Four Serbian army brigade are dug-in and a land war is in process along the Albanian borders!
It must be an odd sort of war. Who are those brigades fighting against?
The only way is to bomb them in to submission or else send the ground troops!
As I keep pointing out, if there are no ground troops facing them those brigades can simply disperse among civilian areas, rendering themselves effectively immune to bombing. The only way to force them to concentrate is to face them with a credible and immediate threat of ground attack. I did not say that ground forces need to actually be sent into Kosovo. I did say that neither diplomacy nor bombing will be effective unless an invasion-capable ground force is deployed in a position to invade. There is a big difference between a gun in a locked cabinet and a gun pointed into your eyeball.
Solution, we are moving toward a UN protecterate in Kosovo.
I can cope with that. As long as it isn't a US protectorate.
Re the Shah, you miss my point entirely. You claimed that the Iranians "have lived under kings for 2500 years", and that an absolute ruler was the natural order of things. I pointed out that the Iranians deposed the shah in favor of a constitutional monarchy in 1906, and all serious scholars consider the Iranian monarchies ended at this point. The Pahlavi "dynasty" was imposed by the British and Russians as a pawn for their partition of the country. The Iranians, who were tired of seeing their country run as a wholly owned subsidiary of a British oil company, tried to get rid of their monarchs again in 1951-53, and succeeded. But the Brits came back again, this time by convincing the Americans that Mossadegh was a communist pawn. There was little or no evidence that this was the cased, but in those days any such accusation was believed. At that point the die was cast.
If we had lived up to our principles, and backed the Iranians against the British with firm guarantees against foreign intervention (which could of course have been applied to Russians as well), we could have had a stable ally instead of an unstable lapdog.
It should also be pointed out that we could have done worse than Khomeini. The Shah was ripe for subversion, and if it hadn't been Islamic fundamentalists it might very well have been communists. At least Khomeini wasn't in the Russian camp - he wasn't exactly pro-American, but that's hardly a surprise, given our relationship with the Shah. Not so many years later we were sending arms and money to Islamic fundamentalists as extreme as Khomeini, possibly more so, because they were fighting Russians.
In point of fact Islamic fundamentalism has been a more effective check on Russian power in the middle east than propped-up feudal states ever were. |
