Kosovo war: war of principles and personalities

Albright, Blair, Cook and Clark will be the ones who pushed the West to fight the war that ended the era of the occupation of Kosovo.

The war for Kosovo was, first of all, a war of principles and personalities, not a war of interest.

This is best proven by General Wesley Clark's book "Waging Modern War". When he finishes reading it, the reader, especially if he is a Kosovar Albanian, will not be able to escape the conclusion: Kosovo's freedom is a miracle in itself.

THE GREAT UPFRONT IN KOSOVO

Shortly after the end of the NATO war for Kosovo, in Toronto, Canada, the meeting of the North Atlantic Alliance at the level of defense ministers will be held, which was primarily dedicated to the lessons learned from the 78-day NATO campaign. . One of the ministers asserted that the ultimate lesson is that "we will never do what we did again...". The Foreign Minister of France, Hubert Vedrine, will affirm, following this position, that the war for Kosovo was something special, an exception to the rule and not something that proves the fundamental change of Western policy.

In 1964, while at West Point, the most prestigious military academy in the world, Clark will discuss war, death, Vietnam, with fellow generation Alex Hottell, who will be killed six years later in Vietnam. The conclusion of this conversation was that if there is nothing to fight and die for, there is nothing to live for. The opportunity to fight for what is right, for General Clark, is one of life's greatest gifts. He proved this with his life.

The war for Kosovo not only overturned a state order maintained by Belgrade for almost a century, thanks to previous Balkan and world wars in which Serbia found itself on the western side of history, but even more so this war overturned almost all the political and military rules which were in force in the West after World War II. Perhaps for this reason, in no single case, Western officials will not call the conflict of the NATO Pact with Serbia a war and will not celebrate the victory, which will likely be decisive for the Balkans to be removed from the nickname "powder keg". which he had acquired at the beginning of the 20th century, when the Ottoman Empire left here.

"Modern war", General Clark calls the war for Kosovo. This war was presented, according to him, as a function of history and culture, as a result of NATO, the media, technology.

The war for Kosovo, in fact, brought together a multitude of war experiences: from the Second World War, the Vietnam War, the limited American military interventions in Panama and Haiti, the Gulf War, the Bosnia-Herzegovina War to the Cold War. All the possible contradictions and frustrations that are the legacy of these wars came to the surface during the NATO Pact campaign, General Clark tells us in his book "Waging Modern War".

ATOMIC APOCALYPSE AND LOCAL DISASTERS

A "red line" was drawn for Kosovo by President George Bush in December 1992, which remained in memory as the "Kirşendella Threat". An order was given, in May 1998, by President Bill Clinton, that the West will not allow Bosnia-Herzegovina to repeat itself in Kosovo. A series of ultimatums were made to Slobodan Milosevic and his regime to renounce the crimes in Kosovo and accept the International Agreement on Kosovo, as presented at the Rambouillet Conference.

However, between these commitments and the willingness to deliver on them, there was a wide gap. Milosevic understood this as early as 1991, when the RSFJ was torn apart in a savage war, which politically, even to this day, has not won its epilogue, because the issue of Kosovo and Montenegro remain unresolved. The Serbian leader learned early that the West was surprised by the peaceful end of the Cold War, the decomposition of the communist system in the East and the bloody destruction of the SFRY. For decades, the West had created a military strategy and political concept that presupposed the Soviet threat as the core of the Western security framework and politics in Europe.

Avoiding the danger of the atomic apocalypse caused the West to underestimate the great tragedies of the small peoples in the Balkans, who suffered the consequences of the mandate of Belgrade from the West as the main security center in the Balkans. The downfall of the Soviet Union was nevertheless intended to create a new European political and security order. There were not a few Western European politicians and soldiers who demanded the radical change of the NATO Pact, the strengthening of the CSCE (later the OSCE) and the European Union, the creation of a European military structure, the strengthening of the UN and, as a consequence , the departure of the USA from the position of the main European military power.

America had come to Europe following three major world wars (this third was the "Cold War"), which it had won, and now, according to the Eurocentrics, when Western Europe was no longer threatened by the East, America would had to withdraw militarily from Europe.

As will be seen and experienced, the void created by the search for new political and security structures was filled with the graves of hundreds of thousands of citizens of the former RSFJ. Milosevic emerged as the greatest challenger to the West in the years 1991-1999. His wars, as will be understood later, abolished the dominant Serbian role in the region, gave support to the process of self-determination of peoples (which until then was always subordinated to the principle of state sovereignty), discredited the political and military potential of the European Union, compromised The UN, created a special international decision-making structure (the Contact Group), restored the place of the NATO Pact in the post-cold war European security, brought its troops to the Balkans, re-emerged the USA as the main political and military power of Europe.

WINNING WITH ZERO LOSSES

It has often been said that Milosevic's unscrupulousness made possible the Western consensus against him and in favor of Kosovo. He, in fact, gave the command to launch attacks against Serbia even though he knew very well, as Clark's conversation with Milosevic shortly after the end of the war in Bosnia, that the FRY was unlikely to be at war with NATO. Perhaps Milosevic estimated that he could influence the West politically by playing the Cold War renewal card, or did he think that NATO would never be able to maintain its unity and that Washington would never agree to a ground offensive.

The NATO war will start on March 24th at 5:31 pm European time and will be completed on June 10th at 3:36 pm. On its first day, 366 Alliance aircraft were available to strike 51 targets. On the last day there were 900 planes in the campaign hitting 1000 targets in Kosovo and Serbia. The war was won without using ground troops and Apache helicopters, with zero losses in the ranks of NATO, without giving up on the international security concept for Kosovo and not allowing Russia to gain its sector in Kosovo. General Clark had the opportunity, at the end of this war, to affirm to President Clinton that he has fulfilled his promise given on September 15, 1998 in a ceremony, when Clinton asked Clark: "You will be ready to take care of the Kosovars , or not...". Clark had replied: "Yes sir..."

The West has won in Kosovo, because it simply could not lose, can be learned from Clark's book. If Milosevic did not let go, the West would be forced to enter into a total war with Serbia, because there would be no other option left. Defeat here meant contesting the NATO Pact, the American role, Western values, all the achievements after 1945. The sacrifice of soldiers in the ground offensive would be inevitable to avoid this fatal defeat of the West.
The Kosovars were lucky that their suffering and their freedom became a global media issue, an issue of the meaning of the existence of the NATO Pact, an issue of civilization's surrender to barbarism.

Our freedom is a national and international value. It is dedicated to the heroes and martyrs of Kosovo and the biographies of the great personalities of the West, among whom is General Wesley Clark.

The book "Waging Modern War" is a great and honest book, without which the new history of Kosovo cannot be written. /Telegraph/