| Saturday,
May 8, 1999 Now to clean up after the column. This place is a MESS even for
Chaos Manor...
Darnell was over. We are changing to a server that will run the Front Page Extensions.
I am Guest of Honor at a convention in Orlando this week so I probably will not make the
change today, let it wait a week, but we are nearly there.
Assuming we haven't provoked the Chinese into a war by then.
Roberta wants to revise her web page ( http://www.readingtlc.com
) and we used a program that seems unlikely to exist now to design it. I think I'll
install Symantec Visual Page on her system. It ought to be easier to use than Front Page.
I hope.
Over in mail are two
valuable Windows FAQ site links. I followed one to find out how to get rid of that
stupid warning in Windows 98 whenever you access your Windows folder. Actually it doesn't
bother me as much as most because I tend to use Windows Commander (the upgrade of Norton
DOS Commander) to do most file manipulation, and that doesn't ever see the silly warning.
But anyway, the method is to rename or delete in the Windows folder the file folder.htt.
You could hack this file but it seems pointless: renaming it doesn't seem to change
anything noticeable other than getting rid of that silly warning.
Where will it end?
First, Milosovec will appear to capitulate: he'll agree to withdraw all military forces
from Kosovo, and to allow all genuine Kosovo refugees to return to their homes. A UN (not
NATO) peacekeeping force, with some NATO members but mostly the usual UN mercenaries who
find wearing a blue helmet better pay than being in the Scandinavian or Irish national
armies (and even more so for some of the fourth world nations who contribute). There will
be Russians, and the commander will be someone "neutral". With that agreement
the bombing stops.
Serbia will leave police behind in Kosovo, to keep order and protect Serbs, and part of
the agreement will be that the KLA will have no status whatever.
There being no infrastructure left, it will take a while to start moving refugees back.
Order has to be restored. Fires put out. Sanitation facilities repaired. Bridges and roads
destroyed by the bombing must be repaired. Water distribution restored. Foodstocks built
up since there wn't be any crops.
Then the refugees have to be identified and classified, and genuine refugees separated
from interlopers, and property owners establish their claims to their property; even if
done with all good will and good faith this is going to take a LONG time, and most of
those moved out won't be back.
By then months will have gone by and the world will have lost interest. When it is
discovered that some of the Serbian 'police' are military, and it's taking forever to
"process" the returning refugees, and there's little to eat and little
infrastructure built, the bombing won't start again. The ethnic balance of Kosovo will
have changed, Clinton will have something he can declare as a victory, those in the US who
want to feel good about meddling can do so, the allies who are getting wearier and wearier
of the war can get out, and NATO will be seen to be more than a paper tiger if not a full
fledged Siberian tiger.
And perhaps the US can buy some more missiles and smart bombs because at the moment we
haven't enough to fight another half a war anywhere. If China takes this opportunity to
invade Taiwan, there's not one whole heck of a lot we can do without resorting to nukes;
we fired off our best weapons defending our vital interests in the Balkans, and we don't
have any more, and there aren't any in the pipeline. The Navy is down to about a hundred
non-nuclear smart weapons. USAF hasn't that many.
With luck we will climb out of this without a full disaster, but the potential for a
disaster is still there, and there is no upside. There's no way we can "win",
since anything that leaves the Albanians more powerful than the above scenario risks a
real expansion of the war as the KLA tries to build a Marxist Greater Albania carved out
of Kosovo, Montenegro, The Former Yugoslavian Republic of Macedonia, and Greece itself.
That would be a larger war.
With luck and God's grace we can crawl out of this mess with some shards of national
reputation and shreds of honor. If there's anything better we can get out of this, I don't
know what it is, because I don't know what "Victory" is in this situation.
Enthronement of the KLA certainly is NOT a victory for us.
Bismark said that God looks after fools, drunks, and the United States of America. Let
us hope he was right.
TOP
|
CLICK HERE for
a Special Request. 
