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“What we are really talking about is a humanitarian disaster precipitated by the cold political calculus of an autocratic leader who has pursued a political strategy against his own citizens,” said U.S. Gen. Wesley Clark, supreme allied commander in Europe.
Gen. Clark’s target was Slobodan Milosevic. Yet his words might have been used by another American general named Robert E. Lee, about another “autocratic leader” named Abraham Lincoln.
The day Clark made his statement bolstering the case for air strikes in Kosovo, the fall issue of Independent Review arrived. In a piece on Lincoln, “micromanager of the war effort,” scholar Thomas DiLorenzo describes Union tactics in the rebels’ Shenandoah Valley:
Gen. U.S. Grant “told cavalry officer Phillip Sheridan that ‘we want the Shenandoah Valley to remain a barren waste’ and famously ordered him to make sure that even a crow flying over the valley would have to pack its own lunch. … the Union cavalry went on a rampage of pillaging, plundering, burning, and the murdering of civilians that came to be known as ‘the Burning.’ As one Union soldier described the scene, ‘the atmosphere from horizon to horizon, has been black with the smoke of a hundred conflagrations and at night a gleam brighter and more lurid than sunset has shot from every verge. … The completeness of the devastation is awful. Hundreds of nearly starving people are going north.’”
Kosovo must look like that today. And what is written here is not in defense of the thuggish Milosevic or the squalid atrocities perpetrated there. But it is to raise a question: If the South’s war to break free of the Union was none of Europe’s business, why is Kosovo’s rebellion to break free of Yugoslavia America’s business?
Kosovo has belonged to Serbia far longer than South Carolina had been part of the United States when it seceded. If Lincoln had a right to launch a four- year bl