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Yet, kicking Russia out of Europe is still the objective of the current U.S. developed, and Washington-Berlin executed strategy, thinly veiled under the "Partnership for Peace" slogan. It’s just that the modern version of the "Drang Nach Osten" power play isn’t a frontal assault - a mistake most of Russia’s adversaries had made in the past. It’s more akin to an "end around play," to borrow a football jargon. The "world’s only superpower" and its junior partner are using dollars and marks respectively, instead of bullets and bombs, to achieve the same goal - projecting their power deep into the soft underbelly of the former Russian empire. Already, no less than 18 former Russian dominions, have turned into American/German minions (see the map).

They have succumbed to the temptation of easy access to American or German aid and/or loans. In other words, they have been bought. The local politicians’ cover story for domestic consumption is that it was all done in pursuit of democracy and higher material living standards.

The April 11, 1995 dismissal of the Russian General Perelyakin from the U.N. forces in the former Yugoslavia for alleged incompetence and connivance with the Serbs, only three weeks before his tour of duty was to end, added the pressure on Yeltsin to buckle under.

Since so many UNPROFOR personnel engage in illicit trade (this writer was told of that by eyewitnesses during his May and July 1994 visits to Bosnia and Serbia), the harsh treatment of the Russian was evidently supposed to send a message to Moscow as to who was boss in the world these days. And to put a squeeze on Yeltsin during the home stretch of the IMF negotiations.

When confronted with this apparent contradiction, a NEW YORK TIMES editor admitted that the New York paper has known about the Milosevic’s Secret Service documents for some time (they were smuggled out of Serbia in October 1994!). But, "the NEW YORK TIMES never makes mistakes," the editor joked.

A time for champagne and toasts among the Western (especially the U.S./ German) diplomats and politicians? Not so fast, I am afraid. Save the "bubbly" for happier occasions - family weddings or birthdays, for example. This one isn’t over yet. The "Russian Bear" may be hibernating, but is far from being tamed.

You see, the "brilliant" CFR heads and diplomatic geniuses who constructed the new (i.e., old) "Drang Nach Osten" wolf, and then clumsily tried to disguise it in the "Partnership for Peace" (sheep) clothing, neglected to heed the advice by that "mother of all schemers," Niccolo Machiavelli:

(from the "Prince", 1513)

A modern-day scientist offered a similar warning:

Will not become - more complex!"

But it isn’t the domestic situation which may cause Yeltsin’s downfall. It is his foreign policy handling, more specifically the Balkans situation, that may topple him.

Let’s examine the current options from the viewpoint of the Bosnian or the Krajina Serbs. Right now, they are completely surrounded by enemies. Even their own brethren (i.e., Milosevic’s government) have turned against them, in a silly and naive notion that their betrayal of their own people would win them a pardon from the world’s would-be rulers. In other words, the "Western Serbs" have been backed into a corner by the New World masters.

Now, what choices does a nature’s creature have in such a predicament? Take a raccoon, for example. Normally a relatively docile and domesticated animal, he fights viciously for its life when cornered like that.

Yet, the Serbs are neither docile nor "domesticated." They had fought the Turkish invaders for 500 years before finally throwing off the Ottoman choke collar. No wonder the Austrian throne had given the Krajina Serbs a privileged status, rather than fight them. As long as they helped defend the empire’s borders against the Muslim threat, they could have their autonomy for all practical purposes.

But in the end, the Serbs also helped bury the Austro-Hungarian and the German empires when those turn of the century hopeful "World Masters" tried to put them on a short leash. And they snubbed Hitler in 1941, at the time when the entire world was quaking in its boots before the renewed German might.

Nor was such an intestinal fortitude cheap. The Serbs paid dearly for their stubborn devotion to freedom. More than a million of them perished in World War II alone, most in today’s Bosnia and Croatia.

To begin with, they could take many UNPROFOR soldiers as hostages in a matter of days. And they could kill others who choose to resist. Once the Western Serbs realize that this is not a fair fight; that their real enemies aren’t the Muslims or the Croats, but the U.S. and Germany (hiding behind the U.N. cloak); there is no telling what damage they could cause. If dying is in the cards, they may reason, why not die fighting like a man rather than slowly bleed to death like a stuck pig?

If that happens, the next thing you know, NATO may get involved - ostensibly to "rescue the U.N. hostages." Hasn’t our President (Clinton) already promised that he would send 20,000 U.S. troops, if necessary, to extricate the U.N. forces from Bosnia or Croatia?

America went through some real convulsions over the fate of its 50 hostages in Teheran in 1980, and over the dozen or so of our soldiers killed in Somalia in October 1993. So just think what the reaction would be to seeing hundreds or thousands of American troops brought home in body bags from Bosnia or Croatia? How would President Clinton, Bob Dole or Newt Gingrich explain to the families of the fallen soldiers why they had died?

In pursuit of the U.S. "Drang Nach Osten" strategy?

Nah... That wouldn’t sell. Most Americans don’t understand foreign phrases. It took us five years to learn what "perestroika" was, and less than one to forget it.

So how about as a sacrifice for the "Partnership for Peace" cause?

No, again! Half of us wouldn’t know what that meant, either. But seeing our erstwhile "peace partners" fight us in the Balkans would remind America of the double talk with which our government sent our troops into battle for Kuwait’s oil, for example, or into Vietnam.

Such a gap in understanding and trust between ordinary Americans and our policy-making elite is what happens when the country’s foreign affairs are conducted by a small group of people who talk to each other using slogans.

So how about, Americans died in the Balkans as a part of the "Contract with America?" Everybody’s heard about that, right?

One would think, therefore, that McNamara and others of his ilk in government, should have ended up in electric chairs or gas chambers, just as the common mass murderers do.

Think again...

This is America, not Disneyland...

The fairy tales about justice and fairness may work in Saturday morning cartoons, but they rarely, if ever, apply to high-level people.

As a banker, McNamara must have known that. Remember what they say about banking:

But if you owe a bank $1 billion - you control the bank."

So, being a high-roller himself, McNamara must have figured that he could get away with murder. Make it a "mega murder!" All it would take to get him off the hook was his "oops..., we made a mistake" admission.

Guess what? He could be right...

Those who were hurt most seem to be the first to forgive. "The title of his book should be ‘Sorry ‘Bout That,’" said Max Cleland, Georgia’s Secretary of State, who lost both legs in Vietnam.

Yet, didn’t the mortally sick Ali McGraw say in the 1971 hit movie, "Love Story," that "loving someone meant never having to say ‘I’m sorry’?" If her logic were extended to McNamara, doesn’t his having to apologize to America mean that maybe he never loved the country?

But even Cleland’s forgiving did not mean forgetting. "McNamara went to (head up) the World Bank, while a lot of other people went to their graves," the Georgia state official also told the New York Times.

Others, (even) including the Arizona Senator, John McCain, a former Vietnam prisoner of war, (and certainly no 'war hero' as his bio suggests) were far less benevolent toward McNamara.

Justice will only be served when people like the former DOD secretary, a long-time CFR member, and those who put him in a position of power, such as the late and oft-revered U.S. presidents, Lyndon Johnson and John Kennedy, are put in the dustbin of history. The belated apology was nothing more than McNamara’s effort to buy a one-way ticket through the Pearly Gates at a late stage of his life (78).

And suppose they also re-aim their nukes at us. Enter "World War III?"

What would then the esteemed ladies and gentlemen of the CFR advise Bill Clinton to do? Cut and run as he did in Vietnam years? Or go to war with his "peace partner?" Or just go home, to Arkansas?

Not a pretty set of choices, is it? And so, Signor Machiavelli would probably again have the last laugh. Or a good cry...

Why the five-to-10 million limit?

"Because where the population exceeds 10 million, there is a manifest case for decentralization," concluded the British Prof. C. Northcote Parkinson, in a 1970 report. In other words, it’s a matter of efficiency of government. "A state of 30 to 50 million is hopelessly inefficient," Prof. Heineken concurred.

But both Heineken and Parkinson drew upon the ideas of an Austrian sociologist. Leopold Kohr expressed similar thoughts in his book, "The Breakdown of Nations," published in 1957. That’s right - 1957, not 1975! He wrote that, "it is always bigness, and only bigness, which is the problem of existence - social, as well as physical." Kohr concluded that the only solution must lie in cutting down of the substances and organisms which have outgrown their natural limits."

Without realizing the foregoing, this writer also argued in a 1991 report that bigness in business has become a liability rather than an advantage. And he compared a successful modern services business enterprise to an amoeba - which splits up before becoming too big (and, therefore, inefficient).

So, why has Europe been so slow to adopt a good thing? One might speculate that it’s because Europeans are wedded to traditions, and are slow to change. After all, the region has not earned its nick-name, the "Old Continent," for nothing, has it?

But that would be a rather shallow explanation. Prof. Heineken points out that the German or Italian states, for example, never existed before the second half of the 19th century. In other words, they are younger than even the U.S.! Furthermore, at the time of the French revolution (1789), the majority of the population did not even speak French, and was "not able to sing the ‘Marseillaise,’ the newly-minted national anthem," argues Prof. Heineken. It was only at the end of the 19th century that the French peasants became "Frenchmen."

In other words, the whole notion of statehood and nationality is an industrial era invention. It is not natural! And it cannot last in its present form!

Yet, the main reason that the Heineken proposal won’t work is because it runs against another law of nature - the survival of the fittest, which Charles Darwin so eloquently explained - also in the last century.

Why would Europe’s most powerful countries, such as Germany, France, Britain or Italy, for example, volunteer to be split up into five or more weaker entities? Can you really see the Greeks giving up their northern territories to a new state called Macedonia, after having kicked so much fuss over the mere use of the name by the former Yugoslav republic? What are the chances of the "incorrigible Serbs" ceding Kosovo, the cradle of their civilization, to Albania, while leaving their Western Serb brethren in belligerent states called Croatia and Bosnia? Why would the Romanian leaders agree to have their country broken up into three pieces while seeing that Hungary, remains intact?

The answers to the above questions are "no," "no," "slim to none," and "beats me." As the Serbian general, Ratko Mladic once said, "borders are drawn in blood," i.e., not by some academicians’ or diplomats’ pens.

So, Heineken’s ideas are not perfect. To his credit, even the author called them "a Eurotopia?" (i.e., a European utopia). Which suggests that he was not drinking the brew which made his Dutch namesake famous when he put the proposal together.

If the above analysis proves accurate, it would probably spell the end of the world as we know it. But not the end of the world. For, did you ever observe what happens after a fire or an avalanche had wreaked havoc in a forest? What follows is - life! And it is a life richer and fuller than the one which the cataclysm had destroyed.

So, the real challenge which each member of the human race faces these days is the same as that of a pine tree in a forest: How does one mutate from a tall and proud pine into a tiny fireweed?