In case you are having trouble figuring out who is who in this war we are in
From: Tom Seals
Now let me make sure you understand this. It's pretty complicated.
Listen closely. We've got troops (young Americans who have volunteered to
risk their lives defending American freedom and independence, in exchange
for the chance to learn electronic repair and to drive tanks) in Bosnia
because the Bosnian Muslims were mistakenly included in Yugoslavia by the
victorious allies when they broke up Austria-Hungary in 1918. Or maybe the
Austro-Hungarians made the mistake when they took Bosnia and Herzegovina
from the Ottoman Turkish Empire in 1906 and gave it a hyphenated name
because the Austrians spoke German and like to shove words together, like
Austro-Hungarian. Anyway, Woodrow Wilson and the boys shoved the people
together, and that was definitely a mistake.
Herzegovina was inhabited by Croats, who are basically Serbs who are
Catholics instead of Orthodox and who write their dialect of Serbian using
Latin letters instead of Cyrillic. This looks less funny to us, so they
must be the good guys and the Serbians are bad. Maybe it's that the
Serbians write their dialect of Croatian in those weird Russian letters,
which is even more perverse; they're definitely the Bad Guys.
So we bravely side with the Bosnians and the Croats against Serbia,
until the Croats cheat by massacring Bosnians. That's why we had to send in
troops, right, because everybody was massacring Bosnians? And the Bosnians
couldn't fight back because the UN wouldn't let anybody sell them guns, on
the grounds that if nobody had guns nobody could shoot anybody there.
Somehow the UN forgot that the Serbians and the Croats already had lots of
guns; only the Bosnians really needed them.
OK, so now three years or so after our strictly limited one-year
peacekeeping mission to save the noble Bosnians (who only go out and
slaughter Serbs and Croats when they manage to get guns) from the Evil Serbs
(who already have lots of guns and so slaughter Croats and Bosnians all the
time) and the Semi-Evil Croats (who slaughter Serbs whenever they can but
would rather slaughter Bosnians because they don't have so many guns) --
after all this time, we still have Our Brave Boys (and Girls, and, er..
don't ask, don't tell) over there Doing A Wonderful Job of Nation-Building.
(Hello, Montgomery Ward? I'd like three nice custom-built Nations,
please. Yes, deluxe, peaceful with lovely mountains. You guarantee
one-year delivery, right? Faaantastic. My VISA card number is .....)
We're still there after three years, of course, because as soon as we
leave, some of the Bosnians might get guns and start to slaughter the Serbs,
who will start to slaughter the Croats and Bosnians as soon as we leave,
using the excuse that the Croats have started to slaughter the Serbians and
even some Bosnians without guns because the Bosnians who have guns are
slaughtering Croats and Serbians.
Fine. Just fine. I think I'm starting to understand it.
Now Albania, just southwest of Serbia, I mean Yugoslavia, I mean Serbia,
has been slaughtering anybody who tried to climb their mountains for at
least the last thousand years. In the off-season they practice by
slaughtering each other. They still hate the Turks for invading them in
1388, so even though they're all Muslims because of half a millennium of
Turkish rule, they still slaughter Turks every chance they get. They will
run across the street for a chance to slaughter a Turk (and I'm told this is
more dangerous in Tirana than mountain climbing).
Some Albanians, though, live in Kosovo, which is part of Yugoslavia, I
mean Serbia. They want to live in Albania instead of Yugoslavia, because
they're not Slavs and besides, there's less sport in slaughtering Slavs when
you're part of their country. So there's a Marxist guerrilla group fighting
for independence for Kosovo so it can immediately join Albania, which got
rid of its own Marxists in 1991.
The Serbs, meanwhile, being Bad Guys, since they can't slaughter quite
as many Bosnians and Croats while the Yankees are watching, have decided to
slaughter Kosovar Albanians instead, both for the Glory of Serbian
History -- the Serbs heroically fought the Turks there in 1389; Kosovo is to
Serbs what the Alamo is to Texans, except that the Serbs lost the war and
were part of the Turkish Empire for the next 400 years -- and because
several thousand Serbs moved there in 1995 when they got tired of living in
Croatia and being slaughtered.
So now we've got the Bad Guys not letting some Marxist guerillas break
up their country, and obviously we have to do something to make everybody
sit down and talk it over in calm reasonable tones and go play golf together
and do Male Bonding and live happily ever after and make the Kosovars settle
for autonomy (which they don't want) instead of independence (which they
do), and make the Evil Serbs grant them autonomy (which the Serbs don't want
to do) instead of slaughtering them (which the Serbs do want to do). So
that's why NATO ...
NATO!? What the hell is NATO doing in this all of a sudden? Well,
don't you see, NATO has to maintain peace and civilization in Europe ...
What? I thought it was just to keep the Russians from coming down the
Champs-Elysee in their tanks ...
Please! If we accepted that, of course, NATO would have to be disbanded
now that the Red Army is selling its AK47s and fur hats on streetcorners in
Leningrad, I mean Saint Petersburg. And if we disbanded NATO, thousands of
bureaucrats in Washington and Berlin and Paris and London and Brussels would
be out of work, and they don't have any AK47s to sell on streetcorners, so
the human cost would be terrible. NATO's mission is now to promote love and
peace throughout Europe; that's why we let in Poland and the rest. It's
like a Certificate of Appreciation on the wall saying you're a Good Country
now. These new little countries were so happy to get their NATO merit
badges, isn't it wonderful?
But what about the promise to go to war if anybody attacks a member,
isn't that a pretty serious commitment? I mean, all those border disputes
between Poland and ...
Please! Nobody is about to go to war with any of our members; that's
the whole problem. But we've fixed that. As I was saying, that's why NATO
had to bomb the Serbians. To let them know that if they don't accept
our Peace and Love, we'll shove it right down their throats. And if they
don't accept our Pan-European Peace and Love, we'll keep slaughtering them
until they do.
OK, so that's why we're playing God over there where ethnic massacres
have been a family tradition for the last thousand years, and dropping a
couple of billion dollars worth of American ordnance on them...
Don't fret about all that. Remember the surplus; if we didn't spend it
blowing up Serbs, we'd just have to do something else with it. We can't
just give it back to the taxpayers, after all; they might not spend it right.
Wonderful. I think I understand now. What a relief... Just one
question: how come all the Serbians and Croats and Bosnians and Albanians in
Chicago and Detroit and Pittsburgh can live together so peacefully?
Time's up! The conference is over for now...
