The lesson that most Americans are learning now about foreign interventionism, I learned in 1999 in Kosovo. When I went there, I was full of ideas about helping people and saving the world, then realized that the reasons we went there were false, the people we aided should have been the enemy, and the whole mission was none of our business. We killed hundreds (or thousands) of people by bombing them, then got in there and watched the genocide that we were trying to prevent, except the Albanians were the ones doing the killing. People in third world countries want victory, not peace. They want to be the ones in charge, not create a democracy. That is what the US thinktanks and the ideologues on either side don't understand. They have such an ethnocentric worldview that they think that everyone's version of "freedom" is like ours. They think that everyone wants a government like ours. The truth is that many times they don't.
Kosovo.
Remember that little adventure? It was after the blowjob scandal and before the current never ending series of scandals. It taught me a lot about the concept of military intervention and its success in international affairs.
I was 19 years old when Kosovo started showing up on CNN. I had no idea where it was on a map when my unit was given an alert to the fact that we might be going there in the near future. We were pulled out of our barracks rooms one night and informed that we might be going there. I didn't think much about it because the older guys didn't seem too concerned. Afterwards we resumed drinking beer and hanging out, a pretty standard evening for infantry troops while not in the field.
I watched the news as the weeks went by and began to believe that it was our duty to go and help these people because of the genocide that was being reported in the news. My unit began its train up for deployment and the air campaign against Serbia started. In the months prior to and during the air campaign my unit was deployed to the field more and more and we were tasked with training for a ground invasion contingency. I was to hear later that ground invasion was only days away when Milosevic signed the peace agreement leading to the NATO peacekeeping mission. My unit was in the field when the ceasefire was agreed to and was therefore unprepared to leave directly for Kosovo. We instead shifted our training focus from high intensity combat operations into a more police-like peacekeeping role, with focus on search and seizure, detention, and riot control.
We were scheduled to leave in November 1999, about 6 months after the initial occupation of the region, and were nervous about what we were getting into after almost a year of constant training, most of which was geared towards high intensity combat operations. Our Company Commander had lined us up in formation a few days beforehand and told us to take a good look at each other because some of us wouldn't be coming back. Although he would be proven wrong later, this was a pretty scary concept for guys just out of high school and our young married NCOs. Our attitudes during our first days there reflected his comments and our own preconceived notion that everyone there was the enemy and trying to kill us.
We kissed goodbye to families and friends and boarded a bus headed for the airport at Rammstein air base. We arrived in Macedonia and spent the night in tents on the main base in Skopje. The next morning we loaded onto buses and moved out to Kosovo. On the way I got to see firsthand the devastating effect our Air Force had on the factories and buildings in area. It was an amazing sight. I had never seen the effects of bombings firsthand and writing about it I have clear mental images of a huge factory of some type near the Kosovo/Macedonian border. All that was left of it was a hollow facade. From that point on I had a lot more respect for the Air Force, often previously referred to in derogatory terms by us grunts.
We got into Camp Monteith after dark and had a security briefing on the current situation in the area. We were told about a guard tower on the main base which had taken fire the previous week. Someone had taken about 7 to 10 shots at a guard tower and the reaction was about 1500 rounds back into the buildings the shots were believed to have originated from. No one was injured and we never found the original shooter. It did send a message though; I do not remember hearing of a similar incident during the next 7 months which I was there.
Next we met up with the unit we would be replacing, signed for our vehicles, and headed out into our sector. I was put on air guard in a humvee, that's the guy sticking out of the top with the machine gun for you non-military folks, and we left the front gate. I think there was a curfew at this point because I don't remember there being traffic. I just remember feeling like I had a big target on my head and being paranoid about getting shot my first day there and fulfilling my commanders prophesy. We left the city surrounding the base and everything was dark except for our headlights. Most of the towns there had power only partially (mostly during the day) and there were no street lights.
We arrived at our destination and met the troops we would be replacing. It was a traffic control point a mile or two from the Serbian Border. An abandoned house had been taken over and the road out front sectioned off to provide areas to search cars entering and exiting the province. After the Platoon sergeant and the lieutenant had been briefed on the situation, the other unit loaded into trucks and left us alone to search the cars.
We were very green, paranoid, and pent up. The transition from a "fighting" force to a "peacekeeping" force is not an easy one. On our first evening we had a line several miles long in either direction. It was taking locals hours to get through as we searched every part of every car just the way we had when we practiced it in Germany. Suddenly a car broke ranks and started driving toward the checkpoint on the wrong side of the road. Our natural reaction was for 5 or 6 guys to move toward that side of the checkpoint with weapons raised toward the car and when it stopped to pull the driver out of the car and throw him on the ground with rifles in his face, and to do the same to his passenger. After we got the interpreter to come over we realized that the female passenger was in labor and that they had been sitting in our traffic jam for more than an hour. Oops. We felt like assholes but didn't really have a choice given the circumstances. The idea of a car charging the checkpoint with explosives was a not impossible reality.
About two weeks into the deployment, a farmer and his brother walked up to the checkpoint, the farmer covering one of his eyes with his hand and walking kind of dizzily. I walked up and noticed that there was blood running down the arm covering his eye. I called for a medic and an interpreter. He moved his hand away and I could see that his cheekbone was gone and his eye was sunken in. The medic went to work on him and we found out that he had been walking about a hundred yards behind our checkpoint and had accidentally kicked the trigger of a landmine. When he felt his foot hit something he looked down just in time to get hit in the face by the top part of the mine. We drove him down to the hospital and later heard that he recovered although he lost the one eye. It was a pretty startling reminder that this wasn't a place to get comfortable.
At the beginning of the deployment we listened to the Albanian interpreters who were attached to us and believed that the Serbs were the bad guys and that our mission was correct and important. As the months went by though we started to realize that the credibility of the Albanians was suspect.
We were called to a problem arising from a group of Serbs who had gone into a cemetery in an Albanian town. This town was formerly half Serb/half Albanian however after the Serbian Army withdrew as part of the ceasefire agreement, the Serbian villagers were forced to leave as well. On the Serbian Orthodox Christmas, the relatives of Serbs buried in the cemetery went to place flowers on their family graves. The Albanians in the town took to the streets and blocked their exit from the city by putting their children in the street and then began throwing stones and bricks at the cars. My opinion of the innocence of the Albanians came into question after seeing an old man get hit in the face with a brick with absolutely no provocation. From that day on I didn't believe in the mission or trust our interpreters. Afterward I noticed that all the dead bodies we picked up were Serbs, not Albanians.
I realized that the people we were helping were not interested in peace, they were interested in victory, and we have given it to them. The Albanians began using the de-militarized buffer zone between Kosovo and Serbia to launch attacks because neither the US or Serbian military units were allowed to go in there. We launched raids near the border which netted a couple prisoners, some documentation, and weapons, targeting the Albanian militants but we weren’t allowed access to the primary area they were operating from. It was frustrating.
The first of these raids we went on was very secretive in nature, our interpreters were left out of the loop and we were only given details immediately before leaving. We raided the area and found substantial weapons caches and explosives, etc. After returning the interpreters were furious that they had not been informed. This led me to realize that they were providing Intel to people who had become the enemy and I never valued anything they had to say, or said much to them again.
I left that country with eyes opened to the inaccurate reporting of the media and a firsthand view of idealistic American foreign policy and its direct effects on an area. We went somewhere to stop mass killing as was being reported in the news, and when we got there, there were no mass graves like the ones in Bosnia, and we effectively helped a Muslim separatist group win their guerilla war.
This was a war that we "won" because not too many of our people died. Some did, and they were quickly forgotten by the public and were probably a page 14 news blip in the paper. Most died in accidents, a few from mines. We are still there, coming up on ten years later with virtually no benefit to the US whatsoever and billions of dollars spent. The Serbs have mostly all fled to Serbia proper, their churches and property destroyed, just like the Iraqi minority populations have fled to areas in which they are a majority population.
The problem with the strategy in these third world internal conflicts is that they have no "solution." You have to pick a side and fight it out or leave when things get too hot. We did so in Somalia when we decided to get Aidid and go after the militias that were taking food shipments and feeding their "armies." We have started doing it in Iraq by arming certain militias to go out and fight against al Qaeda and others. We did it in Afghanistan by arming the northern alliance. All of these people have absolutely no long term loyalty to us and will turn on us the day we leave these countries, or sooner, and we will eventually leave these countries if for no other reason than because monetarily it is costing too much for us to sustain. Then our occupation and our support for people who oppress and control the populace in these areas will become the rallying cry the new enemy, our former ally (or the people fighting them) will use as an excuse to come and kill us. Then we will all be shocked that the guy we gave the gun to put it to put it to our head and we will have to invade someone to stop them... or invade their neighbor because we get along right now with the royal family of the country who is actually producing and funding the terrorists, whichever is more politically expedient. It’s a great way to have perpetual war with no possibility of victory. There is no way to beat someone that gains two recruits every time you kill one of their members. There is no way to solve Darfur except to cut Sudan off from any type of foreign aid and refuse to do anything with them until they stop, pressure China (Sudan’s major trading partner) to get them to stop the fighting. The only way these things can be resolved is by the people there fixing them diplomatically or fighting it out. Half the time when we bomb and deploy, the guy you went there to help ends up being just as bad or worse than the guy we bombed to help him. We are just fighting in circles. Using them fighting us as a reason to fight them just ends in perpetual conflict. Getting in the middle of conflicts just breeds resentment and anger from people we have no business dealing with in conflicts that stretch back millennia.
The Republican line about wanting to "fight them over there" so we don't have to "fight them over here" is a complete copout as well. Its really easy to send kids into combat 3 or 4 times so that you don't have to deal with it. Giuliani and Bush lived through 9/11 one day, so they kill 3500 of our soldiers, and wound 20,000 more, so that they don't have to have it near them. They are scared, so they send 18 - 25 year olds to go live through 9/11 every day for 15 month tours. Someone please explain to me how losing 3500 American troops is not worse than 9/11? I've lost my best friend and three guys I served with so far in this war. It hurt just as bad as someone who lost a friend on 9/11. The big difference was that the fireball that killed my friend wasn't on TV to scare the country. Dead Americans are dead Americans, whether they get killed over there or over here.