Manufactured Bewilderment & the Shadow of Daesh: In 2016, Balkans Reportage Remains Fantastic

According to this article from the New York Times, Daesh and other political Islamists are currently gaining a substantial foothold in Kosovo.

Please do be so good as to enlighten me on why people are so ‘surprised’ about all of this? I mean, if funding the Mujahideen was a bad idea, well, this… what could possibly go wrong?

… 7 years since an American-led intervention wrested tinyKosovo from Serbian oppression.

Correction:

There was a bloody multi-level civil war between Serbs, Croats and Albanians. Different factions committed numerous mass atrocities; including many Serbs and of course, the militant KLA terrorists. There is no evidence whatsoever of a clear moral hierarchy, unless you believe that murders committed by ‘underdogs,’ whether real or imaginary, are automatically more virtuous than any other kind of murder…

Or unless, again, you think it is ‘all about the numbers,’ by which logic Stalin or Pol Pot would be ‘more immoral’ than Benito Mussolini or Cecil Rhodes.

Kosovo may well have been ‘tiny.’ But infantilizing sycophancy aside, so was the KLA. And what about tiny Hamas, tiny IRA, or even (dare I say it) tiny Daesh, who are still occupying well under half the territorial land mass and populations of the Middle East?

… this once-tolerant Muslim society at the hem of Europe into a font of Islamic extremism and a pipeline for jihadists.

Objection:

Asserted, not evidenced. Rose-tinted views are very useful for The Great & The Good, but less useful for those who are exposing the rank brutality, incontinent barbarism, and cynical, self-serving opportunism of the humanitarian interventionists. The assertion here may well be true; but it is not easy to take it at face value in an article whose rhetoric is otherwise highly suspicious (observe carefully as we proceed).

It is a stunning turnabout for a land of 1.8 million people that not long ago was among the most pro-American Muslim societies in the world. Americans were welcomed as liberators after leading months of NATO bombing in 1999 that spawned an independent Kosovo.

Caveat:

Pro-American? Pro-American-assistance, certainly! I do not know how pro-American or anti-American most people were; I do know, however, that unevidenced assertions look suspicious in the context of any article which goes lightly on Bill Clinton’s self-serving meddling in the affairs of others.

But where the Americans saw a chance to create a new democracy, the Saudis saw a new land to spread Wahhabism.

Despairing shrug:

I don’t think you need me to tell you what’s any of the thousand-and-one things wrong with the first clause in that sentence….

Why the Kosovar authorities — and American and United Nations overseers — did not act sooner to forestall the spread of extremism is a question being intensely debated.

Dismissive barb:

Why should Washington care about the lives of the citizens of Kosovo? ‘I got mine.’

I mean, in all seriousness… What do you think this ‘humanitarian intervention’ was all about then, really?

Families have been torn apart. Some of Kosovo’s best and brightest have been caught up in the lure of jihad.

Final headshake:

Yes… why so so surprised? Next thing we’ll be hearing that Afghanistan might have gone off the rails a little since the Mujahideen got funded by the ‘International Community’ in Washington D.C.

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In a nutshell:

A classic example of ‘Manufactured Bewilderment.’

What is intriguing about the article in question, is how far it seems to accept the official story about the Balkans intervention. ‘We’ are there not to invade or to occupy; on the contrary! Unlike every other empire in history, we have the proverbial Blairite ‘good intentions.’ This summer, let us see what the fruits of such good intentions are for the charismatic and highly dynamic former UK Prime Minister, Tony Blair.

But however that may be, these few short quotes illustrate perfectly how far the Beltway’s neoconservative/liberal-interventionist consensus really does hold sway. This consensus is not based on reality; it is not supposed to be either verifiable and falsifiable. Like so much of what The Great & The Good say, it is supposed to be taken on faith alone.

But faith alone, without reason and integrity, is currently wreaking havoc across the Middle East, and indeed much of the world. The ‘honest mistakes’ of Washington, sooner or later, risk endangering Israel even more than they may have done already.

Accountability for the elected interventionists of Washington, London and Paris seems a forlorn prospect.

Will Israel end up being increasingly tainted by an association which is both largely unjust and exaggerated by opportunists?

And will the critique of the Humanitarian Interventionists be left only to the Regressive Left and other extremists, as the rest of the center left stands idly by, or even plunges headlong into the suicidal Phaeton-gallop of the self-styled Party of Humanity?

Regressive Left and Regressive Humanitarians:

Les extrêmes se touchent.

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Beyond the snowy peak of the sola fide Olympus, winds of change are blowing….