Now that American and allied troops have been exposed to hazard on the ground in Kosovo for some 10 months, it is time for a little honesty. We have a quagmire on our hands, our purported enemies are not that bad and our "victim-friends" are anything but good. The Albanian nationalists of the KLA have proved to be more than homicidal maniacs, they are the real racists in the Balkans, killing and cleansing Serbs, Roma (Gypsies) Turks, Egyptians, Gorani and Croats as well as their own political opponents in the Albanian majority. The troops in Kosovo and Bosnia know something's fishy, and not just what they were advised by the Clinton Administration to expect. But they don't have the real story, not yet. . These troops will not get protection from the White House, so some illumination must come from we of the brotherhood of arms who are retired and can provide objectivity. There is a growing --and very interesting-- body of Balkan War insights contained in a series of books by Canadian military journalist Scott Taylor and associated/affiliated minds, including Canadian Major General Lewis Mackenzie. It is time that Americans involved in our current and future peacekeeping adventures get, and accept, some unvarnished truths from our great and good allies to the north. "INAT," the newest, is the most urgent for those with a limited budget, to read, but other books by Taylor, "Tested Mettle," "Tarnished Brass" are also important accessions for those with funds and a desire for insight. Sergeant James Davis' "The Sharp End" and Major General Lewis MacKenzie's "The Road to Sarajevo" are also important reads; ones which will disabuse the reader of much anti-Serb propaganda. These books can provide a more balanced view of the protagonists, which is so very necessary for peacekeeping by "honest brokers," rather than partisan "thugs, " as our troops are often characterized of late. In past years of our increasingly Orwellian political world, some of these earlier books were all but kept out of the United States, where no publisher would pick up the rights. But Amazon.com and other internet book services have outflanked the censorious partners of administration spin-doctors. Now that they are readily available, it would be a wonderful bonus if some benefactor made sure a complete set was positioned in the post libraries maintained for our US (and allied) forces in Kosovo, Bosnia, and at the divisions which are preparing successor task forces to maintain those occupation assignments. Our troops need to know the reality on the ground, rather than the over-glossed perception, limned ("spun") by and for political circles. Politics and regulatory government may depend on the triumph of perception over reality, but our infantry live or die on the physical facts, not the diplomatic sophistries which have overwhelmed reality in recent years. As a preamble, in the spirit of "full disclosure," I met Scott (Mr. Taylor) in late March, in Belgrade, where we were both guests of the Yugoslav government's Institute of Politics and Economics, at a conference also attended by Indian Army Lt General Satish Nambiar and about 95 other international journalists and academics. Scott, a former Canadian Army commando, is second to no man in squad-bay "testicularity." You could not ask for better company in a foxhole or bunker, though the laughter might make it easy for an enemy patrol to zero in. Scott, who publishes the Canadian military monthly, "Esprit de Corps" (www.espritdecorps.on.ca), made 6 trips into Croatia and Bosnia during the three-sided Bosnian war, visiting the "Princess Pats," and the "Vandoos" task forces. With his own eyes, Scott has "supped full of horrors" and personally witnessed Croatian war crimes as they took place during "Operation Storm" in the summer of 1995. In Tested Mettle ($24.95 at Amazon), Scott and co-author Brian Nolan recount the all-but unknown 1993 battle between "the Princess Pats" task force and Croat Army ethnic cleansers under the command of the Albanian-Croat Brigadier Agim Ceku, now commander of the "Kosovo Protection Corps." In this battle, the Canadians killed more than 30 Croats even as they attempted to violently "cleanse" a Serb village under UN protection, in a replay of the savage and genocidal liquidation of Krajina Serbs by the Fascist Ustashe and Croat SS in World War 2. As the reader will learn, the Canadian military tried to file war crimes charges after this battle, and again, after 1995's "Operation Storm" (planned and executed by the same Brigadier Ceku), but the International Criminal Tribunal for Yugoslavia (ICTY) in the Hague brushed these charges under the carpet, while relentlessly pursuing Serbs, who may or may not have actually committed crimes of equal or lesser magnitude. Thus, Ceku, second to none as a war criminal, is wined and dined by NATO, rather than receiving the austere fare of a prison dining hall. It is the experience of Canadian peacekeepers in these two "moments" that lays the whole ICTY process open to an arguably valid charge that it has been little more than a politicized kangaroo court; hence recent interest in actually prosecuting a few Croat extremists, suggested in this month's headlines. In Inat: Images of Serbia and the Kosovo Conflict, ($13.99, trade paper only, at Amazon), which is generously illustrated with photos, Mr. Taylor has produced a very economical combination of background, war reportage and post-war critique, including a handy time-line of the Kosovo Crisis. Scott, who spent the last 25 days and nights "in country" and under bombardment reporting for the Toronto Sun and the Ottawa Citizen, plus other Canadian media outlets, had to produce this volume himself, but now benefits from e-distribution. Inat suffers lightly from a few editorial errors, which are not surprising in a self-produced work. But, in my view, these are errors of detail and errors of proof-reading, not errors of fact, intent or history. This book will stand a stern inspection, but historians should double-check some items. Among those errors, some, as in his introductory background, are those of generalization --the Ustasha, for instance, existed separately from the Nazis (though the Croats also formed the SS Kama division, while Kosovo Albanians formed SS Skanderbeg and the Bosnian-Muslim Nazis formed SS Hanzar, or, "Handschar"), well before the German occupation. Towards the end of the book, Mr. Taylor gets a couple of men's names backwards: Read "Vujevic Nebojsa" as Nebojsa Vujevic on page 86 (the index entry is also wrong and directs the reader to page 82, and it appears that the insertion of photos upset the pagination). A thorough edit for a second edition would be worthwhile. But that is merely testiscularity in action. Mr. Taylor does offer a lot of original and puncturing insights for little money --and to both sides, fairly: On pages 123-24, his conversation with a government advisor, Bojan Bugarcic, devastates the myth that Serb Air Defense Forces shot down sixty or eighty NATO aircraft. That they downed an F-117 and an F-16, plus a host of UAVs and a number of Tomahawks, is pretty good, anyway. Bugarcic admitted, "a tremendous, and extremely effective, propaganda campaign had been mounted by the Serbian military." Taylor adds, "The aim was to keep the populace believing their forces were mounting a spirited defense." In other words, it was a morale booster, but the disclosure underscores why I demand a photo of "the tail number" before I will agree an aircraft was lost. On the other hand, I remind readers that the Belgrade blitz lasted 30 days longer than the London Blitz of 1940. And, in fact, the wall of toggled-off, but unguided, SA-6 missiles and flak did keep the NATO aircraft up high (above 15,000 feet), and all but impotent. Last year's NATO air war was mostly willful vandalism of empty buildings; and now, the infantry have to protect the illusion that something meaningful was "accomplished" by the jet jockeys of "TacAir" (Tactical air power). Pilots: this is not to condemn you but to remind you that you support the infantry, and cannot decisively effect battle or war without us. That accepted, we really do love your deliveries and loyalty!) I will add to Mr. Taylor's narrative the confirmation that when NATO attacked government buildings in Belgrade (a lovely though threadbare city, by the way), all the ministries' movables had been cleared out to storage, so files, furniture and functionaries were spared destruction. Then on April 24th, when impotence piqued blind rage, a guided NATO bomb massacred several union-member TV technicians and a make-up artist at the RTS (Radio and Television Serbia) building. Her hands were found in a park a hundred yards from the point of impact --but RTS was, after all, (as Jamie Shea assured us), a key element of "Slobo's" "propaganda machine." Nobody died on the NATO side -- it was "virtual war." But on the ground, ordinary people did die, while soldiers resisted. Yugoslavia's air defenses may not be at the leading edge, but the Serbs --and their Yugoslav fellow citizens-- are neither dumb, nor fainthearted: they survived. Surprisingly, there is an utter lack of animosity towards the US in Belgrade a year later, as I found during my 8-day visit there. I will also affirm that there are 200,000 unmolested and un-"cleansed" Moslems in Belgrade; plus Gypsies and 70,000 Croats, who, by reason, would be dead or elsewhere, if Serbs really were "ethnic-killers" their opponents' propagandists allege them to be. Lewis Mackenzie's book, The Road to Sarajevo ($20.27 at Amazon), is also a core reading, and my conversations with General Nambiar while in Belgrade, serve to reinforce the veracity of the much-maligned Scots-Canadian. Mackenzie, Nambiar and David Hackworth are three of the military experts who know how many times the Muslim Nazis in Sarajevo (who betrayed open connections to the SS Hanzar Division of 1942) mortared their own people to create a "photo-op" atrocity that the lazy media cameramen would blame on the Serb "butchers." --Pay attention folks! We've all been bamboozled by these propagandists for the last nine years. Mackenzie chose honor over career, and retired on "pip" shy of his rightful pay grade -- a (very model of a most post-modern) major general, rather than as a Lieutenant General, which would have embellished Canada's "honour," instead of Ottawa's mere political pragmatism. As to "Tarnished Brass," ($22.99 at Amazon), this shows that the Military-Industrial (Congressional) Complex "MIC" (or MICC) corruption of "perfumed princes" is endemic. Not only does mere corruption persist in the "E-Ring" of the Pentagon; it is also alive and as well as a leech in Ottawa and in every governmental "establishment" or "nomenklatura" on both sides of the recently erased "Iron Curtain." Buy them, read them, love them. "Lives will be saved." Benjamin C. Works is Director of SIRIUS, The Strategic Issues Research Institute www.siri-us.com E-mail: Benworks@AOL.Com ***
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