Does anyone think we can back up what Bush says here?
I know that he is bound and determined to go out as “The War President”, but I don’t think we have the manpower at this time.
I’m all for granting things independence. Honestly, let’s just go ahead and do it: we can print up Kosovo flags, open a separate embassy in Kosovo and demand to talk to their leaders, put them in the CIA factbook, and most importantly of all, simply add them to wikipedia.
Do you understand how Kosovo came into being?
Yes. Do you understand that we, as a military force, are spread just a mite thin these days?
“We” are not NATO. It was a Euro-war and if Europe wants it to happen then they can pony up the boots.
You mean before or after Serbian involvement? 
Then why the hell is Bush the one giving the deadline and saying “The West” will act if it doesn’t happen? What exactly is “The West”, anyway? Is it just us, or did Canada, Mexico and all of South America give us their proxies when it comes to threatening other countries?
A UNSC resolution is not going to pass, so it’s a waste of time. Russia will veto it, and I suspect China will, too. I don’t know how we make this happen without more bloodshed.
As for the “the West”, it’s a common euphemism which generally means Western Europe and the US and Canada. NATO would be a good approximation. Even the article in the OP uses the term to describe who engaged with Serbia in 1999:
Emphasis added.
Serbia had nothing to do with it from the standpoint of conflict. The shift from a predominately Christian population to a predominately Muslim population was facilitated by Tito in the early 70’s. Not that the region was ever stable in this respect but Tito precipitated the migration of Albanian Muslims into Kosovo. That’s why the article refers to the majority of the population of Kosovo as ethnic Albanians. They are not Serbs and they are not native from the perspective of the last century (insert various wars here).
Imagine a US President carving out a chunk of California and then invited Mexicans to hop the fence. 30 years later they immigrate or breed the population percentage from 10% to 90%. That’s Kosovo from 1972 on. A civil war breaks out with Serbia. Enter NATO for the next chapter of the region’s history.
Can you back that up with a cite? Are you saying that Tito brought in people from Albania itself, or are you saying that he moved ethnic Albanians there from other parts of Yoguslavia. I can’t imagine the former was the case, and I don’t think there were that many ethnic Albanians in Yugoslavia who weren’t already living in Kosovo.
If you’re interested you can Google “Kosovo,history” and get a better picture but you can start here.
Kosovo has been an ethnic football for centuries so it depends on the time frame referenced when looking at population demographics. In the late 60’s Tito changed the political structure of Kosovo by reorganizing Serbian leadership. That created an immigration flood of Albanians into Kosovo. Tito then changed the constitutional make-up of Kosovo giving it more (equal) political power with the other states.
Just to be clear, the Albanians came from Albania which borders Kosovo.
Neither, really. The shift of Serbs out of Kosovo and the shift of Albanians into Kosove has been going on for several hundred years. Tito imposed or allowed (depending on the year and political expediency) the region of Kosovo to be politically dominated by the (already majority) Albanians and with the generally favorable conditions for ethnic Albanians at that time, the Albanian population (starting from a majority position) grew faster than the Sebian population in the twenty years prior to the dissolution of Yugoslavia.
The Serbs have an emotional attachment to the region based on it being the location of the first Serb kingdom that was not a vassal state to one of the nearby empires, but with the ongoing wars with the Byzantine and, later, Turk empires, the population kept shifting North and East, replaced by Albanians from the coast, and there had not been a majority Serb region in Kosovo since the eighteenth century–possibly earlier.
You’re right that he changed the political structure to favor a majority position of Albanians but he created the situation by removing Alexander Rankovic who represented Serbs. Prior to his removal the ethnic Albanians were a minority. I don’t know if Tito intended a flood of immigrants but Albania was a dirt poor country so the migration was just human nature. The turn around in demographics happened very quickly.
Not in any neutral history I have read.
After the Serbs expelled Albanians and recolonized Albanian Kosovo in 1912, engaging in a bit more ethnic cleansing in the 1920s, the Albanians turned around and expelled Serbs and re-recolonized the area in 1941, allowing more Albanians to settle through 1945. Following WWII, Tito, hoping to keep the Serbs weak within Yugoslavia, never did anything to resettle Serbs in Kosovo. Do you happen to have an independent census for Kosovo from 1970 or earlier indicating a Serb majority? The Britannica gives the Serb/Albanian split in 1946 as half and half and indicates that there was a steady migration of Serbs out of Kosovo through the 1950s and 1960s as they tended to seek jobs in (Serbian) cities while the Albanians tended to remain on Kosovan farms. I am open to any neutral claim that demonstrates a Serb majority in 1970, but I have only seen Milosivec-era propaganda claims to support that.
I stand corrected. I can’t find the website I got my original numbers from but it doesn’t jive with any of the censuses taken from a variety of sources.
I thought the Albanian purge pushed the ratio well below 50%. After further investigation most of the provinces never dipped below 60%. The immigration of the late 60’s was more on the order of a 25% increase. While a large migration did occur through Tito’s actions it was not on the order of 80%.
Yeah, there’s a lot of agenda driven rewriting of history by the various parties involved. Even the wikipedia entry looks very suspicious to me.
I would modify this to say “all” the parties involved. There do not seem to be many innocents still breathing in that part of the world.
However, I would also tend to characterize many of the disparate viewpoints as serious efforts to present each party’s understanding. Aside from some of the blatant Milosivec lies, (which is not the same as all Serbian viewpoints and even Milosivec did not lie with every statement he uttered), most of the reports I have seen appear to be genuine efforts from the perspectives of people who had different experiences of history rather than outright propagandists. It is unfortunate that with such highly charged events, nearly all occurring within the fog of one war or another, much of the information is simply not available for neutral review and exposition.
Isn’t that pretty much what we’ve already done?
NY Times (may be behind the subscription firewall):
As Kevin Drum asked last night, “is it really too much to ask the president of the United States to take his own policies seriously enough to actually know what they are?”
I don’t see what the big deal is about this. I don’t consider “at some point in time” to be a deadline, but even if it were, why do we necessarily have to have the same policy for Iraq that we have for Kosovo?