#5 But, given the choice between expanding the already booming vacation resorts of the Dalmatian coast for their eager Anglo-German tourist clientele or reducing Croatia and Bosnia and Kosovo to rubble over ethno-linguistic differences no outsider can even discern ("Serbo-Croat"?), Yugoslavia opted for the latter.
Steyn neglects to note how the choice was nigh well irreversible. Yugoslavia's fragmentation included a particularly catastrophic form of warfare. The Dalmatian coast was once known as a "second Riviera". Turquoise waters, white sand beaches and luxuriant pine forests gave the region an almost fairy-tale setting. During years of strife a peculiar and devastating form of "environmental warfare" was fought that saw beautiful stone bridges—which had stood for centuries—and famous Medieval walled cities all blasted to smithereens. Ancient mansions were torched and their wooded estates chain-sawed to destroy what was once a thriving tourist industry. This was "economic terrorism" and it is emerging as a new strategy to stall recovery and modernization. Rest assured that this horrid practice is being exported elsewhere. Lebanon's famous cedars have fallen prey to this tactic as well. Islam is not just spiritually retrogressive, it is temporally regressive as well and—given the opportunity—will drag this earth back into the dark ages.
When President Bush declared a "war on terror," cynics understood that he had no particular interest in the IRA or the Tamil Tigers, but that he was constrained from identifying the real enemy in any meaningful sense: In the fall of 2001, a war on Islamic this or Islamic that would have caused too many problems with Gen. Musharraf and the House of Saud and other chaps he wanted to keep on side.
The words of Srdja Trifkovic ring evermore clearly:The elite class has every intention of continuing to “fight” the war on terrorism without naming the enemy, without revealing his beliefs, without unmasking his intentions, without offending his accomplices, without expelling his fifth columnists, and without ever daring to win. Their crime can and must be stopped. The founders of the United States overthrew the colonial government for offenses far lighter than those of which the traitor class is guilty.
[emphasis added] |