[Peace-discuss] covert political positions

[Chas. 'Mark' Bee]

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "C. G. Estabrook" <galliher at uiuc.edu>
To: "Chas. 'Mark' Bee" <c-bee1 at itg.uiuc.edu>; 
<peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net>
Sent: Tuesday, April 10, 2007 12:00 PM
Subject: Re: [Peace-discuss] covert political positions


> 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.

  No connection shown there - that was a PNAC priority.  As anyone knows, 
correlation does not imply causation.

>
> 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.

  Which proves nothing at all.

>
> 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.

  Nice story.

>
> 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,

Umm...  =)

 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.).

  One guy's opinion.

>
> 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.

  I see we are back to the blather.

>
> 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

  Relevance needed here.
>
>
> 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...

  I can see why you snipped the rest.  You failed utterly.