The Brooklyn Connection is a wonderful documentary by Dutch filmmaker Klaartje Quirijns about an Albanian living in America who equipped the Kosovo Liberation Army out of U. S. gun shops and surplus stores. It really drives home for me the madness of the ‘War on Terror’ namely that we don’t have any conception about what is going on in the world outside of the things that the government wants us to think about.
There are NATO troops in Kosovo and Bosnia, Chechnya and Somalia are still a mess, and yet these issues that were so large in the 1990s are all but invisible today. In the place of these longstanding issues we are now focused on the created issues of Iraq and al Qaeda. These aren’t real issues – both the Islamic jihad against America and the U. S. animosity towards Saddam stem from real actions by the U. S. in recent times (say the last 15 years).
It’s just kind of sad that we will create divisiveness rather than try and deal with generations old conflicts, and that those new conflicts never get resolved and become longstanding.