BLOG: But What About Serbia? (registan.net)

Posted: 12 Aug 2008 12:52 AM CDT

Thomas Barnett has quite a history to overcome when analyzing political events. In his books, which advocate unending war against the poor, he has written off the non-military angles of the wars the U.S. fights as “they just need more diplomacy,” while claiming that Iraq would have been a raging success if President Bush had just been more charming so we could have had 40,000 troops from Russia, China, and India… each. And that simply having more international, non-Muslim troops would have somehow avoided the insurgency (Afghanistan rarely if ever makes it into his lengthier expositions, as he relies on brief quips on his blog to substitute for serious thinking about why an actually international occupational war of connection, or whatever it is he calls those things, is currently failing). Barnett has seriously advocated the forcible annexation of post-Castro Cuba as well, and sees little moral issue with states aggressively expanding their territory.

But Barnett’s sins go much deeper. In Blueprint for Action, which contains a rather disquieting section in which he fantasizes about which countries to invade and occupy first, he highlights the Balkans as the model by which the International community should intervene in civil wars and “fix” countries. He envisions the UNSC acting as a kind of grand jury, the U.S. as executioner, and a magical international force composed mostly of Europeans then moves in for the really difficult nation-building and counterinsurgency work that inevitably follows. The former leaders of said “fixed” country then face war criminal charges at the Hague.

Of course this didn’t really work out too well in Serbia… or anywhere else, for that matter. The actual war criminals roamed free for years, some as much as a decade or more, before being caught. And the politics of the Hague make it unlikely any will ever face actual justice for their crimes. While it is nice to see Sarajevo is no longer the hellhole it was in 1993, the Balkans could hardly be called “settled.” Nearly a decade after the NATO-led war there, and even after its halfway-recognized independence, Kosovo still has tens of thousands of foreign troops stationed there to enforce a peace and prevent Serbia from regaining its lost territory. Near the border areas, U.S. government employees are still required to travel in armored convoys thanks to a constant stream of violent activities. It is still not a region that can be called a success, just a mild failure with the potential to erupt into enormous bloodshed at a moment’s notice (such as the violent riots in Belgrade after Kosovo declared its independence).

Which brings us to Barnett’s take on Georgia. While he does us the courtesy of NOT quoting “Back in the U.S.S.R.” like every other blogger whose use of “Georgia on My Mind” and variations result in me instantly refusing to read another damned word they write, Barnett can’t really bring himself to mention his previous advocacy of either nationalist expansionism or armed intervention in civil wars.

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