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

[C. G. Estabrook]

The map makes the matter clear.  SW Asia, like NE Africa, is to the US 
part of the approaches to the ME.  Read about the US base in Kosovo, 
Camp Bondsteel: 
<http://www.globalsecurity.org/military/facility/camp-bondsteel.htm>.

Quashing a bunch of rebels does not reduce Sudan.  Supporting them, as 
the US proposes to do via the UN, does, as supporting the KLA in Kosovo 
reduced Serbia.  --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 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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