Tom Paine 1949
Diamond Member
- Mar 15, 2020
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I think it is important to note that the U.S./ NATO interventions in ex-Yugoslavia were not primarily “imperialist military adventures” as was our intervention in Libya, Iraq, or — going back much further — Vietnam. I think defending narrow European economic (or historic cultural) interests in different parts of Yugoslavia (especially Croatia and Slovenia) were not the key “motivating” element for Western military interventions there.
The military interventions in ex-Yugoslavian regions came after brutal civil wars broke out and were designed to stop the massacres and genocide and establish peace. This was an extraordinarily difficult thing to do, but it was essentially accomplished.
The Russians were neither inclined nor in any position back then to do an equally “successful” job. I believe most of the people living today in the seven “independent” states existing in ex-Yugoslavia are better off than they would be if the diplomatic and forceful U.S. / NATO intervention never occurred, and the civil wars continued. (The bombing of civilian bridges in Belgrade, however, to me seemed both wrong and unnecessary.)
This doesn’t mean that either the U.S. or the NATO alliance always act as “peacekeeping forces” or as a “defensive alliance” or that they never simply advance Western economic and political interests, or that mistakes weren’t made, or that the strong Serbian “Slavic” connection to Russia wasn’t also a factor.
It just means that in cases of interpenetrated peoples it can be damn difficult to resolve difficulties once civil war begins — and sometimes only a judicious exercise of outside power is needed to end “endless wars.”
Tito’s Communist partisans did a good job of forging a united Yugoslavia out of the boiling cauldron of mutually hostile, fascist and jingoistic national groups with hostilities going back centuries that existed and were murdering each other during WWII, but that unity and initial pride in Yugoslavia grew from the barrel of communist partisan’s guns as well as from an internationalist ideology, as well as from Tito standing up to Stalin. It simply could not last when Tito died and new economic opportunities asserted themselves on the regions’ market economies, and the old regime’s new leaders themselves turned nationalist.
It is too easy just to take sides, to portray everything and every group as all good or bad according to one’s own national or narrow party partisan perspective. The Bosniak Muslim leader Izetbegović, for example, cannot be accurately labeled “an Islamic fascist,” anymore than Milosevic can be called a Serbian fascist — though there were plenty of bloody fascistic criminal elements fighting on all sides, committing atrocities, etc.
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