Monday, March 20, 2006

Milosovic's death highlights the poverty of European soft power

Milosovic's 'career' shows why Europe can't be trusted

by StFerdIII

Milosovic’s death should remind Europe and the West of its moral and military obligation to combat fascism and evil wherever it appears and threatens our own security. There are few people more critical of Islam than myself. But the Balkan wars of the 1990s were not ‘an either or’ choice. The Muslims were never a threat to rampage into Belgrade and wipe out the city - like the Serbs did to Sarajevo, Srbrenica and countless smaller towns that contained non-Serbian populations [like Vukovar]. About 300.000 non Serbs died of various causes from the Balkan wars including death due to starvation, torture and murder. The West could have stopped the war from both sides. Western perfidy was nauseating. It was not a choice of one evil over another. The Muslims were not bent on a ‘Greater Muslim Kosovo’ nor were the Bosnians much interested in empire building. It was the Serbs and Milosovic that prattled on about race and a race based ‘Greater Serbia’. The West had a responsibility to stop evil and massacres from taking place in the Balkans and it failed utterly.

Now Milosovic has died apparently from poison cheating the long drawn out and largely incompetent trial process. Like the Hussein trial, the due process given to a fascist leader is a waste of time and money and only affords the fascist dictator a soap box to preach hate and distribute lies. Better just to shoot the man and be done with it. Not only can we not find Bin Laden but it has been over six years since the collapse of the Serbian fascist regime, and still no one seems to know where either Radovan Karadzic, or his military commander, Ratko Mladic are. It is rather incredible that these 2 war criminals are still at large living somewhere in Europe.

Yet the Milosovic trial highlights many things that are wrong with Europe. It highlights Europe’s two faced hypocrisy especially when they wail about 'unilateralism'.

The Europeans sneer that the US and President Bush in particular are cowboys using phrases like ‘dead or alive’ or other malapropisms when discussing the war on terror. Yet French leader Jacques Chirac's recently cried that France would consider a nuclear response to any country sponsoring a terror attack against it. Had Bush said anything close to that, the Europeans would be in state of frenzied anti-US bashing calling for the UN to inspect US nuclear deployments and moaning that yet another anti-nuke treaty was needed to guarantee the world’s peace from the rogue American state.

Apparently being weak and soft allows the midget nations opportunities to hold more powerful states to higher standards. Europe is weak and America far stronger, so the latter is held to a higher standard, as the former suffers from loud envy and public resentment. The powerful don't care as much to dress up their omnipotence with utopian affectations; the weaker, in lieu of military strength, have babble and fantasies. The US has spent a large amount of effort in the forging of closer ties with Japan, Australia, and India, but somehow this does not meet European requisites of ‘multi-lateralism’. In the European mind internationalism is a neologism for deference to Europe and the establishment of European political supremacy. An idea that left liberal socialists in Canada and the US fall over themselves to support.

There is also a more disturbing element at play: European perfidy and economic self interest. Europe triangulates with the non-West against the United States, both to corral American influence and to seek economic advantage by offering a more ‘sensitive and effeminate’ Western commercial alternative. That means, in the case of the Middle East, a desire to reveal European sympathy and concern to the Islamic world. So there is a blanket condemnation of much of what the United States does, without any acknowledgement that detaining killers, trying former heads of state, and hunting down populist terrorists are not easy — even for the European Union.

But this sensitive soft power comes at the price of reality. The Europeans and Canadians don’t understand that both the Iraqi and Afghani wars are part of the same larger war on terror and fascist Islamic states. For the weak nations Afghanistan is seen as a somewhat palatable war though the UN never authorized it, and Iraq an immoral war of imperialism since the UN never authorized it. The UN also never authorized the 1999 Kosovo war but yet that form of ‘unilateralism’ was okay for the Europeans. The hypocrisy is clear and nauseating.

The Janus-faced European approach to world affairs and crises is wearing thin. The double standards enacted in world affairs is just too European for most non-Europeans to stomach. Ironically in the great struggle with fascistic Islamic elements the Muslims hate the Europeans probably more than they despise the Americans. Bombings, the French riots, the murders in the Netherlands, and the world-wide Muslim outrage over the Danish cartoons show that EU appeasement has failed and that the radical Islamists view Europe as part of the West and a lackey of the US. Even Hamas which is now preparing for a military strike against Israel shows no gratitude for huge past European grants to the Palestinians demanding more money and mocking European softness even while it states boldly that it will wipe out Israel.

What the leftists and socialists want is what the flower children who moaned against standing up to the Soviet Union wanted – capitulation. Soft power is hard nonsense. Would you trust Europe to defend civilization when in the 1990s it could do nothing to stop genocide in its own backyard? When war criminals are captured do you really want the Europeans to handle the trial? Should Hussein be transferred to Milosevic's now empty cell? Have the European police done so much better in hunting down a Mladic or Karadzic than US soldiers have in their more difficult hunt for Bin Laden? And will the United Nations, the EU3, the Russians, and the Chinese, in multilateral fashion, really stop the Iranian nuclear program — or simply stall meaningful action while they make money and pass more anti-American pronouncements? Leaving the world in the hands of the Euro-fantasists is to hand over our civilization to a 9th century pagan cult. Milosovic – his career, his fascism, his trial and his death – only serve to reinforce that point.