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NATO'S LATEST INTERVENTION
NATO's supreme commander, Gen. Joseph Ralston, gave the go-ahead for deploying troops to Macedonia today, setting the stage for another NATO commitment in the volatile Balkans region, according to The New York Times. ( http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A42244-2001Aug21.html )
At a closed-door meeting at NATO headquarters in Brussels, Ralston briefed ambassadors from the alliance's 19 countries on the results of his fact-finding trip this week to Macedonia to determine if conditions were ripe for the NATO intervention. Diplomats said Ralston and NATO Secretary General George Robertson endorsed the British-led mission, called Operation Essential Harvest, and pushed for it to begin quickly, warning that a delay might allow the fragile cease-fire to unravel.
"For Washington's deepening diplomatic and military involvement in Macedonia is not driven by any meaningful concern about the fate of that small country," writes foreign policy analyst Gary Dempsey in "Intervention Protection." ( http://www.cato.org/dailys/08-02-01.html ) "It is instead driven by a desire to keep NATO's flawed Kosovo intervention from unraveling and becoming a colossal embarrassment."
In "Waist Deep in the Balkans and Sinking: Washington Confronts the Crisis in Macedonia," ( http://www.cato.org/pubs/pas/pa-397es.html ) Cato's Ted Galen Carpenter writes that the continued fighting in Macedonia shows the bankruptcy of Washington's Balkan policy. He recommends that the United States disengage and let the European countries grapple with the situation. The book "NATO's Empty Victory: A Postmortem of the Balkan War," ( http://www.cato.org/cgi-bin/Web_store/web_store.cgi?page=emptyvictory.html&cart_id=
) edited by Carpenter, shows that NATO's ostensible goal of a tolerant, democratic, and multiethnic Kosovo is a fantasy and predicts an interminable and futile nation-building mission for the United States.
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