copyright 1998 by New World Order Intelligence Update. This article may be posted to Internet conferences and Web sites.

During and following the 1996 Bilderberg Conference, we asserted that Bilderberger Bill Clinton would be re-elected as U.S. president; that he would promptly break his promise to bring American troops home from Bosnia, but that he would re-position them in Hungary and the surrounding countries instead and pass command of the Bosnian operation to a German general and 3,000 German combat troops from Heidelberg [this later occurred, in October, 1996]; and that the Bilderbergers had thereafter arranged to inflame the Serbs by pursuing the war criminals in their midst for trial before a new International Court [the Serbs, a proud but experienced people, side-stepped this provocation by persuading the lower- and middle-level suspects to voluntarily surrender].

If that failed to incite a Balkan war, then we pointed out that they were prepared to utilize Kosovo to bring one about:

"When war comes, as expected, Kosovo, at the southern tip of the Serbian Republic, may be the flashpoint that ignites a wider war involving Greece, Albania, Bulgaria, Russia, and Turkey - in addition to the hapless U.S. and NATO troops caught in the middle. Kosovo, "the Jerusalem of the Balkans", is a self-proclaimed nominally independent "republic", presided over by "President" Ibrahim Rugova. It is, in fact, a province of Serbia, though its population is largely of Albanian descent. The United States, though on record as recommending more "autonomy" for Kosovo, treats the province to all intents and purposes as a de facto independent state, a fact which infuriates the Serbians. Twice - once in 1992 and again in 1993 - Presidents of the United States have threatened Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic with military retribution "in the event of a conflict in Kosovo caused by Serbian action." To add insult to injury, the U.S. now plans to establish an "official presence" in "the capital of Kosovo." Aggrieved by this, and rightly sensing the intent of the United States to encircle and contain them, the Serbians are likely to appeal to an increasingly-nationalistic Russia, their traditional protectors, for help and military assistance. As reported by Germany's DIE ZEIT, "Serbia is every place where there are Serbian trenches or Serbian graves", according to Serbian opposition leader Val Draskovic. That means that Serbia will fight to retain Kovoso, in spite of the fact that its population is 90% Albanian. The Albanian Kosovans, determined to be independent, will fight back. That will likely draw into the conflict the 3.4 million inhabitants of Albania proper, together with the Albanians of Montenegro and Macedonia.

Albania also has openly-expressed designs on Macedonia's western provinces, largely populated by Albanians: at least one armed insurrection directed by Albania has been foiled by the Macedonian authorities, and the Albanians continue to openly support and encourage Macedonian Albanian separatist groups. Bulgaria, which considers Macedonians to be "western Bulgarians", may then go to war for the fourth time this century to seize the opportunity to finally settle its territorial claim there. Greece, already incensed by Macedonia's use of the Greek "Vergina Sun" symbol on its flag and suspicious of the Macedonian Republic's supposed intention to form a "Greater Macedonia" by inciting insurrection and separation in the Greek province of Macedonia, may well then take advantage of events to settle the issue once and for all.

Turkey, acting in defense of its Muslim brethren in Bosnia, and infuriated by the actions of its traditional rival Greece against the Macedonian Republic, could then scarcely be refrained from joining the fray. The "Albanian issue", centered in Kosovo and overshadowed by the larger Serb-Bosnian tensions, is a powder keg waiting to explode. And when it does, the whole region will explode with it."

- from our 1996 BILDERBERGER REPORT [almost three years later, these things are now happening!]

The Serbs, scenting the trap thus laid for them, have confined themselves to short, repressive police actions against the Kosovan Albanian population, none of which have been sufficient in duration, extent or intensity to provide the pretext necessary for the Bilderberger elite to rally Western European and American public support for a full-fledged military engagement of the Serbs. So their methodical preparation, financing and arming of the newly-revealed Kosovan Liberation Army has so far provided the Bilderbergers with no dividends at all...and the clock is running on their schedule. They need this war, and they need it soon.

Relevant links:

Harvest Trust

A HREF="http://www.inforamp.net/~jwhitley/bild98.htm">1998 Bilderberg Meeting

Don't know who the Bilderbergers are? Look it up.

-- sparks (wireless@home.here), April 02, 1999.

War is the health of the state.

-- A (A@AisA.com), April 02, 1999.

@@@.com, I see your point. A "Wag the Dog" argument, however emotionally charged it may be for CLinton-haters, is not the most rational one. This I respectfully conceed. Nevertheless, I cannot rule it out, given our CICs previous proclivities.

As for your support of the war, well, I hope to God you're right. To me--in my smallminded peacenik ways--it seems as if NO ONE (or only a FEW...thus the reason for this topic) is being helped by this military action. Certainly not the Kosovo Albanians. To me it seems as if the decision to bomb was made by people's emotions and their hubris, not their minds.

-- coprolith (coprolith@rocketship.com), April 03, 1999.

Yes Coprolith - I have a few ideas - best summed up by listening to the recent Jeff Rense show with David Icke at the following link...

http://www.davidicke.com/icke/index.html

-- Andy (2000EOD@prodigy.net), April 03, 1999.