The silence from the Left's anti-war movement is deafening.
NATO sends reinforcements to Kosovo after ethnic clashes kill 22, injure hundreds
NATO sent U.S. and Italian reinforcements to Kosovo on Thursday after fighting between Serbs and ethnic Albanians killed 22 people and wounded hundreds -- the worst violence since the province's war five years ago.
Attackers burned several Serb houses and an Orthodox Christian church on Thursday in Obilic, an ethnically mixed town west of Kosovo's capital, Pristina. U.N. police and NATO troops evacuated dozens of Serbs.
The Kosovo clashes triggered fighting elsewhere in Serbia, where nationalist crowds burned mosques and shouted slogans threatening Kosovo's ethnic Albanians with "slaughter" and "death."
Bracing for more trouble, NATO sent in about 350 soldiers, mostly from Bosnia and Italy, to back 18,500 international peacekeepers now in Kosovo.
The troops from Bosnia include an American infantry unit of about 100 soldiers. Britain, which already has 280 soldiers in Kosovo, will send another 750 within days, its defense ministry said Thursday.
The unrest illustrated the failure of international efforts to set the province on the path of reconciliation after a 1999 NATO air campaign stopped a crackdown by Serb leader Slobodan Milosevic on Kosovo's secessionist ethnic Albanian majority.
NATO played down the prospects of renewed conflict.
"I don't believe there is a possibility of a war. We will do what is necessary to restore and uphold law and order," NATO spokesman Jamie Shea said Thursday.
Note that US, British and Italian forces were moved in to do what the French cannot or will not. Given that ethnic Albanians (aka Muslims) are the agressor in the current round of violence, how long before Islamo-terrorists begin to attack US, British and Italian forces in Kosovo?
Kosovo Crisis a Wake-Up Call from NATO's BackyardBRUSSELS (Reuters) - Just when NATO was gazing at far-flung hotspots from Afghanistan to Iraq, ethnic violence flared up in its backyard in Kosovo this week, putting the alliance's global pretensions to their most severe test yet.
Analysts said on Thursday that the violence in Kosovo might open NATO to charges that its peacekeeping mission there was reduced too quickly, and would certainly underline the gap between its ambitions and the number of troops available.
"The missions in terms of intensity and tempo are expanding exponentially, but the forces are not," said Julian Lindley-French at the Geneva Center for Security Policy. "Until they sort that out, NATO is in big trouble."
Stagnant defense budgets in most NATO countries have limited the supply of costly helicopters and other vital equipment and reduced the number of soldiers ready for overseas action. Of the 1.5 million Europeans in uniform, only 150,000 can easily be used for 21st century crisis management, Lindley-French said. Allowing for troop rotation, that leaves barely 50,000 troops available for operations at any one time.
This is the force John Kerry would enlist to execute the War on Terror.
UPDATE: Bear Flag blogger Slings and Arrows posts a question.