[Peace-discuss] A Progressive Legacy

[C. G. Estabrook]

"Doesn't it make you feel good -- doesn't it make you feel humanitarian -- to 
know that little children are still being killed in your name, even ten years 
after Bill Clinton killed hundreds of innocent civilians to make the Serbs open 
up their markets and cut their social programs? And isn't it great that the 
Clintonistas are back in the saddle again, riding herd with Barack Obama?"

	TUE 24 MAR 2009
	A Progressive Legacy: Bill Clinton's Long War in Serbia Rages On
	WRITTEN BY CHRIS FLOYD	

Progresso-Americans are of course united in their rightful condemnation of 
George W. Bush's invasion of Iraq. Those on the milder, "centrist" side will 
boldly aver that the invasion was a "mistake," was "done badly," or was "the 
wrong war at the wrong time." A much smaller number -- those not seeking jobs 
with the Obama administration or sinecures in "serious" media outlets and think 
tanks -- will denounce it forthrightly as an act of evil, a war crime of 
monstrous, murderous proportions. But all the groovy great and good agree that 
the Iraq War has been a major harsher of America's buzz.

But when it comes to an earlier instance of a young president from a Southern 
state waging a unilateral, undeclared, unsanctioned war against a nation that 
had not attacked the United States and posed no threat to it, progressive unity 
falls by the wayside -- although the "serious" vs. "shrill" dynamic still holds. 
There are still a small number of Progresso-Americans who will condemn Bill 
Clinton's war on Serbia as a war crime; but most P-As are perfectly happy to 
laud this precusor to Bush's Iraq atrocity as one of America's many "good wars."

Noam Chomsky, arguably the most "unserious" analyst of American policy out 
there, has, along with many others, thoroughly demolished the alleged case for 
Clinton's civilian-murdering assault on Serbia: i.e., that the Serbs were 
carrying out vast atrocities and mass displacements in Kosovo that could only be 
stopped by NATO bombs. Chomsky followed the radical course of actually 
consulting the abundance of official documentation on the run-up to the war. 
(Consulting documents! You can tell he's no journalist.).There he found 
something curious:

==========
The documentary record is treated with what anthropologists call “ritual 
avoidance.” And there is a good reason. The evidence, which is unequivocal, 
leaves the Party Line in tatters. The standard claim that “Serbia’s atrocities 
had of course provoked NATO action” directly reverses the unequivocal facts: 
NATO’s action provoked Serbia’s atrocities, exactly as anticipated...

In brief, it was well understood by the NATO leadership that the bombing was not 
a response to the huge atrocities in Kosovo, but was their cause, exactly as 
anticipated. Furthermore, at the time the bombing was initiated, there were two 
diplomatic options on the table: the proposal of NATO, and the proposal of the 
[Serbians] (suppressed in the West, virtually without exception). After 78 days 
of bombing, a compromise was reached between them, suggesting that a peaceful 
settlement might have been possible, avoiding the terrible crimes that were the 
anticipated reaction to the NATO bombing.
=========

Chomsky's September 2008 article, "Humanitarian Imperialism," in Monthly Review, 
will give you chapter and verse of this case, which he has also spelled out at 
book length. But what is perhaps most interesting is the new confirmation he has 
found for the real casus belli behind the mass bombing operation dubbed, with 
truly macabre cynicism, "Merciful Angel":

==========
Without running through the rest of the dismal record, it is hard to think of a 
case where the justification for the resort to criminal violence is so weak. But 
the pure justice and nobility of the actions has become a doctrine of religious 
faith, understandably: What else can justify the chorus of self-glorification 
that brought the millennium to an end? What else can be adduced to support the 
“emerging norms” that authorize the idealistic New World and its allies to use 
force where their leaders “believe it to be just”?

Some have speculated on the actual reasons for the NATO bombing. The highly 
regarded military historian Andrew Bacevich dismisses humanitarian claims and 
alleges that along with the Bosnia intervention, the bombing of Serbia was 
undertaken to ensure “the cohesion of NATO and the credibility of American 
power” and “to sustain American primacy” in Europe. Another respected analyst, 
Michael Lind, writes that “a major strategic goal of the Kosovo war was 
reassuring Germany so it would not develop a defense policy independent of the 
U.S.-dominated NATO alliance.” Neither author presents any basis for the 
conclusions.

Evidence does exist however, from the highest level of the Clinton 
administration. Strobe Talbott, who was responsible for diplomacy during the 
war, wrote the foreword to a book on the war by his associate John Norris. 
Talbott writes that those who want to know “how events looked and felt at the 
time to those of us who were involved” in the war should turn to Norris’s 
account, written with the “immediacy that can be provided only by someone who 
was an eyewitness to much of the action, who interviewed at length and in depth 
many of the participants while their memories were still fresh, and who has had 
access to much of the diplomatic record.” Norris states that “it was 
Yugoslavia’s resistance to the broader trends of political and economic 
reform—not the plight of Kosovar Albanians—that best explains NATO’s war.” That 
the motive for the NATO bombing could not have been “the plight of Kosovar 
Albanians” was already clear from the extensive Western documentary record. But 
it is interesting to hear from the highest level that the real reason for the 
bombing was that Yugoslavia was a lone holdout in Europe to the political and 
economic programs of the Clinton administration and its allies. Needless to say, 
this important revelation also is excluded from the canon.
=========

And needless to say, the malign effects of Bill Clinton's stern chastisement of 
Serbia for its failure to get with the globalization program -- i.e., the very 
program that has now brought the entire world to the brink of economic ruin -- 
are still going on. The BBC reports this week that thousands of unexploded 
cluster bombs still litter the Serbian landscape, still killing people or 
maiming them horribly -- and will keep on doing so for decades:

==========
Every year the Maksic family like to visit the river near their home in southern 
Serbia. They go to remember 12-year-old Miroslav.

Miroslav had just been for a swim with his friend in Bujanovac, when he was 
killed by a cluster bomblet. His friend was seriously injured.

It was a hot August day, a few months after the end of the 11-week Nato bombing 
campaign, launched on 24 March 1999 in an effort to push Serb forces out of the 
province of Kosovo.

The unexploded ordnance had been lying discarded in a field, it had been dropped 
as part of a cluster bomb....

A decade on from the Nato bombing campaign, more than 90,000 Serbs are still in 
danger from unexploded cluster munitions, according to a recent report funded by 
the Norwegian foreign ministry. The report says they face a daily threat and 
estimates that there are some 2,500 unexploded devices in 15 areas of Serbia.
=========

In a bitter irony, the cluster bomb problem has been made worse by the fact that 
Serbia has indeed finally gotten with the program and is seeking to please the 
Potomac overlords. The Serbian government has joined the bipartisan elite in 
Washington in refusing to sign the international treaty banning cluster bombs -- 
a refusal which hinders efforts to cleanse the country of the overlord's 
leavings. As the BBC reports:

==========
Sladjan Vuckovic says the anniversary is also difficult for him. The 43-year-old 
retired Serb military officer was clearing cluster munitions from Mount Kopaonik 
in central Serbia when one exploded. He lost both his hands and part of his 
right leg, and his face was disfigured.

"I can't forget how my life has changed since that day. I can't take my children 
for a walk, I can't hold their hands," he says. "It is especially hard when I 
think of Serbia, the country that I fought for, not signing the convention on 
banning cluster bombs."
==========

Doesn't it make you feel good -- doesn't it make you feel humanitarian -- to 
know that little children are still being killed in your name, even ten years 
after Bill Clinton killed hundreds of innocent civilians to make the Serbs open 
up their markets and cut their social programs? And isn't it great that the 
Clintonistas are back in the saddle again, riding herd with Barack Obama? 
Doesn't that fill you with hope for the future? Why, there are probably 
thousands of 12-year-olds yet unborn who will die from cluster bombs yet 
undropped in humanitarian interventions yet unlaunched by the defenders of humanity.

NOTE: We would be remiss if we failed to note one of the most paradigmatic 
statements issued by a "public intellectual" in the United States during the 
bombing of civilians in Serbia. It was, as you might expect, our old friend (and 
a friend to all humankind), the Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist of the New York 
Times, Mr. Thomas Friedman, who in April 1999 called explicitly for the 
infliction of a war crime -- the targeting of civilian infrastructure -- on Serbia:

=========
"Let's at least have a real war... It should be lights out in Belgrade: every 
power grid, water pipe, bridge, road and war-related factory has to be 
targeted...Every week you ravage Kosovo is another decade we will set your 
country back by pulverizing you. You want 1950? We can do 1950. You want 1389? 
We can do 1389 too."
==========

Here is the true face of the American elite: ignorant, arrogant and 
bloodthirsty. But serious; oh-so-serious.


Full article with links at
http://chris-floyd.com/component/content/article/3/1727-a-progressive-legacy-bill-clintons-long-war-in-serbia-rages-on.html