Yugoslavia has been identified as one of those places where they produce more history than they can consume locally. In the United States, where widespread and unapologetic ignorance of history is commonplace, the grip of long-ago battles and long-dead kings on the thinking of apparently edu cated, cultured, Westernized people in the former Yugoslav federation can be baffling. William Faulkner had the old South in mind when he wrote, “ The past is not dead. It is not even past,” but his observation certainly applies to the former Yugoslavia as well. To understand the former Yugosla via's present and future, therefore, a study of its history becomes essential. Thorough and accurate in its research and analysis, this work aims to advance the reader's understanding of the military events that have shaped the devolution of Yugoslavia and the evolution of its daughter states. The United States really has no choice but to try to understand the history of the former Yugoslavia. Since the end of the Cold War, the former Yugosla via has been the point of origin of new enemies and potential allies. It is the locus of open-ended US military deployments. The former Yugoslavia has become the central issue of US relations with Europe, east and west. All the elements of US national security policy-military, diplomatic, developmen tal, and intelligence—will most likely have to engage the multifaceted real ities of the former Yugoslavia more deeply than with those of happier lands. To accept that the United States will be a vital part of the postwar shaping of the Balkan states, yet to be in ignorance of what actually went on in the wars that turned Yugoslavia into the former Yugoslavia, would be foolish. Imagine a traveler from those lands stepping off the packet from Trieste to Baltimore in 1866, aware only of newspaper accounts of a long and bloody civil war. He knows who has won, but remains ignorant of the military par ticulars of the war. This hypothetical traveler would have puzzled at refer ences to Pickett's Charge, General Sherman and his March to the Sea, or Andersonville and would have been unconscious of the many myths grow ing from their hard realities. He would not understand that these wars would shape American life, politics, and culture for generations. The wars of the former Yugoslavia had their own versions of all these in full measure. Both myths and realities will shape the futures of these countries. We are all entitled to our own opinion. We are not entitled to our own his tory. The misuse of history has been widespread in portrayals of events in the former Yugoslavia. This applies not only to the mythmakers and self exculpators in the region but also to those watching it from the United xi States, as any reading of newspaper op-ed pages during the recent Kosovo crisis would make painfully obvious. The " lessons ” of the former Yugosla via are regularly invoked to demonstrate a wide variety of propositions about an equally wide variety of topics, some appropriate, others less so. If, in the United States, future military and political analysts seek to use these lessons as more than rhetoric, they will have to turn to the history of the recent Balkan wars. This work, the first comprehensive military analysis of the wars of the former Yugoslavia, aims to present, objectively and analytically, such a his tory. If the journalistic accounts and contemporaneous analyses of regional specialists were the proverbial first draft of history, then this two -volume book is surely the second.
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