🚀 go-pugleaf

From Vietnam to Serbia
Strange are the ways of men! It feels like only yesterday that the New
York Times was denouncing President Bill as a moral midget, deserving
of the harshest reprobation for fondling Monica Lewinsky's breasts.
And today here's the New York Times doling out measured praise to the
same president for blowing little children in pieces. The Times last
Thursday had pictures of those dead refugees on its cover, bombed by
one of NATO's aviators. Editorial page editor Howell Raines staked out
the Times official view that "For now, NATO must sustain and intensify
the bombing." What a weird guy Raines must be. Kiss Monica's tits and
he goes crazy. Bomb peasants and he shouts for more.

Maybe some corner of Clinton's brain reckons that bombs on Serbia will
extinguish Monica Lewinksy from popular memory. But what man of mature
judgment and compassion would not prefer to be remembered by the Starr
report than by bomb craters and dead bodies? Many people thought
Clinton would be the first president who would somehow prefer Starr's
volume as his epitaph, however embarrassing. But no. Like all the
others he wants craters and corpses as his requiem.

Being a peacenik is definitely pass�. Liberals are learning once
again--did they every truly forget--that it's fun to be a warmonger
and cheer the high explosive as it falls. After suffering indigestion
towards the end of the Vietnam affair, they got the taste for war
again in the mid-1990s, with Bosnia. They became the "laptop
bombardiers," an apt phrase coined by Simon Jenkins in The Spectator
in 1995.

Back then, there wasn't a week, for months on end, that Anthony Lewis
didn't call for the bombardment of Serbia. The Serbs became demons,
monsters, and Milosevic the most demonic monster of all. Last week I
ran across an interesting piece by an Indian, Lt General Satish
Nambiar who had been First Force Commissioner and Head of Mission of
the United Nations force deployed in the former Yugoslavia from March
1992 to March 1993. He was writing in an Indian journal. "Portraying
the Serbs as evil and everybody else as good was not only
counterproductive but dishonest," the general writes. "According to my
experience all sides were guilty but only the Serbs would admit that
they were no angels while the others would insist that they were."

Nambiar says accurately that there were plenty of chances of agreement
on a Bosnian settlement in the mid-1990s but the Americans always
nixed them. There was the Lisbon plan and then the Vance-Owen plan,
both not so different from the final Dayton plan. But the trouble was
that the US, amid the furious screams of the liberals, refused to
admit the Serbs had legitimate grievances and rights.

In Britain there was a coalition running from Margaret Thatcher to the
Laborite New Statesman in favor of bombing the Serbs. Ken Livingston,
the pinko firebrand of London, bellowed for bombs. So did the Thinking
Woman's Crumpet (my sister-in-law's wry description of him), Michael
Ignatieff. In this country the laptop bombardiers crossed from the
Wall Street Journal editorial page, which likes to bomb anything,
(though most of all, Little Rock) to William Safire, to Anthony Lewis,
to the Democratic Socialists of America.

The worst offender was the press, which carefully ignored detailed
accounts of how the Bosnian Muslims were manipulating western opinion
most notoriously by almost certainly lobbing a missile in to a
marketplace filled with their own people. When the Croats ethnically
cleansed the Krajina of hundreds of thousands of Serbs--the biggest
such cleansing in the Balkans since World War II--with direction from
US military and CIA officer, reporters and commentators mostly looked
the other way or actually cheered. "The Serbs Asked For It," exulted
the headline on a piece in the Los Angeles Times by pundit William
Pfaff. Monitors for the European Union prepared a report on the Croat
atrocities, and though it was confidential, Robert Fisk of the London
Independent was able to get a copy. "Evidence of atrocities; an
average of six corpses a day, continue to emerge...the corpses--some
fresh, some decomposed--are mainly of old men. Many have been shot in
the back of the head or had throats slit, others have been
mutilated...Serbian homes and lands continue to be looted. The crimes
have been perpetrated by the HV (Croatian Army) the CR (Croatian
Police) and CR civilians. There have been no observed attempts to stop
it and the indications point to a scorched earth policy."

If American journalists had bothered to report this, then perhaps
public opinion would have been prepared for the notion that there are
no innocent political players in the Balkans. The better informed the
people are the harder it is to demagogue them with the idea that the
best way forward now is--to get back to Howell Raines and that New
York Times editorial to "sustain and intensify the bombing."

But Bosnia, back in the middle 1990s, rode on a hysteria that was
never properly confronted and now the price is being paid, with
contemptible opportunists like Senator John McCain shouting for
"lights out in Belgrade" (why doesn't McCain have the guts to emulate
John Glenn, get assigned to a bombing crew and go strafe refugees in
Kosovo.) But McCain is more than matched by Democrats like Senator
Carl Levin, or by that brass-lunged fraud from Vermont, Bernard
Sanders, "socialist progressive," who has endorsed Clinton's bombs. 

Well over two-thirds of the Democrats in the House are cheering the
bombs, and senatorial liberals like Barbara Boxer are discovering the
joys of war. "I never believed I'd go back and vote on air strikes,"
she marveled in an article in the Boston Globe for March 31.

These days, to get a dose of common sense, you have to go over the
Republican side of the aisle and listen to people like Rep Curt Weldon
of Pennsylvania who made a terrific speech in Congress on April 12,
reporting on his contacts with members of the Russian Duma (where
Weldon has many friends), endorsing their idea that Russia should
pledge that Milosevic will abide by the Rambouillet accords on
condition that an international peace-keeping force moves into Kosovo,
devoid of any personnel from nations now bombing Serbia.

Follow this carefully, because the exact nature of such a force is
what's causing bombs to fall on civilians in Belgrade and Kosovo.
Remember that Milosevic agreed to virtually everything on the table at
the Rambouillet meeting, with two exceptions. For him the status of
Kosovo as part of Serbia was non-negotiable, and he wouldn't agree to
the stationing of NATO forces on Yugoslav soil, which does after all
include Kosovo. But it's clear enough that a solution could have been
found. As Stephen Erlanger reported in the New York Times on April 8,
the Serbian Parliament, before the bombing started, accepted the idea
of a UN force to monitor a political settlement there. And it's clear
that the notion of an Albanian autonomous region within Serbian Kosovo
was negotiable. After all, Montenegro, Macedonia, Greece--to name only
three--and also the US have pronounced themselves opposed to the idea
of a greater Albania, which is what an independent Kosovo would
presage.

It's plain enough that the US and its NATO subordinates wanted a
confrontation and ultimately forced it. It's also clear that
increasingly vocal and explicit charges by the Russians that the KLA
was supplied by the Germans and the CIA have merit. The KLA itself was
roundly denounced--before the bombings--in the London Times, as a
Maoist gang fueled by heroin trafficking. (This is standard operating
procedure for a CIA operation, as any scrutiny of recent histories of
Afghanistan, or south-east Asia will attest.)

So the NATO bombs began to fall and, exactly as could have been
predicted, the Serbian brutalities in Kosovo escalated and the tidal
wave of refugees began. Everything has gone according the script. NATO
bombs destroying Serbian civilian infrastructure: power plants, sewage
treatment, electricity and gas and oil supplies. Everything that's hit
is hastily described by NATO spokesmen as "dual purpose," (i.e.,
possibly also for Serb military use) unless it's obvious to all that
only peasants, with no conceivable "dual purposes" have been blasted
to bits. Wednesday last saw the mad NATO supreme commander, Wesley
Clark, utter his most deliberate and obvious lie to date, when he said
that "There was a military convoy and a refugee convoy. We struck the
Serb convoy and we have very strong evidence that the Serbs then
retaliated by attacking the column of refugees." By the next day it
became clear that there was no "Serb convoy," no "very strong
evidence" and that an Albanian column of refugees on tractors had been
killed by NATO bombers. 

By the end of last week the Germans were surfacing a plan for
international peacekeepers to move in, after a cease-fire gained by
the ending of aggressive Serbian operations in Kosovo. The transition
from this to a negotiated agreement guaranteed by non-belligerent
forces under UN auspices is not too hard, unless the US refuses to
relinquish its overall goal of making NATO the arbiter of Europe's
future. This is what the war and the bombing are about. On this
strategy which presumes a continued refusal to let Russia have any
role in securing a ceasefire or peace settlement, there can be no
truce or suspension of hostilities. Indeed there can only be a ground
war, with NATO troops, following Hitler's old invasion plans, which
Adolf called "Operation Punishment," because the Serbs overthrew those
who sided with him and refused to knuckle under. Serbia was then
invaded by Germany, with Italian and Hungarian support. Now US
generals are poring over those old Nazi war plans, even while they
carefully deny it's an option.

To date it's been a lovely war from the American point of view. Only
three captives, and one Stealth shot down. (We like that Serb sign,
"Sorry, we didn't know it was invisible.") A ground war? Those who
keep talk about the need to "see this through" have probably forgotten
what a ground war is really like. People have talked so long about "a
new Vietnam" that they don't recognize it when it finally slouches
round the corner. Not just 70 dead refugees: thousands and thousands
of dead civilians. Thousands of dead soldiers. Serbian villages being
flattened. Our boys being debauched and corrupted by fighting against
a people defending their homeland.

This really does take us back to somewhere round 1962 or so, when all
the Kennedy liberals and all the Eisenhower "internationalists"
thought war in Vietnam was a great and necessary idea. The Republican
isolationists had been put out of business by then, ever since the
Republican senator Vandenberg signed on to the cold war in the 1940s.
But these days there is no communist threat. The Chinese premier just
took America by storm, without so much as a weapon in his hand, except
for the magic words, "cheap labor" and "big markets." Maybe our only
hope now is that Republican isolationist tradition. Right now main
only confusion is whether to vote for Pat Buchanan or Dan Quayle, the
only presidential candidates to oppose the war. We've always loved
Marilyn Quayle, with those wonderful great teeth, big enough to chomp
an apple through a picket fence. A Vote for Quayle is a Vote for
Peace! The essence of a properly functioning corporate democracy is
that there are no agreeable choices. CP