Kosovo and the Battle for Eurasia

Today's Kosovo is nothing but a criminal enclave led by terrorists and murderers… Kosovo "politicians" are bandits hired by the US in order to turn the territory into a US ground aircraft carrier. This was the main objective of the offensive against Yugoslavia, and this was why they needed to make Kosovo independent from Belgrade… The US, inspired by the chimerical goal of the global dominance, will soon crack down on Iran. A new global drama will begin.

Dmitriy Sedov, Strategic Culture Foundation (a prominent Russian think tank)

As I write these lines, the powerful Group of 8 is deciding the fate of a small province in Serbia known presently as Kosovo. The E.U. and U.S. want independence for Kosovo as quickly as possible while Russia has promised to oppose any moves towards independence without direct talks between Pristina (the administrative center of the province) and Belgrade (the capital of Serbia). Once again the lines are being drawn between opposing sides in an increasingly dangerous global situation.

Kosovo, also known as Kosovo and Metohija, has never in its history been an independent political entity. While most of its population is comprised of ethnic Albanians, there have always been significant Serbian, Bosniak, Turkish and Roma (Gypsy) minorities. In around 1995, a paramilitary organization financed by heroin and prostitution trafficking (as well as other criminal activities) called the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) emerged on the scene. The following year, the KLA provoked a full-scale war with Serbia by attacking Serbian police and civilians alike with the aim of full independence. This conflict was known as the Kosovo War and it lasted until 1999. That year, NATO carried out a military operation against Serbia bombing both military and civilian targets. NATO, spearheaded by President Clinton, claimed that the Serbian government was committing genocide in Kosovo and had to be stopped.

In April of 1999, while NATO was bombing Serbia's cities, the U.S. state department announced that the genocide against ethnic Albanians in Kosovo had taken as many as 500,000 lives and compared the the ethnic cleansing to the Nazi Holocaust. In May that figure had somehow fallen to 100,000 -- according to the Department of Defense. Strangely, after NATO occupied the region and place it under the governance of the U.N. in June, the number shrank to 10,000 -- this time according to the British Foreign Office. No reports have ever stated how the British Foreign Office arrived at this figure and to this day it has never been objectively confirmed.

The fighting ended in October and by November, most of the ethnic Albanian refugees who had fled during the conflict returned to their homes. However, much of the remaining Serbian population population -- some 250,000 people -- fled and have never been able to return. The Roma (Gypsy) population was also forced to flee after being brutalized by the KLA.

After the war, reports began to surface which revealed that British and U.S. (CIA) intelligence agents had been in constant contact with the KLA since at least 1996 and that they had been providing advice and training to the KLA throughout the war. These reports further undermined the official pretext for the NATO invasion since the putative "genocide" of ethnic Albanians had not begun until well after the CIA made contact with the KLA. While, most people in the U.S. and Europe probably still believe the genocide story and that the U.S. got involved in the Balkan wars of the 1990s for humanitarian reasons, it is fairly clear that the NATO bombing of Serbia was in fact the final phase of the U.S.'s plan for Yugoslavia after the death of General Tito -- dissolution and the establishment of a permanent air base in the region.

Slobodan Milosevic was the antagonist in the official U.S. story about Yugoslavia not because of his war crimes or his responsibility for ethnic cleansing but simply because he opposed the break-up of the former Yugoslavia. The wars in the Balkans were wars amongst thieves scrambling for the scraps of what was once a major regional power and war crimes were committed on all sides. Slobodan Milosevic was different from the other forces in the region mainly because his aim was to maintain the territorial integrity of Yugoslavia (he is arguably the least evil of the players involved ). Every step of the way, since the death of General Tito, the U.S. and its junior partners in Europe supported the forces of fragmentation and Slobodan Milosevic stood in their way.

Kosovo, now controlled by the heroin and prostitute trafficking KLA, would be an excellent location for a U.S. air base. It would serve as a strategic base for any air offensive against Iran and is another step towards the goal of encircling Russia and dominating Eurasia.

Of course Russia is opposing Kosovo's independence just as it opposes U.S. missile defenses in Eastern Europe. Moreover, Russia is making its own power moves. Recently Russia secured natural gas deals with Kazakhstan and Turkmenistan -- deals which will increase the energy dependence of Europe on Russia. Meanwhile, the efforts of the U.S. and Europe to build a Trans-Caspian oil pipeline that would allow them to bypass Russia are all but dead in the water.

Unlike the Cold War we are no longer in a situation where the major players recognize the line between "yours" and "mine". The U.S. wants Eurasia and a unipolar world while Russia wants to maintain its position as a regional power-broker with China as an equal partner in a multi-polar world. Either they will come to an agreement or they will go to war.

There Won't Be Another Cold War

It's the joke of the year since Iranian missile cannot reach Europe... these days, the Americans tell a lot of jokes. Iranian missiles are incapable of reaching Europe and it is very unlikely that they (the Americans) do not know this.

Ali Larijani, Secretary of Supreme National Security Council, Iran

Iran simply does not have the ability to launch a missile attack against Europe. Moreover, since the E.U. is Iran's biggest trading partner, an Iranian missile strike against Europe wouldn't make any sense. Larijani is wrong about one thing though. This isn't the joke of the year. The idea that North Korea could launch a missile attack against Europe is even funnier.

Side note: the utter contempt with which the current U.S. administration holds the general public is infuriating. They really expect us to swallow these lies?! Well, as Adolph Hitler wrote in 1925, people are most likely to believe a big lie since the average person cannot fathom that anyone would go to such lengths to distort the truth.

So, if the official justification for building missile defenses in Eastern Europe is a lie, then why is U.S. building them? When examined through the lens of the U.S. policy toward Russia since the fall of the Soviet Union, the answer to this question becomes obvious. Since the fall of the Soviet Union, the U.S. has pursued policies designed systematically and ruthlessly to destroy Russia.

The first Bush and Clinton administrations carried out the initial phase of the effort -- the looting of the Russian financial system. Under the auspices of the IMF and with the assistance of corrupt Russian politicans (e.g. Boris Yeltsin) and businessmen (i.e. gangsters), billions of dollars were funneled out of Russia and into U.S. banks.

Simultaneously and continuing into the present, the U.S. government has sought to fragment the countries of the former Soviet Union into as many little countries as possible, since little weak countries are easier to dominate than larger ones. The obvious supplement to this strategy has been the support of anti-Russian, pro-U.S. governments in the former Warsaw Pact nations of Eastern Europe. Altogether, these are the newly independent states of Central Asia and Eastern Europe, many of which are governed by corrupt, religious fundamentalist and/or right-wing politicans whose only mark of distinction is that they hate Russia and love Uncle Sam.

Side note: NATO absorbed the Baltic States and Poland during these years. The governments in these countries are now openly working to rehabilitate Nazism and demonize the Red Army which was largely responsible for the Nazi defeat in Europe. I wrote about this in a post last month.

The final phase of the plan is to encircle Russia with missile defenses using the pro-U.S. countries of the former Soviet Union and Warsaw Pact as bases. This, theoretically (since missile defense systems have not been proven to actually work), would allow the U.S. the liberty to launch a nuclear attack against Russia without fear of reprisal.

But why would the U.S. want to do all this to Russia? As Zbigniew Brzezinski -- probably the most influential geo-strategist since Henry Kissinger -- wrote:

The most immediate task [in the wake of the Cold War] is to make certain that no state or combination of states gains the capacity to expel the United States from Eurasia or even to diminish significantly its decisive arbitration role (page 198, The Grand Chessboard, 1997).

Why is Eurasia so important?

Eurasia is the globe's largest continent and is geopolitically axial. A power that dominates Eurasia would control two of the world's three most advanced and economically productive regions. A mere glance at the map also suggests that control over Eurasia would almost automatically entail Africa's subordination, rendering the Western Hemisphere and Oceania geopolitically peripheral to the world's central continent. About 75 per cent of the world's people live in Eurasia, and most of the world's physical wealth is there as well, both in its enterprises and underneath its soil. Eurasia accounts for 60 per cent of the world's GNP and about three-fourths of the world's known energy resources (page 31, The Grand Chessboard, 1997).

In other words the U.S. ruling class must neutralize Russia in order to dominate Eurasia -- the key to global domination.

Russia is still able to challenge the U.S. despite its severe financial handicap and the loss of much of its former territorial influence thanks to its massive wealth of energy resources defended by its gigantic nuclear arsenal. Moreover, the war in Iraq has served to increase Russia's wealth by driving global energy prices to historical heights and strengthen its influence in the world by utterly wrecking the U.S.'s credibility.

As is normally the case, it's the masses of Russian people who have suffered the worst effects of Washington's policy towards Russia. Moreover, if the U.S. ruling elite's quest for global domination precipitates a global war, it will be the masses of people who pay the cost.