[Peace-discuss] covert political positions

[C. G. Estabrook]

Clinton showed the way by his devastation of Iraq, along with his airstrikes on Iraq and Afghanistan.  The account by Bush's first treasury secretary describes how that administration came to power determined to attack Iraq, even before 9-11. 

As to the Clinton administration's motive for attacking Serbia, look at the map.  Both Serbia and Somalia are on the approaches to the Middle East, which is what the US really cares about.  As a result of Clinton's attacks, the US now has a military base with a seven-mile perimeter in the middle of Kosovo.

Furthermore, the former Yugoslavia and its successor state Serbia  presented "the threat of a good example" (as Vietnam did in the '60s) -- an alternative model of development not coordinated with American control of the world-wide economy. 

As for the "humanitarian" motives for Clinton's attacks, 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 "Friend of Bill."  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. xxiif.).

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's remaining in NATO, the Bush-1 administration  promised that NATO would never expand further east. Clinton violated that agreement and arranged for Hungary, the Czech Republic and Poland to join NATO, then used NATO for the reduction of Serbia, after which the Bush-2 administration continued to expand NATO to the Russian border.  --CGE


Chas. 'Mark' Bee wrote:

>  I'm looking for proof that Clinton "showed the way" for 
> Bush, and that Serbia wasn't undertaken on humanitarian
> grounds...