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| Return to: Left History: a digital archive | Return to: Say no to imperialist wars! | Return to: NATO-Yugoslav War Internet Resources |
IT LOOKS like an American base in Vietnam - a huge agglomeration of barbed wire, motor pools, trucks and brown tents in a raw, red landscape. But instead of bulldozers churning up rice paddies, it was fields of wheat that were disappearing yesterday to make way for this big slice of America in southern Kosovo.
Already there is a fitness centre, chapel and hospital. Now, a Burger King, a food court that provides cheap sweets and soft drinks and three recreation centres are going up at Camp Bondsteel, named after an American officer who performed bravely in Vietnam.
At one stage in that war American forces were suffering hundreds of dead a week. The point about this US fortress in Kosovo is that not one GI should die at all. It is magnificent - but is it war?
About 4,860 US troops, or 77 per cent of Americans deployed in Kosovo, are based here in what is, in effect, a 775-acre city being built at a cost of $32 million (£19½ million) among the hills near the town of Urosevac.
It is like using a sledgehammer to crack a nut. Kfor does not really have an enemy in Kosovo - not one that can use the sort of weapons that the lines of berms, watchtowers and protective concrete bunkers have been built against.
The Vietcong would have made short work of it, no doubt tunnelling under it, mortaring it or attacking it with satchel charges.