today's www.washingtonpost.com

[Ivo Skoric]

Since Racan can find 60 in Croatia, I am sure Zivkovic can find 1000
people in Serbia happy to kill Muslims. And I have no doubts they
would be more efficient than Americans against the guerilla war in
Iraq.
Still, this would be a very dangerous idea for two reasons. First,
the U.S. would mix up 'angry men' from two so far separated conflict
areas, creating the danger of those two conflict situations to merge
in one big mess.
Second, there is no guarantee that those 1000 Serbs would actually be
loyal to the U.S., that bombed their country just 4 years ago. Why
wouldn't they just help Iraqis organize their insurgence better? The
Trojan horse metaphor comes up vividly when thinking of such a
scenario.

ivo


On 4 Aug 2003 at 10:47, anthony margan wrote:

To all: this is incredulous (mypersoanl letter to the editor is at
the very bottom):
washingtonpost.com
Europe's Last Hard Cases
By Jackson Diehl

Monday, August 4, 2003; Page A15
Almost lost among the foreign favor-seekers who crowded Washington
last month was the leader of a nation the United States went to war
against just four years ago. For most of the 1990s U.S. policymakers
were preoccupied with containing Serbia -- the main component of a
country then called Yugoslavia and recently renamed Serbia and
Montenegro. Now its new prime minister, Zoran Zivkovic, is but one of
the heads of government seeking to forge a "strategic alliance" with
the Bush administration -- and as a teaser, he's offering to send the
army crushed by U.S. air power to support American soldiers in Iraq.
It's not an easy sell, despite the need for troops. Zivkovic is a
democrat and a reformer, but by his own account his country is still
plagued by economic dysfunction and criminal gangs, including some
linked to extreme nationalists and criminals of the last decade's
wars. One of the worst, Ratko Mladic, is believed by prosecutors at a
Balkan war crimes tribunal in the Hague still to be at large in the
country. Zivkovic's predecessor was assassinated by the gangsters,
and it's not clear that the army has reformed very much since it
fought the wars of the Balkans.
Yet here was Zivkovic, meeting with Colin Powell and Condoleezza Rice
and outlining a strategy for his country that is pinned on
integration with the central institutions of the West -- the European
Union and NATO, the alliance whose first shooting war was waged in
1999 to drive the Serbian army out of Kosovo. As a first step, Serbia
is hoping for an invitation to the Partnership for Peace, NATO's
program for friends and prospective members. "Serbia is looking for
an ally in the United States, and in return Serbia can offer to be a
reliable partner in the Balkans," the prime minister said at a
meeting at The Post. To prove he means it, he told Rice that Serbia
would contribute 1,000 troops to any U.S. mission -- including
Afghanistan or Iraq.
It would be easy enough to dismiss the proposed partnership -- yet
Zivkovic represents not just his historically troublesome corner of
Europe but a much larger piece of unfinished business for the West.
Though NATO and the EU have undertaken big expansions since the fall
of the Berlin Wall, they have yet to cope with a dozen countries and
some 170 million people who consider themselves European. They range
from bits and pieces of the former Yugoslavia and the former hermit
state Albania in the Balkans, to former Soviet possessions such as
Armenia and Georgia in the Caucasus, to the newly independent states
that lie between Central Europe and Russia -- from giant Ukraine and
impoverished Moldova to Belarus, the continent's last dictatorship.
The easy part of reconstructing Europe after the Cold War was
expanding the West to include countries such as the Czech Republic
and Poland, which had Western traditions and a history of democracy.
States such as Romania and Bulgaria have since been nursed toward
free-market capitalism and democracy by the promise of membership in
the transatlantic alliance. But what to do with Ukraine, a country
the size of France with a population of 50 million, which teeters
between democracy and autocracy, as well as between alignment with
Moscow and with Washington? Or Turkey, a country that forms Europe's
border with the Arab Middle East and belongs to NATO but not the EU?
Or, indeed, Serbia, the most frequent starting point for European
wars in the past 100 years?
"Where this part of Europe finds itself five years from now is where
we will be for the next 50 years," predicts Bruce Jackson, a well-
connected former Pentagon official and advocate of NATO expansion,
who has made it his mission to call attention to Europe's last hard
cases. The alternatives are stark in their range -- countries such as
Serbia and Ukraine could be coaxed into becoming democracies, U.S.
military allies and part of a federal Europe; they could fall under
the suzerainty of a resurgent Russian empire; they could drift along
as unstable buffer states, home to drug and arms traffickers,
terrorist groups and presidents-for-life.
Jackson, who recently founded the Project on Transitional
Democracies, has been trying to persuade policymakers in Washington
and Brussels to aim for the first alternative, even if it means
tutoring some unsavory characters -- or in Europe's case, subsidizing
more poor farmers. "These are the last victims of communism, fascism
and nationalism," Jackson says. "They imagine themselves part of
Europe, and allies of the United States. Not all of them will
necessarily make it -- but we will be judged by how many of them we
can save."
His strategy meets resistance in Paris and parts of Brussels, which
would prefer to keep Turkey out of the EU and exclude Ukraine and the
Caucasus from the West altogether. But it seems to be gaining
traction in the Bush administration, which is pushing hard for
Turkey's EU membership and accepted Ukraine's offer of troops for
Iraq despite the problematic record of President Leonid Kuchma.
Zivkovic, too, got a warm reception from Rice and Powell. As for his
troop offer -- officials say they are thinking about it.
                 © 2003 The Washington Post Company
Dear Editor,

The Bush Administration must be absolutely desperate for troops for
Iraq if, as Jackson Diehl notes,the US State Dept is "thinking
about" an offer of troops from Serbia ("Europe's Last Hard Cases," op-
ed, August 4).Has the Bush Administration stooped so low, as to
now consider this offer from a government that, according to the UN
and otherorganizationsthat monitor Serbia,still offers safe harbor
tothe world's two top war criminals -General Ratko Mladic and
Radovan Karadzic, both wanted for, among other things,
executing8,000 unarmed men and boys eight years ago at Srebrenica,
Bosnia?

Mr. Diehl also fails to mention that it was only last November and
December when The Postheadlined stories that illustrated, in detail,
how Serbian companies were actively aiding and abetting Saddam
Hussein's regime, and how Serbian companies and indivudualspropped
up hismilitary. Even though those ties were severed with the fall
of Saddam, there's no evidence to suggest that
theindividualsresponsible for propping up Saddam havebeen removed
from power in the Serbianmilitary, secret services or society. So,
The Bush Adminsitration isnow "thinking about"stationing Serbian
troops in Iraq?Is it fair to ask ifGeneral Mladic, or if one of
his close associates,willbe commanding this detachment?



Help STOP SPAM with the new MSN 8  and get 2 months FREE* Ivo Skoric
1773 Lexington Ave
New York NY 10029
212.369.9197
ivo at balkansnet.org
http://balkansnet.org