 Listen
closely
 E'VE
got troops (i.e., young Americans who have
volunteered to risk their lives defending
American freedom and independence, in
exchange for the chance to learn
electronic repair and to drive tanks) in
Bosnia because the Bosnian Muslims were
mistakenly included in Yugoslavia by the
victorious allieswhen they broke up
Austria-Hungary in 1918. Or maybe the
Austro-Hungariansmade the mistake when
they took Bosnia and Herzegovina from the
Ottoman Turkish Empire in 1906 and gave it
a hyphenated name because the Austrians
spoke German and like to shove words
together, like Austro-Hungarian. Anyway,
Woodrow Wilson and the boys shoved the
"people" together, and that was
"definitely" a mistake.
Herzegovina was
inhabited by Croats, who are basically
Serbs who are Catholics instead of
Orthodox and whowrite their dialect of
Serbian using Latin letters instead of
Cyrillic. This looks less funny to us, so
they must be the good guys and the
Serbians are bad. (Maybe it's that the
Serbians write their dialect of "Croatian"
in those weird Russian letters, which is
even more perverse; they're definitely the
Bad Guys. So we bravely side
with the Bosnians and the Croats against
Serbia, until the Croats cheat by
massacring Bosnians. That's why we had to
send in troops, right, because everybody
was massacring Bosnians? And the Bosnians
couldn't fight back because the UN
wouldn't let anybody sell them guns, on
the,grounds that if nobody had guns nobody
could shoot anybody there. Somehow the UN
forgot that the Serbians and the Croats
"already" had lots of guns; only the
Bosnians really needed them. OK, so now
three years or so after our strictly
limited one-year peacekeeping mission to
save the noble Bosnians (who only go out
and slaughter Serbsand Croats when they
manage to get guns) from the Evil Serbs
(who already have lots of guns and so
slaughter Croats and Bosnians all the
time) and the Semi-Evil Croats (who
slaughter Serbs whenever they can but
would rather slaughter Bosnians because
they don't have so many guns) -- after all
this time, we still have Our Brave Boys
(and Girls, and, er.. don't ask, don't
tell) over there Doing A Wonderful Job of
Nation-Building. (Hello,Montgomery Ward?
I'd like three nice custom-built Nations,
please. Yes, deluxe,peaceful with lovely
mountains. You guarantee one-year
delivery, right?) Faaantastic. My VISA
card number is .... We're still there
after three years, of course, because as
soon as we leave, some of the Bosnians
might get guns and start to slaughter the
Serbs, who will start to slaughter the
Croats and Bosnians as soon as we leave,
using the excuse that the Croats have
started to slaughter the Serbians and even
some Bosnians without guns because the
Bosnians who have guns are slaughtering
Croats and Serbians. Fine. Just fine. I
think I'm starting to understand it. Now
Albania,just south west of Serbia, I mean
Yugoslavia, I mean Serbia, has been
slaughtering anybody who tried to climb
their mountains for at least the last
thousand years. In the off season they
practice by slaughtering each other. They
still hate the Turks for invading them in
1388, so even though they're all Muslims
because of half a millennium of Turkish
rule, they still slaughter Turks every
chance they get. They will run across the
street for a chance to slaughter a Turk
(and I'm told crossing streets is more
dangerous in Tirana than mountain
climbing) Some Albanians,
though, live in Kosovo, which is part of
Yugoslavia, I mean Serbia. They want to
live in Albania instead of Yugoslavia,
because they're not Slavs and besides
there's less sport in slaughtering Slavs
when you're part of their
country So there's a Marxist
guerrilla group fighting for independence
for Kosovo so it can immediately join
Albania, which got rid of its own Marxists
in 1991. The Serbs, meanwhile, being Bad
Guys, since they can't slaughter quite as
many Bosnians and Croats while the Yankees
are watching, have decided to slaughter
Kosovar Albanians instead, both for the
Glory of Serbian History- the Serbs
heroically fought the Turks there in 1389;
Kosovo is to Serbs what the Alamo is to
Texans, except that the Serbs lost the war
and were part of the Turkish Empire for
the next 400 years-and because several
thousand Serbs moved there in 1995 when
they got tired of living in Croatia and
being slaughtered. So now we've got the
Bad Guys not letting some Marxist
guerrillas break up their country, and
obviously we have to do something to make
everybody sit down and talk it over in
calm reasonable tones and go play golf
together and do Male Bonding and live
happily ever after and make the Kosovars
settle for autonomy (which they don't
want)instead of independence (which they
do), and make the Evil Serbs grant them
autonomy (which the Serbs don't want to
do) instead of slaughtering them (which
the Serbs do want to do). So that's why
Nato ... Nato!? What the hell is Nato
doing in this all of a sudden Well, don't you see,
Nato has to maintain peace and
civilization in Europe What? I thought it
was just to keep the Russians from coming
down the Champs-Elysee in their tanks. . .
. Please! If we accepted that, of course,
Nato would have to be disbanded now that
the Red Army is selling its AK47s and fur
hats on street corners in Leningrad, I
mean Saint Petersburg. And if we disbanded
Nato, thousands of bureaucrats in
Washington and Berlin and Paris and London
and Brussels would be out of work, and
they don't have any AK47s to sell on
street corners so the human cost would be
terrible Nato's mission is
now to promote love and peace throughout
Europe; that's why we let in Poland and
the rest. It's like a Certificate of
Appreciation on the wall saying you're a
Good Country now. These new little
countries were so happy to get their Nato
merit badges, isn't it wonderful? But what
about the promise to go to war if anybody
attacks a member, isn't that a pretty
serious commitment? I mean, all those
border disputes between Poland and ...
Please! Nobody is about to go to war with
any of our members; that's the whole
problem. But we've fixed that. As I was saying,
that's why Nato had to bomb the Serbians.
To let them know that if they don't accept
our Peace and Love, we'll shove it right
down theirthroats.... Anyway, if they
don't accept our Pan-European Peace and
Love, we'll keep slaughtering them until
they do. OK, so that's why we're playing
God over there where ethnic massacres have
been a family tradition for the last
thousand years, and dropping a couple of
billion dollars worth of American ordnance
on them... Don't fret about all that.
Remember the surplus; if we didn't spend
it blowing up Serbs, we'd just have to do
something else with it. We can't just give
it back to the taxpayers; after all, they
might not spend it right. Time's up! The
briefing is over for now.
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