Ignored: Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic tried to broker a deal with Blair and Bill Clinton - but it was made unacceptably draconian because the leaders preferred a war
Writing about Kosovo at the time, and visiting the province twice after the war, I could not understand why more people in Britain were not worried by Mr Blair’s assumption that he could bomb and invade someone else’s country when he felt like it in order to redress what he believed was an injustice. Those were the days, of course, when most of the media thought Tony Blair could do no wrong.
His military success in 1999 convinced him that Britain could and should play the role of the world’s number two policeman to the U.S. A messianic note entered his rhetoric, as at the 2001 Labour party conference, when he raved that ‘the kaleidoscope has been shaken . . . Let us re-order this world about us’.
The U.S.-British legal case for invading Iraq was as feeble as it had been in the case of Kosovo. In fact, Saddam Hussein was a much more egregious genocidal maniac than Milosevic. However, while many on the Left had branded Milosevic a ‘fascist’ (actually, he was a barely reconstructed former communist), they were more indulgent of the tyrant Saddam Hussein.
Incidentally, the extremely unpleasant Hashim Thaci wrote an article in The Guardian newspaper praising Mr Blair to the skies as recently as September. The delusion that the Kosovo Liberation Army were really not such bad chaps persists on the Left.
what happened in Kosovo helped shape subsequent events in Iraq and Afghanistan. Mr Blair acquired the mentality of a do-gooding Wild West sheriff who believes he can right wrongs wherever he chooses, and doesn’t care overmuch about breaking the law in the process, or even the unfortunate deaths of innocent civilians who get caught in the cross-fire.
It is richly ironic that ‘liberated’ Kosovo should now be a failed, gangster state, with its prime minister, Hashim Thaci, identified by as authoritative a body as the Council of Europe as being directly or indirectly responsible for organ trafficking, as well as corruption and other misbehaviour on an epic scale.
Kosovo finally declared independence from Serbia in 2008, but it is far too small and poor — despite having received billions of dollars of western aid, much of which may have been siphoned off — to go it alone as a viable country. So the West will be nursing it, and its corrupt leaders, for years to come.
Beyond repair? Eleven years after the bombing of the country, Serbia is still trying to recover from the £38bn of damage the U.S./UK attack caused
Meanwhile, Serbia is still recovering from the shock that was inflicted on it by Britain and the U.S. in 1999, when the cost of the damage caused was put at £38 billion. It, too, has absorbed an enormous amount of aid, most of it from the European Union.
Needless to say, neither Mr Thaci nor any of his senior comrades in the Kosovo Liberation Army have been put on trial, though that could now change. By contrast, numerous Serbs have been tried at the War Crimes Tribunal in The Hague — no doubt rightly so — including Milosevic, who died of a heart attack before a verdict had been delivered.
With his messianic certainties, the morally bipolar Tony Blair liked to divide the world into ‘goodies’ and ‘baddies’, having presumptuously placed himself in the first category. How fitting that this begetter of war after war should end up by receiving the Golden Medal of Freedom from a monster who traded in body parts
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/debate/a...-Kosovan-PM-Hashim-Thaci-bizarre-monster.html
Bona
