The Perils of a U.S. Interventionist Foreign Policy Abroad
This book review of Fool's Errands: America's Recent Encounters With Nation Building featured below is not new by any means, as I wrote in late 2004. It is timely and worth revisiting, as the United States continues to address concerns of foreign policy and intervention abroad. As a student of history and politics, I have confronted issues of foreign policy, and have come to esteem the virtues of a non-interventionist foreign policy.
The Non-Interventionist Tradition
The founding fathers enshrined their commitment to non-interventionism in the Neutrality Act of 1793. "The Great rule of conduct for us," proclaimed George Washington, "in regard to foreign Nations is in extending our commercial relations to have with them as little political connection as possible... It is our true policy to steer clear of permanent alliances with any portion of the foreign world." Thomas Jefferson further lauded the virtue of strategic independence, in proclaiming: "Peace, commerce and honest friendship with all nations; entangling alliances with none." John Quincy Adams surmised, "America does not go abroad, in search of monsters to destroy. She is the well-wisher to the freedom and independence of all. She is the champion and vindicator only of her own."
Some of our "monsters" in recent years whether Osama Bin Ladin or Saddam Hussain were actually considered our allies at one time. Rep. Ron Paul has rightly characterized American foreign policy as "schizophrenic." Moreover, these "monsters" were foreign aid recipients. Bin Ladin's gang got stinger missiles and weapons, and Hussein got missile technology and a sizable foreign aid package from the time of the 1970s practically to the outbreak of the First Gulf War.
In my humble opinion, America's security lies in a foreign policy based on strategic independence and armed neutrality, not in reckless intervention abroad or in countless foreign entanglements, alliances, and commitments to international bodies like the United Nations. I offered an Amazon.com guide to unravel the intrigue of the welfare-warfare state, which is essentially a critique of America's interventionist foreign policy obsession.
In looking back in history, I'm increasingly loathe to admit the U.S. faced innumerable bad consequences to its' intervention over the years. Likewise, the U.S. made quite a few strategic blunders. Now, the United States continues to wage perpetual war for perpetual peace and our political leadership embraces a quixotic Wilsonian idealism. Our political leadership acts as though we can make the world safe for beguiling abstractions like democracy, and treats our institutions of free government as some tangible commodity for export abroad. A reading of Aristotle's Politics shows the folly of universalism applied to political systems and Alexis de Tocqueville's Democracy in America shows the uniqueness of American institutions and the fragile nature of ordered liberty. It's not so easily duplicated.
Where Defense intersects with Foreign Policy
Conservatives I am told are supposed to have a soft spot for the military, but I look back to an Old Right isolationist / non-interventionist tradition that preceded the Cold War. Admittedly, I wanted to join the military at one time and pursue a JAG Commission. I'm not anti-military by any means, but anti-interventionism. I generally think the Anti-War Left are a bunch of uncouth obnoxious kooks. I don't have any esteem for the Hate America First crowd and the disciples of Noam Chomsky. I don't favor cutting military spending to the bone, but rather much more prudent allocations of resources that we might get more bang for our buck coupled with the elimination of redundant weapons systems, a trimming of waste, and a general reduction in our troop deployments throughout the world. Warhawk Republicans need a wake-up call, but they would rather cast derision on whistle-blowers like A.E. Fitzgerald for his insider's view, entitled The Pentagonists: An Insider's View of Waste, Mismanagement, and Fraud in Defense Spending.
While I am not a warhawk, I do recognize the value of a good national defense. I believe the United States should develop the Strategic Defense Initiative and create a multi-tiered ballistic missile defense and place more emphasis on the ability to project naval and air power abroad, by simply maintaining and upgrading our two-ocean deepwater Naval fleet.
The fact remains that we spend almost three-quarters of a trillion on defense expenditures, (though not all of it is under the auspices of the Department of Defense.) We have 725 military bases in 134 countries.
The Consequences of War
Having studied Robert Nisbet and his works The Quest for Community, I see that war is a leaven for radical social change. The socialists, in fact, accomplished much of their agenda that was readily adopted by Western countries as ostensibly temporary war-time expedients (that were never really repealed in whole.) This is all the more reason, why we should eschew interventionist foreign policy. War begets radical social and political change that would probably never muster acceptance in free-time. War socialism and central planning has a penchant for entrenching itself.
—Ryan Setliff
----------------------------------
Book Review - Fool's Errands
Fool's Errands: America's Recent Encounters With Nation Building is a terse analysis and overview of Clinton foreign policy maladministration. It succinctly captures his sad legacy of nation building efforts in the 1990s. Driven by naïve Wilsonian idealism, perhaps rosy views of human nature, and a quixotic fixation with seeing "democratic enlargement," the Clinton State Department presided over one foreign policy boondoggle after the other. Nation building efforts in Somalia, Bosnia, Haiti, and Kosovo were all entered with the best of intentions. Nonetheless, the end results were spurious victories with limited successes and arguably outright failures in some cases where intervention caused more harm than good. Some contests deemed triumphs are perhaps Pyrrhic victories at best. In such cases, US/UN/NATO babysitting (i.e. peacekeeping) has been deemed semi-permanent, political tripwires are everywhere, and an uneasy peace ensues.
(1) SOMALIA was an emerging crisis duly noted by Bush Senior after a coup d'état toppled the government in Mogadishu. Bush Senior sponsored increased humanitarian aid following instability and a famine, but withheld a more direct presence. After the coup, the vacuum of power was filled by rival warlords. Thereafter, Clinton soon came on the scene and pushed for more direct intervention. Dempsey and Fontaine paint a startling sketch of war torn nation and give cogent reasoning why well-meaning foreign policy goals led to disaster. Powerful warlords in the cities plundered the spoils of humanitarian aid for their own gain to buy weapons and buy off cadres of foot soldiers to do their bidding. The Somali animosity towards Westerners intensified amidst the chaos; humanitarian workers became victims of warlord violence and street crime. The Western world took note of the stark aforesaid events. The U.S. intervened under U.N. auspices. They were in the precarious position of picking allies from the warlord factions and protecting unarmed U.N. personnel. The thorn in their side was Mohammed Farah Aideed, a nt urban warlord who pilfered foreign humanitarian aid rather than distribute it equitably. He used the spoils to buy and arm his own armies and finance his criminal syndicate. Aideed was bold and flagrantly attacked UN peacekeepers and killed foreigners. The U.S. responded to these hit-and-run attacks by targeted strikes that summer. In October 1993, 18 U.S. Army Rangers were tragically killed in fighting while hundreds of Somali causalities fell. That conflict drew ominous parallels to Beirut and the quagmire touched a nerve in Washington. Thereafter, many in Congress demanded withdrawal. Clinton lashed out at isolationist "poison" and lack of U.S. commitment in the aftermath of sharp criticism. Further scandal erupted as millions of U.S. taxpayer dollars were lost to misappropriations, corrupt contract practices and embezzlement at the behest of UNOSOM. The U.S. eventually would relent and for the most part curtailed its presence. Aideed has died in fighting in 1996. Though Somalia is not a happy ever after story, the situation has marginally improved. Having endured Marxist despotism and anarchy, markets have since started to develop in the 1990s. Neighboring Djibouti helped broker a peace conference of Somali factions while an election brought President Hassan to power. Somalia is slowly emerging from the backwater Third World and all without a significant U.S. presence in the nation.
(2) HAITI is another horror story of good intentions gone awry. Haiti has a sad history of being mired in poverty, instability, corruption and economic stagnation with a paltry $250 per capita income. Clinton insisted on making democracy a grandiose cause in trying to strong arm a military junta out of power, and seeking the return of a democratically elected Marxist named Jean Aristide. The consequences of a naïve insistence on making the world safe for lofty democratic platitudes are well documented. The Clinton Administration made a fundamental mistake of economic sanctions to expedite a regime change. Clinton only succeeded in cutting the Haitian GDP by fully one-third after the nominal foreign businesses that were there packed their bags. In the end, U.S.-U.N. sponsored sanctions only hurt the Haitian people. The effects of sanctions will likely have repercussions for decades. Clinton sent in Marines to restore Aristide to his palace in Port-au-Prince which was simple enough. Afterwards came massive aid packages and troops that were deemed necessary to train Aristide's security forces and maintain order. The Haitian markets and economic development remained stagnate. Aristide only proved himself to be a corrupt kleptocrat who plundered the lion share of humanitarian aid to line his pockets while buying off protection for himself and his cronies. Haiti has since been mired in more crime and poverty as the corrupt Aristide rigged subsequent elections. Aristide was eventually toppled at dawn of this century, and many observers welcomed it. The present Bush Administration refused to restore him to power much to chagrin of the Fidel-coddling Rep. Charles Rangel of New York. Clinton's policies in Haiti spelled a disaster, and rested on naïve insistence on bringing a corrupt, avowed Marxist back to power in the name of democracy. It was also part of a politically correct agenda since Haiti in the early 1990's was being lead by a French Haitian in an essentially black republic. This was a touchstone of intervention for a Democratic administration obliged to defend political correctness over our vital security interests.
(3) BOSNIA AND HERZEGOVINA, that is a multi-ethnic Bosnian democracy, can be surmised as wishful thinking. The malfeasance in the nation-building campaign by the U.S. and NATO is Bosnia is captured by the chapter's subtitle, the Potemkin State. Potemkin, of course, alludes to the illusory idyllic village settings that were fabricated by Gen. Potemkin in eighteenth century Russia to awe Catherine the Great's courtesans from a distance as they toured her ostensibly idyllic kingdom. The artificiality of the Potemkin Villages came to embody the superficial and halfhearted attempts to reform and liberalize Catherine's kingdom. Happy peasants and happy villages were all a façade. Likewise, Bosnia remains an illusory farce, a state that exists merely on paper. It is deeply divided into mono-ethnic regions with separate standing armies and security forces. Germany helped foment the problem by recognizing the Bosnian State amidst a Civil War. By recognizing a independent Bosnia, Germany and NATO gave a carte blanche to the Bosniacs to wage war against the Serbs. The brokered peace at the Dayton Accord and negotiations came far too late. Germany and NATO exacerbated the crisis and the death toll by their intervention. Thereafter the Albright State Department decided that political correctness and the need for "multiethnic democracy" trumped the rights of Croats and Serbs. Croats abdicated their Croat settlements in Bosnia as are the Serbs in the New Bosnia. Technically, there really isn't such thing as an ethnic Bosnian. The so called Bosniacs are merely Muslims who live in Bosnia. The conflict in Bosnia was a proving ground for radical Islamists who trained and fought there, and networked with the Mujahideen and Al Qaeda. War crimes committed by those other than Serbs are downplayed if not ignored, though all sides have unclean hands. I'm not a Serb apologist nor do I dismiss their atrocities in pointing out that Croats and Bosniacs committed their share as well. The difference is the outside world turned a blind eye to the atrocities committed by the later two nationalities. Serbs didn't initiate hostilities and something has to be said about the fact that the first refugees in 1992 were 40,000 Serbs. Not surprisingly, the prospects for ethnic reintegration are bleak and a multiethnic, cooperative, democratic Bosnia is an illusory farce and a modern Potemkin State. Bosnia is a veritable powder keg ready to go off — and a quagmire that NATO helped erect.
(4) KOSOVO is a quagmire, and perhaps the biggest failure of any nation-building scheme the Clinton Administration contrived. Historically, Serbia has the strongest ties to Kosovo with more than a millennium of ties to the region. The battle of Kosovo against the Ottoman Turks was fought there. Moreover, it is home to innumerable sacred Serbian Orthodox shrines, many of which have been desecrated by Muslim militants. Nonetheless, the policies of the internationalist overseers are inherently philo-Albananian. While the occupiers and the Western media sensationalized accounts of Muslim victims of Serb aggression, many Serbs, Macedonians and Gypsies in the region have suffered immensely and many refugees of the later three nationalities have fled Kosovo. For all the hue and cry about ethnic cleansing, the unintended consequences of NATO policy was the massive ethnic cleansing of non-Albanians. War and terror atrocities only seem to get reported though when Serbs are the culprits. The West-NATO-US aligned itself with the Albanian KLA, which was nothing more than a corrupt, narco-terrorist group involved in illegal drug and arms trafficking as well as white slavery. The CIA, in fact, has long classified the KLA as a terrorist group. The KLA has little interest in the aims of the internationalist cadre behind KFOR, preferring instead a Greater Albania including Kosovo purified of non-Albananians. Kosovo will likely remain in the economic doldrums since its political status remains in limbo. The only foreign investment seems to be in security forces, building and maintenance of support structures for occupying peacekeepers. The economic prospects of Kosovo are bleak, and international controls greatly hinder prospects of burgeoning markets or foreign investment. Investors simply lack confidence in an unstable region that is locked in political limbo for perpetuity.
President Bush said prior to his election in 2000, "I don't think our troops ought to be used for what's called nation building." I tend to agree, but I have not changed mind on the subject. This book is vitally requisite for addressing the contemporary issues as the issue United States continues to be naively obsessed with reckless intervention in the name of "democratic enlargement," furtherance of Wilsonian idealistic ideology and international human rights agendas. If we want lessons from history, we have to look no further than the last decade of the last century. Nation building takes more than imperious regime changing by superpowers and copious amounts of foreign aid. Free governments cannot be simply imposed. Nations must be built from within from slow cultural and political transitions. The Clinton foreign policy gurus act as though democracy is some tangible commodity for export abroad, and ignore how fragile the institutions of free government really are. They misread cultural, historical and strategic considerations before inaugurating their campaign of reckless interventionism and nation building. Bombing a region or country into the ground and whimsically rebuilding it into a free democracy seldom goes as planned. Gunpoint democracy has proven itself to be an illusory farce; the four major attempts at nation building in the 1990's were dismal failures. Dempsey and Fontaine substantiate this assertion in their book with sound reasoning and a trenchant analysis.
"Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it."
—George Santayana
This book review of Fool's Errands: America's Recent Encounters With Nation Building featured below is not new by any means, as I wrote in late 2004. It is timely and worth revisiting, as the United States continues to address concerns of foreign policy and intervention abroad. As a student of history and politics, I have confronted issues of foreign policy, and have come to esteem the virtues of a non-interventionist foreign policy.
The Non-Interventionist Tradition
The founding fathers enshrined their commitment to non-interventionism in the Neutrality Act of 1793. "The Great rule of conduct for us," proclaimed George Washington, "in regard to foreign Nations is in extending our commercial relations to have with them as little political connection as possible... It is our true policy to steer clear of permanent alliances with any portion of the foreign world." Thomas Jefferson further lauded the virtue of strategic independence, in proclaiming: "Peace, commerce and honest friendship with all nations; entangling alliances with none." John Quincy Adams surmised, "America does not go abroad, in search of monsters to destroy. She is the well-wisher to the freedom and independence of all. She is the champion and vindicator only of her own."
Some of our "monsters" in recent years whether Osama Bin Ladin or Saddam Hussain were actually considered our allies at one time. Rep. Ron Paul has rightly characterized American foreign policy as "schizophrenic." Moreover, these "monsters" were foreign aid recipients. Bin Ladin's gang got stinger missiles and weapons, and Hussein got missile technology and a sizable foreign aid package from the time of the 1970s practically to the outbreak of the First Gulf War.
In my humble opinion, America's security lies in a foreign policy based on strategic independence and armed neutrality, not in reckless intervention abroad or in countless foreign entanglements, alliances, and commitments to international bodies like the United Nations. I offered an Amazon.com guide to unravel the intrigue of the welfare-warfare state, which is essentially a critique of America's interventionist foreign policy obsession.
In looking back in history, I'm increasingly loathe to admit the U.S. faced innumerable bad consequences to its' intervention over the years. Likewise, the U.S. made quite a few strategic blunders. Now, the United States continues to wage perpetual war for perpetual peace and our political leadership embraces a quixotic Wilsonian idealism. Our political leadership acts as though we can make the world safe for beguiling abstractions like democracy, and treats our institutions of free government as some tangible commodity for export abroad. A reading of Aristotle's Politics shows the folly of universalism applied to political systems and Alexis de Tocqueville's Democracy in America shows the uniqueness of American institutions and the fragile nature of ordered liberty. It's not so easily duplicated.
Where Defense intersects with Foreign Policy
Conservatives I am told are supposed to have a soft spot for the military, but I look back to an Old Right isolationist / non-interventionist tradition that preceded the Cold War. Admittedly, I wanted to join the military at one time and pursue a JAG Commission. I'm not anti-military by any means, but anti-interventionism. I generally think the Anti-War Left are a bunch of uncouth obnoxious kooks. I don't have any esteem for the Hate America First crowd and the disciples of Noam Chomsky. I don't favor cutting military spending to the bone, but rather much more prudent allocations of resources that we might get more bang for our buck coupled with the elimination of redundant weapons systems, a trimming of waste, and a general reduction in our troop deployments throughout the world. Warhawk Republicans need a wake-up call, but they would rather cast derision on whistle-blowers like A.E. Fitzgerald for his insider's view, entitled The Pentagonists: An Insider's View of Waste, Mismanagement, and Fraud in Defense Spending.
While I am not a warhawk, I do recognize the value of a good national defense. I believe the United States should develop the Strategic Defense Initiative and create a multi-tiered ballistic missile defense and place more emphasis on the ability to project naval and air power abroad, by simply maintaining and upgrading our two-ocean deepwater Naval fleet.
The fact remains that we spend almost three-quarters of a trillion on defense expenditures, (though not all of it is under the auspices of the Department of Defense.) We have 725 military bases in 134 countries.
The Consequences of War
Having studied Robert Nisbet and his works The Quest for Community, I see that war is a leaven for radical social change. The socialists, in fact, accomplished much of their agenda that was readily adopted by Western countries as ostensibly temporary war-time expedients (that were never really repealed in whole.) This is all the more reason, why we should eschew interventionist foreign policy. War begets radical social and political change that would probably never muster acceptance in free-time. War socialism and central planning has a penchant for entrenching itself.
—Ryan Setliff
----------------------------------
Book Review - Fool's Errands
Fool's Errands: America's Recent Encounters With Nation Building is a terse analysis and overview of Clinton foreign policy maladministration. It succinctly captures his sad legacy of nation building efforts in the 1990s. Driven by naïve Wilsonian idealism, perhaps rosy views of human nature, and a quixotic fixation with seeing "democratic enlargement," the Clinton State Department presided over one foreign policy boondoggle after the other. Nation building efforts in Somalia, Bosnia, Haiti, and Kosovo were all entered with the best of intentions. Nonetheless, the end results were spurious victories with limited successes and arguably outright failures in some cases where intervention caused more harm than good. Some contests deemed triumphs are perhaps Pyrrhic victories at best. In such cases, US/UN/NATO babysitting (i.e. peacekeeping) has been deemed semi-permanent, political tripwires are everywhere, and an uneasy peace ensues.(1) SOMALIA was an emerging crisis duly noted by Bush Senior after a coup d'état toppled the government in Mogadishu. Bush Senior sponsored increased humanitarian aid following instability and a famine, but withheld a more direct presence. After the coup, the vacuum of power was filled by rival warlords. Thereafter, Clinton soon came on the scene and pushed for more direct intervention. Dempsey and Fontaine paint a startling sketch of war torn nation and give cogent reasoning why well-meaning foreign policy goals led to disaster. Powerful warlords in the cities plundered the spoils of humanitarian aid for their own gain to buy weapons and buy off cadres of foot soldiers to do their bidding. The Somali animosity towards Westerners intensified amidst the chaos; humanitarian workers became victims of warlord violence and street crime. The Western world took note of the stark aforesaid events. The U.S. intervened under U.N. auspices. They were in the precarious position of picking allies from the warlord factions and protecting unarmed U.N. personnel. The thorn in their side was Mohammed Farah Aideed, a nt urban warlord who pilfered foreign humanitarian aid rather than distribute it equitably. He used the spoils to buy and arm his own armies and finance his criminal syndicate. Aideed was bold and flagrantly attacked UN peacekeepers and killed foreigners. The U.S. responded to these hit-and-run attacks by targeted strikes that summer. In October 1993, 18 U.S. Army Rangers were tragically killed in fighting while hundreds of Somali causalities fell. That conflict drew ominous parallels to Beirut and the quagmire touched a nerve in Washington. Thereafter, many in Congress demanded withdrawal. Clinton lashed out at isolationist "poison" and lack of U.S. commitment in the aftermath of sharp criticism. Further scandal erupted as millions of U.S. taxpayer dollars were lost to misappropriations, corrupt contract practices and embezzlement at the behest of UNOSOM. The U.S. eventually would relent and for the most part curtailed its presence. Aideed has died in fighting in 1996. Though Somalia is not a happy ever after story, the situation has marginally improved. Having endured Marxist despotism and anarchy, markets have since started to develop in the 1990s. Neighboring Djibouti helped broker a peace conference of Somali factions while an election brought President Hassan to power. Somalia is slowly emerging from the backwater Third World and all without a significant U.S. presence in the nation.
(2) HAITI is another horror story of good intentions gone awry. Haiti has a sad history of being mired in poverty, instability, corruption and economic stagnation with a paltry $250 per capita income. Clinton insisted on making democracy a grandiose cause in trying to strong arm a military junta out of power, and seeking the return of a democratically elected Marxist named Jean Aristide. The consequences of a naïve insistence on making the world safe for lofty democratic platitudes are well documented. The Clinton Administration made a fundamental mistake of economic sanctions to expedite a regime change. Clinton only succeeded in cutting the Haitian GDP by fully one-third after the nominal foreign businesses that were there packed their bags. In the end, U.S.-U.N. sponsored sanctions only hurt the Haitian people. The effects of sanctions will likely have repercussions for decades. Clinton sent in Marines to restore Aristide to his palace in Port-au-Prince which was simple enough. Afterwards came massive aid packages and troops that were deemed necessary to train Aristide's security forces and maintain order. The Haitian markets and economic development remained stagnate. Aristide only proved himself to be a corrupt kleptocrat who plundered the lion share of humanitarian aid to line his pockets while buying off protection for himself and his cronies. Haiti has since been mired in more crime and poverty as the corrupt Aristide rigged subsequent elections. Aristide was eventually toppled at dawn of this century, and many observers welcomed it. The present Bush Administration refused to restore him to power much to chagrin of the Fidel-coddling Rep. Charles Rangel of New York. Clinton's policies in Haiti spelled a disaster, and rested on naïve insistence on bringing a corrupt, avowed Marxist back to power in the name of democracy. It was also part of a politically correct agenda since Haiti in the early 1990's was being lead by a French Haitian in an essentially black republic. This was a touchstone of intervention for a Democratic administration obliged to defend political correctness over our vital security interests.
(3) BOSNIA AND HERZEGOVINA, that is a multi-ethnic Bosnian democracy, can be surmised as wishful thinking. The malfeasance in the nation-building campaign by the U.S. and NATO is Bosnia is captured by the chapter's subtitle, the Potemkin State. Potemkin, of course, alludes to the illusory idyllic village settings that were fabricated by Gen. Potemkin in eighteenth century Russia to awe Catherine the Great's courtesans from a distance as they toured her ostensibly idyllic kingdom. The artificiality of the Potemkin Villages came to embody the superficial and halfhearted attempts to reform and liberalize Catherine's kingdom. Happy peasants and happy villages were all a façade. Likewise, Bosnia remains an illusory farce, a state that exists merely on paper. It is deeply divided into mono-ethnic regions with separate standing armies and security forces. Germany helped foment the problem by recognizing the Bosnian State amidst a Civil War. By recognizing a independent Bosnia, Germany and NATO gave a carte blanche to the Bosniacs to wage war against the Serbs. The brokered peace at the Dayton Accord and negotiations came far too late. Germany and NATO exacerbated the crisis and the death toll by their intervention. Thereafter the Albright State Department decided that political correctness and the need for "multiethnic democracy" trumped the rights of Croats and Serbs. Croats abdicated their Croat settlements in Bosnia as are the Serbs in the New Bosnia. Technically, there really isn't such thing as an ethnic Bosnian. The so called Bosniacs are merely Muslims who live in Bosnia. The conflict in Bosnia was a proving ground for radical Islamists who trained and fought there, and networked with the Mujahideen and Al Qaeda. War crimes committed by those other than Serbs are downplayed if not ignored, though all sides have unclean hands. I'm not a Serb apologist nor do I dismiss their atrocities in pointing out that Croats and Bosniacs committed their share as well. The difference is the outside world turned a blind eye to the atrocities committed by the later two nationalities. Serbs didn't initiate hostilities and something has to be said about the fact that the first refugees in 1992 were 40,000 Serbs. Not surprisingly, the prospects for ethnic reintegration are bleak and a multiethnic, cooperative, democratic Bosnia is an illusory farce and a modern Potemkin State. Bosnia is a veritable powder keg ready to go off — and a quagmire that NATO helped erect.
(4) KOSOVO is a quagmire, and perhaps the biggest failure of any nation-building scheme the Clinton Administration contrived. Historically, Serbia has the strongest ties to Kosovo with more than a millennium of ties to the region. The battle of Kosovo against the Ottoman Turks was fought there. Moreover, it is home to innumerable sacred Serbian Orthodox shrines, many of which have been desecrated by Muslim militants. Nonetheless, the policies of the internationalist overseers are inherently philo-Albananian. While the occupiers and the Western media sensationalized accounts of Muslim victims of Serb aggression, many Serbs, Macedonians and Gypsies in the region have suffered immensely and many refugees of the later three nationalities have fled Kosovo. For all the hue and cry about ethnic cleansing, the unintended consequences of NATO policy was the massive ethnic cleansing of non-Albanians. War and terror atrocities only seem to get reported though when Serbs are the culprits. The West-NATO-US aligned itself with the Albanian KLA, which was nothing more than a corrupt, narco-terrorist group involved in illegal drug and arms trafficking as well as white slavery. The CIA, in fact, has long classified the KLA as a terrorist group. The KLA has little interest in the aims of the internationalist cadre behind KFOR, preferring instead a Greater Albania including Kosovo purified of non-Albananians. Kosovo will likely remain in the economic doldrums since its political status remains in limbo. The only foreign investment seems to be in security forces, building and maintenance of support structures for occupying peacekeepers. The economic prospects of Kosovo are bleak, and international controls greatly hinder prospects of burgeoning markets or foreign investment. Investors simply lack confidence in an unstable region that is locked in political limbo for perpetuity.
President Bush said prior to his election in 2000, "I don't think our troops ought to be used for what's called nation building." I tend to agree, but I have not changed mind on the subject. This book is vitally requisite for addressing the contemporary issues as the issue United States continues to be naively obsessed with reckless intervention in the name of "democratic enlargement," furtherance of Wilsonian idealistic ideology and international human rights agendas. If we want lessons from history, we have to look no further than the last decade of the last century. Nation building takes more than imperious regime changing by superpowers and copious amounts of foreign aid. Free governments cannot be simply imposed. Nations must be built from within from slow cultural and political transitions. The Clinton foreign policy gurus act as though democracy is some tangible commodity for export abroad, and ignore how fragile the institutions of free government really are. They misread cultural, historical and strategic considerations before inaugurating their campaign of reckless interventionism and nation building. Bombing a region or country into the ground and whimsically rebuilding it into a free democracy seldom goes as planned. Gunpoint democracy has proven itself to be an illusory farce; the four major attempts at nation building in the 1990's were dismal failures. Dempsey and Fontaine substantiate this assertion in their book with sound reasoning and a trenchant analysis.
"Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it."
—George Santayana
