Pipe Dreams/Pipe Bombs

Can you name two english speaking countries that are at war........

George Jonas: A disaster from the word go

Posted: February 22, 2008, 7:26 PM by Marni Soupcoff
Filed under: George Jonas

The West went into Yugoslavia to prevent ethnic cleansing, and ended up presiding over it

Can’t blame the Serbs for protesting, which is what they do en masse as I’m writing this — not that it’s likely to do them any good. After the province of Kosovo seceded from Serbia on Monday, the major Western liberal democracies stumbled over each other in their eagerness to put the stamp of good housekeeping on it. By now a dozen nations or more, including the U.K. and U.S., have recognized the breakaway province of ethnic Albanian Muslims as an independent country.

The apprentice sorcerers who precipitated Kosovo’s secession by launching a bombing campaign against Slobodan Milosevic’s rump Yugoslavia in the last year of the last century, are now on the face-saving mission of pretending that this was what they wanted all along. It wasn’t. Their ideal Kosovo was a multicultural Elysium, where Serb and Albanian Kosovars, miraculously reconciled by the bombs of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), lived happily ever after.

Such pipe dreams were shared by the stubborn innocents of the boomer generation, people whose consciousness was shaped by the hallucinogens and chimeras of the 1960’s, from Britain’s Tony Blair to U.S. president Bill Clinton, not excluding Canadian prime minister Jean Chrétien and various luminaries in his cabinet.