General Pierre-Marie Gallois, a prominent critic of the Western policy in the Balkans, died in Paris on August 23 at the age of 99. As noted in my Chronicles obituary, he was the last in a long line of European geopolitical thinkers—from Clausewitz and Jomini to Liddell Hart and Guderian—who'd combined finely honed analytical skills with hands-on soldiering.
Arguing against the building of an Islamic shrine near New York’s Ground Zero, former U.S. vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin linked the mosque project to “building a Serbian Orthodox church at Srebrenica killing fields where Muslims were slaughtered.” Mrs. Palin is right to oppose the Ground Zero mosque. It is unacceptable, and detrimental to her cause, to invoke false parallels in the process, based on events of which she knows but very little.
An English romantic poet has said that we should not revisit the haunts of our youth, and that we should be especially careful in avoiding those that elicit sweet memories. Being on the wrong side of fifty, sipping my morning espresso in Belgrade's Knez Mihajlova street, I realize how wrong he was: as we near the end, we increasingly cherish the sights, smells, sounds, and memories of many decades ago.
For some years now Boris Tadić and his cohorts have been looking for a way to capitulate on Kosovo while pretending not to. The formula was simple: place all diplomatic eggs in one basket – that of the International Court of Justice – and refrain from using any other tools at Serbia’s disposal. (For Serbian scroll down to the end)
