[Peace-discuss] Iraq and Darfur: the politics of war crimes

[C. G. Estabrook]

We have the answer from the horse's mouth, as it were.  One of the kept 
intellectuals of the Clinton administration, Strobe Talbott was Deputy 
Secretary of State from 1993 until 2001 and a long-time FOB.  He was the 
lead American negotiator and director of a joint National Security 
Council-Pentagon-State Department task force on diplomacy during the 
bombing.  He's now the head of the Brookings think-tank.  In a 
"Foreword" to a book by his communications director, John Norris, 
"Collision Course: NATO, Russia, and Kosovo" (2005), he confirms that 
the books tells "how events looked and felt at the time to those of us 
who were involved” in the war in Kosovo.

Here's what Norris says: "The gravitational pull [sic] of the community 
of western democracies highlights why Milosevic's Yugoslavia had become 
such an anachronism. As nations throughout the region sought to reform 
their economies, mitigate ethnic tensions, and broaden civil society, 
Belgrade seemed to delight in continually moving in the opposite 
direction. It is small wonder NATO and Yugoslavia ended up on a 
collision course. It was Yugoslavia's resistance to the broader trends 
of political and economic reform -- not the plight of the Kosovar 
Albanians -- that best explains NATO's war" (p. xxii f.).

The excuse that Clinton offered for bombing Serbia in his March 1999 
speech was simply false: the real reason for the US/NATO attack was not 
the people of Kosovo, who were supposedly suffering a "genocide."  (For 
a version of that speech, see <http://www.zmag.org/satire.htm>.) 
Instead, it was the refusal of Serbia to subordinate itself to the 
neoliberal social and economic programs by which the US and the EU were 
incorporating Eastern Europe.  (Remember that to secure Soviet approval 
of a united Germany remaining in NATO, the USG promised that NATO would 
never expand further east...)  The US meant to remove a "threat of a 
good example" of resistance to US domination of the world economy (just 
as it did in Vietnam), as the Rambouillet agreement showed.  And they 
did. --CGE


Chas. 'Mark' Bee wrote:
> 
> ----- Original Message ----- From: "C. G. Estabrook" <galliher at uiuc.edu>
> To: <peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net>
> Sent: Friday, February 09, 2007 12:08 PM
> Subject: Re: [Peace-discuss] Iraq and Darfur: the politics of war crimes
> 
> 
>> A good article.  See also the earlier pieces (links at the end).
>>
>> I think it's worthwhile drawing the parallel Kosovo/Darfur (as in 
>> another article in the series), which is not just accidental.  In both 
>> cases the USG (Republicans and Democrats) wants to use someone else 
>> (NATO, the UN) to reduce a recalcitrant state (Serbia, Sudan) related 
>> to the cynosure of US foreign policy, ME energy reserves.  Washington 
>> has a tendency to try to repeat its effects.  --CGE
> 
>  Just out of curiosity, what was the economic payoff to the US from Kosovo?