Condi for VP? Puhhhleeeeeeze!

She can play the piano and she's a good cook.

But maybe her grasp of history is a bit ....shallow. And she certainly didn't lend any decent counsel to GWB when he lurched into "recognizing" Kosovo, which may turn out to be his Harriet Miers moment in foreign affairs, with the difference being that people with common sense stopped Harriet Miers' nomination cold.

For Serbs, the play began in Kosovo in the year 1389 on Kosovo Polje, the Field of Blackbirds. There a Serbian army fought and was defeated by an army of invading Turks. The Serbian national ethos that grew from that defeat was one of betrayal, loss, survival, and revenge.

Fast forward a few hundred years, and you get the situation which Bubba and his Mad Hatter, Madeline, "fixed."

As Albanians in Kosovo became a majority, they began harassing the Serbs with the goal of driving them out. Slobodan Milosevic’s rise to power began when he promised the Serbs of Kosovo that, under his rule, no one would be allowed to beat them.

He kept his word. Milosevic turned the tables on Kosovo’s Albanians. Serbian state security forces protected the Serbs by beating up the Albanians. The Albanians responded by escalating to guerrilla warfare. No longer did they beat Serbs up. They killed them, took over their houses, burned their churches, and plundered their monasteries.

Guerrilla warfare is hard on civilians, and in Kosovo both Serbs and Albanians suffered. But the Albanians had the better propaganda machine. Soon all the world’s professional wailers were weeping over the innocent Albanians of Kosovo, who were being massacred by Milosevic’s butchers. What the Albanians were doing to Kosovo’s Serbs somehow got overlooked.

Enter Bubba & Co.:

America, Serbia’s ally in both world wars, decided to intervene in support of the Albanians. The Clinton administration, led by its egregious secretary of state, Madeleine Albright, wanted a splendid little war. In 1999, the U.S. and NATO presented Belgrade with an ultimatum that, like its Austrian counterpart of 1914, was written to be unacceptable. (Mrs. Albright smirked as she said, “We set the bar a little too high for them.”) The result, again, was war.

Washington and NATO justified their massive air attack on a state that posed no threat to either by claiming the Serbs were ethnically cleansing Kosovo of its Albanian population. As German courts have since established, there was no such ethnic cleansing until after NATO’s bombing campaign started. At that point, the Serbs did begin pushing the Albanians out. Military analysis suggests their purpose was to overload NATO’s logistics with the care of hundreds of thousands of refugees, thereby making a NATO ground invasion difficult, if not impossible. That wasn’t very nice, but when you are one small country facing all of NATO, you do what you can.

NATO’s bombing campaign, which Mrs. Albright expected would bring the Serbs to their knees in 72 hours, failed, as bombing campaigns against stationary ground forces have always failed. In the 78 days that NATO bombed, it destroyed all of 13 Serbian tanks. When it became evident about halfway through that bombing the Serbian army in Kosovo wasn’t working, NATO shifted to civilian targets in Serbia proper. This terror-bombing campaign, which destroyed among other things the factory that made the little Yugo car and killed about 5,000 Serbian civilians, also failed.

After Milosevic was betrayed by Yeltsin, Serbia caved, allowing GWB to make a move which was at the very least wrong. We won't find out HOW wrong until he's safely back in Texas.

There the situation stood, frozen until February 2008, when the Kosovo Albanians declared their independence and the U.S., France, and Great Britain recognized Kosovo as an independent state.

By taking control of Kosovo from Serbia, Washington and NATO committed a crime against the law of nations: nowhere does that law give anyone the authority to dismember a sovereign state. By recognizing Kosovo’s independence, those powers did something worse: they committed a blunder

How big a blunder?

Read the book The Guns of August for one possible scenario. Putin, de facto heading a country with renewed financial and military capabilities, could un-do the Yeltsin double-cross.

What will our next President do then?

HT: Dreher