It Takes an Eastern European First Lady

True to American form, there was more noise about Melania Trump's Christmas tree decorations than about the First Lady's ousting last month of National Security Adviser John Bolton's deputy, Mira Ricardel --- perhaps the most brow-raising event amid the ongoing Cabinet shake-up.

That's a shame, because it's the first time in almost four decades of her prominent public service that Ricardel's name has entered public consciousness --- and perhaps the last chance for some light to be thrown on her background and how it has influenced our foreign policy.

When Mrs. Trump very publicly demanded Ricardel's dismissal after the latter threatened to withhold NSC resources (as payback for the refusal to re-designate some seats on the First Lady's plane for NSC staff), Obama DHS assistant secretary Juliette Kayyem quickly grabbed a spot in the condemnation-indignation choreography that accompanies any Trump news.

In the fever of patriotism that's swept over the mainstream left since Donald Trump's candidacy (suddenly defending our "storied" intelligence agencies, the NATO behemoth, and even establishment Republicans), Kayyem proclaimed at CNN.com that Melania was compromising our "national security," in whose interests Ricardel was ostensibly toiling. But the hand that Ricardel has had in "American" interests has been more insidious than most Americans know.

Ricardel, formerly Baratta, formerly Radielovic, has been a Republican fixture in Washington, passing from Bob Dole to George W. Bush, to the Trump administration.

Which wouldn't be bad except she's also the person about whom I wrote the following for Huffington Post and Wall Street Journal in 2010:

A Dole [adviser] was a Croatian woman named Mira Baratta, granddaughter of an officer of the Ustasha regime (the Nazis' more brutish Croatian incarnation), and daughter of Petar Radielovic, who called Fuehrer Ante Pavelic "the greatest man in Croatian history"-- and who in 1985 defended Andrija Artukovic, "the Himmler of the Balkans" during his L.A. trial. Artukovic had said, "Kill all Serbs and Jews including children so that not even the seeds of the beasts are left."

Baratta helped frame a 1995 Senate bill lifting the U.S. arms embargo against Croatia and Bosnia [facilitating the ethnic cleansing of Serbs known as Operation Storm, today celebrated as a national holiday in Croatia], and even advocated for the Albanian cause against the Serbs [which we joined in full depleted-uranium splendor]. To quote Richard Perle, "Other than Richard Holbrooke, Baratta has been the most influential individual in shaping U.S. [Balkans] policy."

Baratta/Ricardel wasn't just Dole's foreign affairs aide, she was reputedly his mistress, as anyone with an ear to Washington's crude jokes at the time could attest.

And on the Croatian radio show he hosted in Southern California, Mira's father, Petar Radielovic, referred to Sen. Bob Dole as "our special friend who is helping the Croats continue the ‘Independent State of Croatia,' a tacit admission that the 1991 struggle was a continuation of the 1941 state that Hitler had bestowed upon his Croat allies, the NDH (Croatian acronym for Independent State of Croatia).

In 1993, when the man who was completing that project (this time with Allied help)--wartime president Franjo Tudjman--visited Los Angeles, Radielovic was master of ceremonies at a $1,000-a-plate fundraiser at Century Plaza Hotel.

The honorary chairperson was Artukovic's widow.

Before Bob Dole becomes the third establishmentarian whose passing we foolishly mourn this year, let the following words by researcher Benjamin Works--just a month before our bombs would again rain down on Serbs (1999)--ring loud and clear:

Mr. Dole incessantly "waves the bloody shirt" with the wound he received under honorable conditions during his brief combat service with the 10th Mountain Division in northern Italy. But, since at least the mid-1980s…Mr. Dole has been in league with the fascist enemies of the US and their children in abetting the erection of a neo-fascist state in Croatia and a state headed by an identified Nazi youth leader, Alija Izetbegovic, in Bosnia. Dole has also attempted to steal Kosovo for the heirs of the Albanians who served in the SS Skanderbeg Mountain Division. In this scheming, Mr. Dole has betrayed his own military service and broken faith with all American and Allied veterans of World War II. It was not for this easy campaign money and twisted policy that my father and uncles fought the Germans and Japanese.

Between Ricardel's prominent positions and the tens of millions flowing from Croatian lobbies into congressional campaigns circa 1990 (despite the spate of Croatian terrorism here in the '70s and '80s), is it any mystery how the U.S. found itself siding in the Balkans with all of Hitler's old friends? Not only in Croatia, but in Kosovo and Bosnia, with Himmler's revived Bosnian-Muslim Handzar division. Every time, against the Serbs. Those Balkanites who had held Hitler off, into the Russian winter, making his defeat at Stalingrad possible (not to mention rescued more than 500 downed U.S. pilots).

That this Croatian-American was ousted by a Slovenian-American First Lady is symbolic, even if the actual spat was far from the historical turmoil that started when Croatia and Slovenia coordinated their secessions and usurped Yugoslav borders, a hasty and illegal move that subsequently locked the two former partners in a fight that continues to this day (over wine and sausages, over the Bay of Piran, a nuclear plant, a motorway, a bank, and migrant-stemming border fences).

Ordinarily, Ricardel's office is to "bend over backwards" as "'a full service provider to the First Lady . . . [and] if there was conflict…it would fall upon the NSC staff to make it right,'" according to NSC veterans speaking to Vanity Fair. Clearly, Melania didn't appreciate being treated instead like Old Country peasantry. The same week that all this happened, her husband, the American president, was being lectured by Emmanuel Macron that "nationalism is inherently treasonous."

But it was nationalism that the West—Germany, U.S., Great Britain and France at the helm—stoked, unleashed, and used in Yugoslavia (while projecting it as "Serbian nationalism"), ensuring that the country's inevitable disintegration would be as violent as possible, and ultimately breaking it up into mono-ethnic statelets. One wonders what Emmanuel "nationalism-is-the-exact-opposite-of-patriotism" Macron would call Ricardel's nationalism for her homeland, which informed her unquestioned "American" patriotism. Whether subconsciously or not, this daughter of Croatia was, effectively, "For the Homeland, Ready!" as the Ustasha slogan went. And, darkly, made America so as well.

Among the dozen or so positions Ricardel has been offered in the days since her banishment by Melania is an ambassadorship to former Axis ally Estonia, which today seeks U.S. "protection" against Russia, as Croatia once had against Yugoslavia. It's a rather far-flung assignment, and she turned it down.

Hopefully America will too.

(COMMENT, BELOW)

Julia Gorin, a former refusenik, is a widely published opinion writer and essayist whose book "Hillarisms: The Unmaking of the First Female President" is the only original humor volume on the 2016 Democratic presidential candidate.