Ron, welcome aboard! How was the weather in Kinshasa?? <vbg>
You asked: Now I wouldn't rule out the remote possibility that there is something more darkly ominous at the root of this incident, maybe even a warning to Bejing not to interfere. Who knows??
How lucky you're: I'm your man! A warning to Beijing? Who knows? I KNOW! Think about it: what could be the connection between Beijing --15,000 miles away from Kosovo-- and Belgrade, after all??
Well, I was kind of depressed lately because of the discarding of the Ground Operation from NATO's kriegspiel... But then I figured out that the US could still achieve their strategic goal through another middle-ground maneuver: if Milosevic agrees on the deployment of foreign, lightly armed troops in Kosovo then the US could push it further by demanding that such a ground deployment be a NATO-led escort of Albanian Kosovars back in their home towns. Such a political agreement would lead to the same end as a hostile storming of Kosovo by NATO, that is US soldiers deployed all over the region, leveraging a strong geopolitical clout for the US. However, the toll among US military entailed by a negotiated deployment would likely be nil.
Yet, for such a UN/NATO patronage to go through, the Chinese green light is required in order to rally a UNSC quorum. And that's where the shoe pinches: China would never endorse a UN initiative allowing NATO to be the secular arm of the UN --this would be a bad international test case.
Hence, we might be back on the ''hostile storming'' track... Hold your breath!
Gustave. |
