What about Bosnia? There was a city they mentioned often when reports began about the civil war that was going on in Bosnia: Sarajevo. Having been a history teacher, a name like Sarajevo brought to memory the story of a ”Serbian patriot" killing Archduke Ferdinand of the Empire of Austria-Hungary and committed what has long been considered the single incident that started World War I.
Thinking back on it, why should such an assassination have been so important as to cause the death of probably 20 million people? Why should it have been even the cause of a war in Europe? We are told that the Austrian Empire declared war on Serbia (?) [How do you declare war on part of your own country?] And the Russians declared war on the Austrians, because the Serbs are their slavic brothers. And the Germans declared war on the Russians, because the Austrians are their kith and kin. And on and on! The French wanted a chance to get back at the Germans because of their inglorious defeat by von Bismarck’s army in 1870. And the English were historically the swing nation in the balance of power in wars in Europe. What earthly interest could China and Japan have had in a war in Europe? Why should the United States ever have become involved? A revolutionary within an Empire killed the Archduke. So what? Let the Empire take care of its internal problems and be done with it. If such a thing was so important, why was there not a world war following the assassination of Czar Alexander by a nihilist? There wasn’t even a minor war! The Czar’s successor just cracked down on the peasants and things went back to the way they were before Alexander issued his version of the Emancipation Proclamation.. Why was Archduke Ferdinand so much more important? The answer is there must have been someone who stood to make more of a gain from having a war over the assassination.
Bring the timeline up to World War II. The Empire of Austria-Hungary was broken up after World War I, and Yugoslavia was a country in itself, instead of a portion of the old Empire. Hitler had blown away Poland, literally and figuratively, in 28 days. He also overran Denmark and Norway in a matter of days. France, of course, had made itself impenetrable by building the Maginot Line...only Hitler sent his Panzers through the Lowlands and put France out of the war in 6 weeks.
Hold it! There are a couple of large questions about Germany...Germany was not allowed to build anything that even faintly resembled military equipment by the terms of the Treaty of Versailles. And Germany was required to pay heavy reparations - in gold - to France and England. Germany was drained of its wealth, and not allowed to build any weapons of war, yet Hitler took over in 1933 and by 1939 had built and trained the most formidable army in the history of Europe! Think of this: The war in Europe started September 1, 1939, and by June, 1940, his armies had overrun Poland, Denmark, Norway, the Netherlands, Belgium, France, and had driven English forces off the continent! He had made Italy an ally, he simply occupied Austria, and he took Czechoslovakia prior to September 1. Except for the Balkans, he controlled all of Europe! Where did he get the money to build such an army? How did he build it without being allowed to build such things? And all that in less than 6 years? Think about that.
A man like Hitler is not happy if there is someone around who might pose a threat to him. He had made a non-aggression pact with Stalin to keep the Soviet Union out of the early phases. But the Balkans might provide an avenue of counterattack later. So he sent troops in to occupy Yugoslavia, Bulgaria, Hungary, and Romania. And he also took Greece and Albania. That is to say, he put troops in those countries. The terrain there is not suitable for tanks, and it is very suitable for guerrilla warfare. For our purposes, look at those in Yugoslavia. A man named Michailovich led what might be termed pro-western partisan forces, and a man named Tito led communist forces. Their campaigns were concentrated on doing the most harm to the Nazis they could, and that was considerable. The Nazis had upwards of 26 divisions in Yugoslavia - if you count a division as about 20,000 men, that was a sizeable occupation force. And they never had any peace. The people in Yugoslavia were occupied by the Nazis, but hardly vanquished.
It is interesting to note that after the war ended, Tito managed to round up Michailovich and most of his top people and have them executed. That’s how the Communists gained control of Yugoslavia. Another interesting point was that after a couple of years taking orders from Moscow, Tito tired of being their lackey, and simply separated from the Eastern Bloc. He was still a communist, but outside that which Churchill had named the Iron Curtain.
The Czechs and the Hungarians had their rebellions against Communist rule, and had been ruthlessly put down. Why do you suppose Moscow never tried to forcefully bring Yugoslavia back under the Curtain? Well, you might make the case that the Serbs were their ethnic brethren. If you were realistic about it, you would know that it would be far too embarrassing for the Soviets to try to conquer Yugoslavia and get the same results Hitler got. And that’s what would have happened, for the very same reasons. Air power and armor is not all that formidable in heavily mountainous terrain. And anti-guerrilla warfare can be very expensive in almost every way. It has been said that it takes 10 men to hunt down 1 guerilla, and each of those 10 requires the support of as many as 7 men. Yugoslavia was simply not worth the cost.
You should be aware that the area known as Yugoslavia is not one of the very wealthy spots on the face of the earth. At this point, it should also be noted that you should use a little common sense in thinking about that area, and avoid paying much attention to the propaganda you might hear about it. It is not dirt poor economically, but neither is it very wealthy, nor do they make the best products in their factories. (Did ever hear the stories about the Yugo?) Let’s don’t knock their ability to take care of themselves, even without the heavy subsides they got from the West. It was to our advantage to see to it they succeeded financially, because it was good anti-Soviet propaganda for us.
On the timeline, somewhere around the time of the Desert Storm we started hearing about the ethnic separation of Yugoslavia into three new countries. The Croats wanted to have their own Croatia, the Serbs wanted their own Serbia, and the Moslems had most of their people in Bosnia. The Serbs wanted more of Bosnia than they were entitled to so they started using their military muscle to take what they wanted. Sarajevo was one of those cities they wanted. Remember that Sarajevo had been the site of some Olympic games just a few years ago. It was a pretty city, and fairly prosperous.
The Serbs used more than a million rounds of artillery to destroy it!
Hey!. Wait a minute! Why didn’t anyone resist the Serbs? Oh, didn’t you know? An arms embargo had been placed on that civil war so that only the Serbs had the necessary armaments to make war! Where did that embargo come from? Why was it honored by the United States? The ones who suffered the most were the Moslems.
Curiously silent in most of this whole scenario were the Croats. If one could believe reports, the Croats more or less watched as bystanders. The aggressors were the Serbs, and the ones suffering their aggression were the Moslems. Moslems? What Moslems? Moslems are Arabic people, aren’t they?
Now it gets deep. A curious thing becomes noticeable. Judaism had its beginnings in the Middle East. Christianity had its beginnings in the same Middle East. And Islam also had its beginnings in the same Middle East, all literally within a few hundred miles of each other. When Islam reached a point in development, Moslems decided it should become the religion of all the world, and there was a huge war of conquest in which the Moslems gained control of all North Africa, the Middle East, most of Asia Minor (India, Pakistan, Burma, etc.), the Philippines, and parts of what is now Indonesia, and the Moslems even moved into Europe from the Iberian Peninsula (Spain, Portugal), into what is now France, and across the Dardenelles into the Balkan Peninsula all the way up to Yugoslavia. At its height, the Moslem Empire was a vast territory! Christians fought a series of holy wars called the Crusades in the 12th and 13th centuries to regain control of those territories. Moslem control eventually receded from Europe, and most of the Asian Subcontinent. But the influence did not. There are still Moslems in all those areas. The Moslems in Bosnia are some of those who have been there for centuries. And there have been periodic fights between the Moslems and the Serbs and/or Croats. It has been that way for nearly 1000 years.
The civil war boiled over about the time Desert Storm was going on. Why should it have happened at that particular time? How about this; where did the Serbs get all their military hardware? Who paid for that million rounds of artillery they used to destroy Sarajevo? Why did the arms embargo only disarm one side? When the obvious savagery of the Serbs was so heavily publicized in the West, why were the Europeans and the United States so adamant about maintaining the arms embargo? It was, after all, a civil war. Why not let everyone be armed and fight it out to their own satisfaction? It was again a way of creating a crisis which we were to perceive as in need of our immediate military attention. Remember Korea? Remember Vietnam? Remember the way Kuwait was presented? Only this time we weren’t buying the deal.
Let’s pull that timeline back a few years and consider some ideas.
When World War II ended, the United States had become the preeminent military and economic power in the world. We had thoroughly bashed the Axis Powers, and all the evil they had stood for. The Soviet Union had been our ”ally" during the war. People had about as low an opinion of the Communists as they had of the Nazis. The force of circumstance had caused us to become allies. When the war ended, we discovered they had been spying on us throughout the war! And, in many cases, they had used Americans to do their spying! Worse yet, we found that England and France had also been spying on us throughout the war! It was the air of distrust after that which aided in the organization of the Central Intelligence Agency. For the first time in our history, we felt the need to have an international espionage agency for our own protection. Well...that was the story we were told.
It became immediately evident when the War ended that the Communists were going to try their hand at world conquest. Only instead of having a war of conquest, they planned to use people within other countries to generate revolutions everywhere, and stand ready to step in and side with the Communist governments that would be formed. The Soviets had troops already there in most of Eastern Europe, so they left them there, and took control of the governments.
The conference at Yalta had been a disaster for our side. It was agreed there that the Soviets would declare war on Japan 90 days after the end of hostilities in Europe...which just happened to be 2 days after we dropped the first A-bomb on Hiroshima. The Japanese had gained control of Korea and the Kurile Islands after the Russo-Japanese War of 1904, and the Russians wanted them back as a condition of their entering the war against Japan.
[Note: You should always be aware that when the Soviets would have a conference with the West, they always established a set of preconditions: before they would meet, they would demand that certain things be agreed to in advance! Usually, those things were the things they hoped to accomplish in the meeting. Anything they would gain in the meeting would be “gravy”. That was a Soviet technique! You could almost tell which unions in this country were controlled by the communists by listening to the pre-conditions set out by the unions in bargaining talks.]
It was arranged that the Communists would have the northern part of Korea only, from the 38th Parallel north. And they could have the islands. So it was that the Russians declared war on Japan right on schedule. A lot of people thought they did so just to get a slice of the pie in the Orient. They already had their slice of the pie!
As soon as the war ended, the revolution in China was resumed. Mao Tse Tung had already been trying to overthrow the Nationalist Chinese government as far back as 1927. Chiang Kai Shek was the leader of Nationalist China. The irony of that situation was Mao had learned about Marxism while he was a trench digger in France during World War I. He was not formally trained. Chiang Kai Shek had been trained in Marxist-Leninism in Moscow (!) and didn’t like it. So Mao had a revolution going on which was interrupted by the Japanese invasion of China. They called a truce while they both fought against the Japanese. Then Mao cranked it back up as soon as possible. By 1949, with the assistance of some members of our government, Nationalist China fell, and the Maoists took over. That’s when the Republic of China moved to Taiwan.
The Communists had their ”people’s revolutions" going on everywhere in the countries which were parts of the old colonial empires of Europe. One of the key places was in what had been French Indo-China. Laos, Cambodia, and Vietnam were what was called French Indo-China. The French fought there until 1954 when they cleared out. The treaty ending that revolution was signed in 1954 in Paris, and once again, a country was divided between the communists and the West. Vietnam was divided by the 17th Parallel into Communist North Vietnam and pro-Western South Vietnam. Laos and Cambodia were returned to the princely leaders (who were pro-Communist) and the agreement was that in 10 years, the people in Vietnam would have a free vote to decide which side they wanted to be on. As you might expect, almost immediately communist guerrillas started working on South Vietnam The Viet Cong were supposed to be the ”people’s army" fighting for independence in South Vietnam.
Do not be dismayed! There is a connection between all these items and Bosnia.
There have been all sorts of crises created to enable our people to be stampeded into action before they could think about what was happening. That’s a pretty neat trick. And it requires the full attention of a dedicated media. It always has to be subtly done, yet have an urgency to cause action to be taken. Two crises have been set up for you in Korea and Vietnam. There were so many others we will skip up to Kuwait. Well, maybe a little before Kuwait.
The hostage situation we went through with Iran had made us mortal enemies. Iran and Iraq were also at odds with each other. They had a war which lasted about 8 years. They fought and fought, and the tide swayed back and forth, but in the end neither side had won a victory, and both sides claimed one. We had aided Iraq to set up a radar defense, and they had both U.S. and Russian weaponry in their arsenal. Saddam Hussein started making noises about wanting to take Kuwait back. It had been a part of their natural rule until the British had arbitrarily divided those countries in the Middle East. Our state department more or less said we weren’t that interested, and the Iraqis took Kuwait.
Now let’s flip back to Korea for a minute. In the spring of 1950, Dean Acheson, who was our Secretary of State under Truman, made a speech in which he said South Korea was not within our perimeter of defense in Asia. Within weeks, North Korea invaded South Korea, and Truman put our troops in action in less than 2 days, without asking Congress to even lick the stamp on some of his letters. There was no declaration of war; the president is only supposed to be commander in chief in time of war; yet there we were in a full scale war, and Truman was running the show!
They finally decided to call it a U.N. ”police action". It was the first ”experiment" in limited warfare. By then, they could claim it was to curb Soviet expansionism. But there was really nothing limited about it...except our people were not supposed to win a victory! We had 54,000+ men killed in action, and another 100,000+ wounded. And after it was ended, there was still the division at the 38th Parallel. All of those men died for nothing! But we had to protect South Korea!
Korea went on for four years, and it, too, ended in 1954, about the same time the French were getting out of Southeast Asia. The intrusions of the V.C. got progressively worse, and the hue and cry began again. Why don’t we do something to defend those poor defenseless Vietnamese? This time Eisenhower said it: It would be foolhardy for any nation to get involved in a land war on the mainland of Asia. But the media was building a crescendo, and Eisenhower finally sent a group of 3-5,000 men to Vietnam to act as ”military advisers". They were to instruct the Vietnamese in methods of warfare, but they were not allowed to have loaded weapons, nor were they allowed to defend themselves if attacked by the VC.
When Kennedy was elected, the force in Vietnam went up to 15,000. And our guys were allowed to “lock and load”! Then when Johnson was president, he lied to the public about an attack by North Vietnamese gunboats on one of our destroyers, and we became fully involved. Only, again, there was no declaration of war. There was not even a “U.N. police action”. And it was another example of “limited war” in which Robert McNamara tried to direct the war from Washington. There was no plan of action. We reacted instead of initiating the action. Our men had to ask permission to fire on the enemy. (Can you believe that?) And on and on. That went on for an eternity until Nixon finally just withdrew our forces. Ted Kennedy was only too glad to proclaim it the first loss we ever suffered in a war...only it was not a war. Still, we had more than 58,000 men and women killed in action, and another 100,000 + wounded in action - and who knows how many became involved with drugs in Vietnam. Indeed, who knows how many were affected by agent orange?
Then there was the group of Marines in Beirut, on station to help maintain the peace - with weapons they weren’t allowed to load. More than 200 were killed by a suicide bomber...for nothing!
Skip over all the small stuff at Grenada and Panama and zoom on the timeline back to Kuwait. Once again, the State Department had invited an occupation by careless remarks. And Bush assembled the largest allied force since World War II to establish peace in the “New World Order”.The public didn’t know it, but our people had established the air defense system in Iraq to help them against Iran. There were 2 key radar stations in that system, and we knocked them out in the first aerial action. Six weeks of round the clock bombing put the Iraqis out of it before the ground action ever started. Then our ground forces simply brushed the remnants of the Iraqi army off the battlefield, and it was over in less than a week.
The media had braced us for the loss of many lives, but any trained military could see what was going to happen. Without air cover, no ground forces can expect to be very effective. The only planes in the air were ours. The Iraqis didn’t stand a chance. I was taken in by the propaganda. It was like Germany occupying the Sudetenland. Only that was sucker bait. Many thought the whole thing was to preserve our access to the oil of the Middle East. Think about this. We shipped large numbers of tanks to that area and they are still there! The best tanks in the world are on station in Saudi Arabia!
Meanwhile, Russian tanks and trucks by the trainload have been shipped to the United States! ”To be painted!" Can you believe that?
Still coming up the timeline, Bush had a huge force (for the job) moved into Somalia ”on a mission of mercy to take food to people who were starving there". Before those guys were withdrawn, Clinton had agreed to have them go chasing a bunch of bandits around the countryside without their protective equipment! Nearly 2 dozen of our men were captured and butchered there...for nothing!
Now we are back to speed with Bosnia. The media was howling every day about the pitiful condition of those people being butchered by the Serbs. (Is that beginning to sound familiar?) The arms embargo on the other side stayed in place. Where did the Serbs get the money for that military operation? Why was the embargo never lifted? The United Nations had troops there on the ground, and they were completely handcuffed by the rules of engagement. They were captured and made fun of. Some were even killed. The Serbs attacked them whenever they chose, simply because they knew nothing would be done to them.
The scenario was scripted to get our people involved in another no-win limited war, only we didn’t take the bait. But the script is still there. When other nations would no longer allow their troops to be put in the embarrassing position they had been in, a deal was crafted to put our troops there with the idea we wouldn’t become involved in combat, only we would be required to rebuild the war damage they inflicted on themselves! There was nothing much said about it, but Clinton has committed us to put up $7-billion to rebuild the war damage. That was hidden in an extra appropriation for the Defense Budget. We have since seen another $12-billion added to the Defense Budget.
It is my contention that the whole thing has been crafted from the beginning! It is another way to get our men killed in a place where we have no national interests. It is another way to get the American taxpayer to pay for rebuilding another country torn by a war we had no interest or part in.
[Note: Since this piece was written, walls built to protect buildings where our people live in Bosnia have been taken down! They were walls put there to absorb any blast similar to the one in Saudi Arabia that killed so many of our troops. Now they are down, and the Moslems are taunting our guys from cars passing by. What would you say the odds are that there will be a truck bomb explosion to kill a bunch of our people before December? December is when our people are supposed to pull out. Want to make book our guys don’t come out at that time?]
Can you possibly imagine who might be the beneficiary of such arrangements? You might imagine that anytime there is a war, or some kind of military action, it will cost a lot more money than has been budgeted for it. You might even imagine that the government(s) might have to borrow large sums to pay for the action. Who would you imagine the government(s) would go to for that extra money? If you guessed some bankers, you’re getting the idea!
Bankers and financiers always profit from wars, or military actions. Think back now on why it was so important to have a war after Archduke Ferdinand was killed. Think back on how Hitler was financed to build his war machine. Think back on all the conflicts we have had since World War II and try to figure out who had the most to gain from those conflicts.
Now, you need to learn something about other things that happened as long ago as our own Revolutionary War. But that will be another story.