Slick Willie Again?

I was listening to CNN give a Media Year In Review.  First they started with the bloopers and Brian Williams.  There were so many mistakes that finally the moderator asked for the highlights.  Top of the list, greatest journalistic accomplishment of 2015 (are you ready for this?) was the picture of the dead boy on the beach of Greece.  All the panelists agreed this had been the epitome of media accomplishment of the year.  Why, they spurred the world into taking Syrian refugees by this picture!  I was stunned.  So they look for a heartrending photo of great tragedy? My mind went back to Somalia.  Remember back in the 90’s when they published that picture of the starving child.  And suddenly all of America was saying we had to do something, so Clinton sent in the Marines.  But then, in classic Democrat form, we started a war not intending to, and had no exit strategy.  Black Hawk down and 18 lives lost and suddenly we were fleeing as fast as we had charged in a month earlier.  But to make amends with our sense of do-goodism we took in 100,000 Somalis who are now living in Minnesota and causing crime 15 times as often as the general population.  And are the chief source of home-grown terrorists in USA.  Great adventure, that Somalia was!  Way to go, Media!

            And my thoughts went back to Bosnia and Kosovo.  The great unlearned lesson of the Trianon Treaty that ended WW I in the Austrian empire is that when people live side by side for centuries and hate each other, it takes a strongman in the neighborhood to make them behave.  If you demolish the strongman’s empire, the way we split Austria, the pieces of land are often left with a self-governing majority who genocides the minorities they always hated.  We saw this in the Balkans and we see it today in Syria-Iraq where Sunnis are determined to exterminate Christians, Jews, Druse, Alawhites, Shiites and Yazidis. 

Kosovo was the original homeland of the Serbs, a Slavic group that had split into Catholic Croats and Orthodox Serbs.  But the pre-Austrian strongman and utterly cruel Ottoman Empire had forced Serbs into a small minority in Kosovo.  Now, with self-government, the Muslim Bosnians saw their chance to totally take over and began forcing Serbs out of their beloved homeland.  Neighboring Serbia struck back hard and sent troops into Kosovo and massacred Bosnians in retaliation.  It was then that the clueless Slick Willie decided to enter the fray.  If he had known what he was doing, he would have sent troops in as a peacekeeping force (temporary strongman) and then substituted with a UN force.  But, like Barack, he was politically allergic to ground troops. Bomb them into the stone age, as LBJ, the tactical genius used to say.  And so, at a huge dollar cost, USA bombed away and certainly managed to bully Serbia into submission, but at a cost of crippling both countries and setting them back 50 years.  And some wonder why we are called Ugly Americans?

            Vietnam, Kosovo, Somalia and now Syria-Iraq should be proof that you have to know what you are doing when you go to war.  War is a last resort, when all else fails, and your enemy won’t reason or compromise and makes war on you. Then you don’t hold back.  Use all means to win. It’s them or us.  Then, once the war objectives are won, you have to win the peace, replacing the old enemy with some settlement that does you no threat.  Failure to recognize this last part is what caused Obama to allow ISIS to rise.  May I point out that all the above-named mismanaged wars were all Democrat failures? That Slick Willie is now helping his wife and a lot of people will vote for her because they see him as the power behind her throne? Do we want more Kosovos and Somalias, more Ben Ghazis and Russian resets?

            If the media would point this out, maybe that would be the accomplishment of the year.