I haven't had a chance to listen to this yet (link at bottom) but it looks very interesting:
The recent history of the Balkans is a curious thing. The overwhelming majority of news accounts and books and scholarly papers -- not to mention the unofficial tilt of the ICTY, the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia, located in the Hague -- follow a sparklingly clear narrative: the Serbs, under Slobodan Milosevic (the "Butcher of the Balkans"), tried to create a "Greater Serbia." Although they failed, in the process Serbia launched wars of aggression against Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia, and Kosovo. Moreover, in Bosnia the Serbs committed Genocide. UN intervention failed to resolve the conflict but NATO cleaned things up. NATO's 1999 bombing of Belgrade helped. Over a decade later some loose ends remain in Bosnia and Kosovo, and perhaps elsewhere, but the fire has been extinguished. There is, however, a different view of things. One that I came to through my travels inside Bosnia during the war. One that many senior officials in the U.S. government, and other governments, shared, both at the time and up through the present. This alternative narrative, however, has never gained much traction -- most outside observers might therefore easily assume, incorrectly, that it has no respectability whatsoever... Not to set the record straight (that would be impossible), but to give listeners a sense of how things might otherwise appear, I talk with Dr. Steven E. Meyer. Steven was with the CIA for many years and in the 1990s he was the Deputy Director of the Interagency Balkan Task Force. He's now a professor at the National Defense University. And I hasten to add: Steven is not by any means the only one from CIA to have this perspective. At some point, perhaps this year or next, I hope to interview David Kanin, a friendly acquaintance, who during the war years was the top fellow for the Balkans at the CIA, who later went on to more senior positions and who's very recently retired. If that happens, you'll see that David tells pretty much the same story about Balkan complexities... I hope you enjoy this one. As always, please feel free to forward the link. Best, g. http://www.electricpolitics.com/podcast/2010/04/bosnia_redux.html <http://ethreemail.com/e3ds/mail_link.php?u=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.electricpolitics.com%2Fpodcast%2F2010%2F04%2Fbosnia_redux.html&i=0&d=7Z81U6Y0-W397-4987-YWXX-YZ1W7YW11W9V&e=...@tjfenton.plus.com> __._,_.___ _______________________________________________ News mailing list News@antic.org http://lists.antic.org/mailman/listinfo/news
