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

[Chas. 'Mark' Bee]

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "C. G. Estabrook" <galliher at uiuc.edu>
To: <peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net>
Sent: Friday, February 09, 2007 3:58 PM
Subject: Re: [Peace-discuss] Iraq and Darfur: the politics of war crimes


> 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

  So I guess my question still stands.  What was the economic payoff, 
related to the cynosure of US foreign policy, ME oil reserves?

  Also, how does quashing a bunch of rebels reduce Sudan?

>
>
> 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?
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