Wait a minute, stop the victory parades!

So, we beat the tar out of Serbia. There was a lot of talk about fierce Balkan fighters and all the empires who crumbled when faced with motivated warriors from Eastern Europe. The Ottomans went down, Hitler got his tail kicked around, the Soviets were barely able to pacify the region -- many thought we'd be there forever. Of course, we still might. All we won was the right to station troops there and make sure people act quasi-friendly. How long have we been doing that in Korea? Don't expect Yugoslavia to exit the headlines any time soon.

Slobodan Milosevic and his forces weren't ready for a uniquely American way of fighting, and that's why they lost. We're the land of the Crips and the Bloods, and we've learned a lot from our own street fighters. Don't get involved in a prolonged fist fight, where you might suffer a bloody nose and have to go home early. Just drive by real fast with a machine gun and spray the area. It doesn't matter what you hit, make everything a target. Gangs don't specialize in pinpoint assassination -- they control whole territories by spreading massive fear and panic. You might not be involved in the gang conflict, but you better respect the boundaries they set because innocents get hit all the time.

The new conventional wisdom is that NATO forces really started pounding the Serbian military near the end of the operations, forcing Milosevic to capitulate. I think that's wrong. Like a street gang, we tortured the civilian population until they just couldn't take it anymore. Some of the targets were television news stations, power plants, bridges, water treatment plants, roadways, radio stations and newspaper offices. Our bombings caused massive food shortages, trapped people in shelled out areas of the country, creating a health hazard in terms of drinking water and deprived the Serbian people of the media they needed to both express and inform themselves. Like a street gang, we terrorized the innocents.

I have a Serbian friend named Svetlana who has family (parents) in Serbia. She spoke with them by telephone whenever possible. The family moved their sick aunt out of Belgrade to a farm outside the fighting. It was a good arrangement as the ailing aunt would be safe and could help the family by gathering food form the farm. Then NATO bombed a bridge, cutting off the family members. No food for the city folk, no support for the aunt. Then they lost communications. Then NATO bombed the area around the farm. Try to remember, these are civilian people just like you and me.

We dropped tons of depleted uranium on them, which caused rocketing rates of brain cancer in Iraq, so those civilians will have to deal with the consequences of our attack for generations. By the way, Yugoslavia is about the size of Ohio, so this conflict is less like the Crips vs. the Bloods than it is like the Crips vs. a local girl scout troop.

You won't hear too much sympathy for Serbian civilians on this side of the Atlantic. Sure, the occasional Serb American will complain in between shouts of "Kosovo is Serbia!" but the general public doesn't listen to those people. Is it because we lack compassion? I don't think it's that simple. We have compassion, but we also, as a democracy, tend to hold civilians responsible for the actions of their leaders. They did, after all, elect Milosevic, and they didn't do anything to get rid of him when he launched a war in Kosovo. In fact, they supported the war. They didn't try to oust him when NATO attacked, either. They supported him. They still support him. They certainly won't turn him over to stand trial for War Crimes in the Hague.

On the other hand, if some other country demanded our president's head, what would we do? We'd react with shock and indignation and we'd tell whoever was asking to go screw themselves. Like when the U.N. slapped our wrists for mining the harbor in Managua, Nicaragua. We said, "shut up, little jerks" and kept right on laying mines.

Because we're a big street gang and we play by big street gang rules. I guess it's no surprise that all global politics comes down to power. But let's try, in the victory glow of the Balkan Battle, to look honestly at what we have done -- we bombed a tiny little country and murdered a lot of civilians. You may go back to your parades now.

Michael Maiello is an equal opportunity crank.