I live in New York and London, and   among the gruesome sights I’ve had to endure these last few years has been the sight of a vainglorious James Rubin, of Madeleine Albright fame, prancing about the hot spots of these multicultural havens for the rich and infamous.  Rubin is married to Christiane Amanpour, the CNN hussy who takes herself almost as seriously as her hubby takes himself.  I first spotted Rubin holding court at one of Conrad Black’s London garden parties, when the Blacks were still throwing parties.  A few Paris Hilton wannabees were hanging on his every word.  Had it been Gen. George Patton, I would have understood the pose.  But Rubin?

It got worse when Rubin oiled his way into a group of close friends of mine, and I had the bad luck to be seated at the same table as his pompousness.  To say that we disagreed would be a gross understatement.  No insults were exchanged, but I did tell him in no uncertain terms that he could sling his bull in D.C., but that I was an old putana who could spot a phoney social climber a mile away.  We never saw each other again—in fact, it took very little time for my friends to drop him like the proverbial hot potato—but now I read that he’s moving to New York in anticipation of a call from State or the White House, once Queen Hillary is restored to her throne.

What was even more striking than Rubin’s arrogance and self-importance was how little he knew about the bad old world out there.  Sure, he could spout the usual bromides he had learned sitting on Madeleine’s knees, but it was all political sloganeering and slide-slipping; the man is a flack, nothing more.  The “on dit” among the chattering classes in London is that his marriage is a perfect one because both parties prefer their own sex.  If true, it’s beside the point.  Now that “gay marriage” is “le gout du jour,” who am I, a poor little Greek boy, to take exception to marriages of convenience?

My beef with Rubin at dinner was, of course, the bombing of Serbia.  Before I go on, however, one more vignette of the gruesome sights I’ve been enduring of late.  Richard Holbrooke (not the name he was born with, but Christianized along the way) is another man with blood on his hands—Greek Orthodox blood, I may add.  He is the Talleyrand who forged the Rambouillet “peace accords,” which offered the drug-dealing KLA de facto independence from Serbia.  The fact that the KLA had been designated a terrorist organization did not bother old Holbrooke, a man who fancies himself a Don Juan, having run off with the late Peter Jennings’s wife Kati, a Hungarian woman known for her flirtatious nature.  (Her children with Peter and mine were in kindergarten together—it is now called preschool by those who believe everything German stinks.  And when I say she’s flirty, I mean she’s very flirty.)

The one and only time I met with the Jewish Talleyrand was at an Italian tycoon’s house (where else?) in New York.  Gianni Agnelli had Holbrooke, the duke of Beaufort, Pamela Harriman, and little old me for lunch.  Compared with James Rubin, Holbrooke was self-effacing and downright humble.  He spoke mostly of the root of all envy—money, that is.  To be fair, this was a long time ago, and he was then employed by one of those Wall Street behemoths who pay Holbrooke-types millions while they’re out of power in order to have the inside track once the Holbrooke-types get back in.  Unlike Rubin, he did not disguise his emptiness with impudence.  In fact, he was quite likeable.

I consider myself fortunate never to have met the grotesque Albright or Baron Munchhausen, a.k.a. Bill Clinton.  Together with Rubin and Holbrooke, they managed to achieve the following: Serbian lands are occupied by foreign armies; the crime rate in Kosovo is horrific; slavery, drugs, intimidation, assault, and smuggling are the norm.  The Albanian mafia and Islamic jihadists fuel the black market.  Kosovo Force troops and E.U. dignitaries look the other way while the KLA is rewarded for bad behavior.  On March 24, 1999, NATO began dropping bombs on Serbia in order to force her army to leave Kosovo, the holiest of places for Serbs.  Over 200,000 Serbs, Roma, and non-Albanians had to flee once Serbia yielded.  The KLA was guilty of crimes against Serbs long before the war, yet it was the coke-dealing Hashim Thaci whom Madeleine Albright turned to as an ally.  In February 1999, Western diplomats nearly agreed to a deal with Milosevic at Rambouillet that would have led to a semi-autonomous Kosovo.  Only an unreasonable insistence by the West (Blair and Holbrooke) that NATO troops should be allowed to roam about Serbia at will, and that there would be a referendum on independence for Kosovo within three years, scuppered the deal.

It is obvious to those who know how Anglo-American governments act against weak opponents that London and Washington were spoiling for a fight.  Blair, Clinton, Albright, and Holbrooke were calling for a “new internationalism” that would not tolerate dictators.  (They seemed to have forgotten Africa.)  Three years later, it was Saddam’s turn, and we all know how that one turned out.  Americans should wake up to what is really going on in Kosovo and put a stop to Washington’s shenanigans in the Balkans once and for all.  I won’t be holding my breath.