Illyria Americana

        Walt Whitman was a bad poet, but he might have made an excellent American statesman, something like an effeminate Madelaine Albright who can switch from one basic principle to the next with the duplicity that even dewy-eyed fairy godmother of the battlefield would have admired. In the course of a day, she can be lecturing the Republika Srpska of Bosnia on the rights of Muslim and Croat minorities; then, without batting a reptilian eye, she can champion the right of the Albanian majority in Kosovo to gain autonomy, which will inevitably entail the right to expel (or extenminate) the Serb minority that has clung to its ancient land in the face of over half a millennium of persecution and ethnic cleansing.

        Perhaps in their hearts, many statesmen are really bad poets: they prefer lies to truth and rely on poetic license as an excuse for incompetence and incoherence. I have been trying to figure our American policy in the Balkans for six years, and the best I can come up with is that we are hostage to special interests - the Croatian and Albanian lobbies obviously, Arab oil interests, and (strange as it seems) the Israelis, who have found a way of doing something to please the Muslims. The United States and Israel, in other words, are making the Serbs pay the price for what we are doing to Muslims in the Middle East.

        But even bribery and cowardice don't fully explain the zeal of the American foreign policy establishment and the media it controls. Their minds are already formed in globalist categories to see nationalism, Christian piety, and attachment to tradition as the last vestiges of a savage old world that must be rooted out no matter what the cost, and although the Albanians and Croats are, each in their own way, as atavistic as their Serbian neighbors, it is the Serbs who have historically been predominant in the region, and it is the Serbs who sing the loudest songs about their heritage and their destiny. The globalist elites hate the Serbs for the same reason that they hate all real Americans who wish to preserve their traditions, their religion, their identity. This point was rammed home to me on the SFOR base in Sarajevo, where American soldier-girls lugged their lard-bellies, huffing and puffing, up the steps of the cafeteria - an oasis of bad cooking - where the bulletin boards featured (on paper of U.N. blue) advertisements for Black History Month.

        The Balkans were heating up again early this year: riots in Kosovo followed by a Yugoslav crackdown followed by an American crackdown, renewed talk of Montenegrin independence, Bosnian Muslim threats over the postponed Brcko decision. By March, Boris Yeltsin's intoxicated hints about World War III breaking out over Iraq seemed more likely to be realized in Europe.

        In tripartite Bosnia, the Muslims are no longer content with the cards they were dealt in the Dayton Accords: so far, they have been disappointed in the expectation that a liberal interpretation of the agreement would improve their hand. The Republika Srpska remains divided between the old warlords of Pale, who exploited their political ineptitude - they never devised a tax system, much less a strategy for victory - as an excuse for massive corruption, and the democratically elected government of President Biljana Plavsic, a staunch Serb patriot whose sense of justice and integrity has been misinterpreted as proof that she is a Quisling who would betray her country to the United States.

        Kosovo is, for the moment, and even more serious question. We saw last year what Albanians can do to each other if they are allowed to go on a rampage (to say nothing of the crime waves Albanian immigrants have inflicted on Europe and the United States), and this violence is nothing compared to what they will do, with a little air support from their American friends, when the Shiptar begin to riot in Macedonia and Greece.

        Meanwhile, the Hungarians of Serbian Vojvodina are clamoring for their autonomy, and their cousins in Slovakia are pressuring the Slovak government to demand autonomy for Kosova (notice how many American journalists, by the way, are adopting the Albanian pronunciation of a purely Slavic word - from kos, blackbird - that means nothing in Albanian). The Slovaks, who have had the chance to bear the gentle yoke of imperial Hungary, are quick to understand that the call for greater Albania being heard in Kosovo (and echoed by Albanian spokesmen in the United States like former congressman Joseph Dio-Guardi) will soon reverberate in hamrony with demands for a Greater Hungary that will include parts of Serbia, Romania, and Slovakia.