TWENTY REASONS WHY NATO’S WAR SUCKS
Even the Secretary of State isn’t sure what we’re doing in Yugoslavia. Madeleine Albright earlier this week said that NATO just wanted to “Send Milosevic a message.” When a pool reporter pointed out that she had earlier said that the NATO goal was to STOP Milosevic, she hesitated and said, “That, too.”
The Serbs were behaving with relative restraint in Kosovo last year (by Balkan standards) until we started bombing Serbia. Then they decided they had nothing to lose, and started driving Albanians out in earnest. Wasn’t this what we were trying to prevent?
These endless comparisons of thugs like Milosevic to Adolf Hitler insult the public’s intelligence and cheapen the special, awful legacy of WWII. Before America started calling Milosevic a new Hitler, it used the same tactic to demonize everyone from Saddam Hussein to Manuel Noriega to Osama bin Laden to the Ayatollah Khomeini to Fidel Castro—we at the eXile even found an American-owned newspaper in Africa which, in complete earnest, compared Kenneth Starr to the Fuhrer. Gore Vidal put it this way: “The CIA’s demonizing process is fascinating, swift, unvarying. Each demon admires Hitler. Keeps a copy of Mein Kampf beside his bed.” Hitler killed six million Jews; he made lampshades out of little children; he tried to take over the entire world. Milosevic is a monster, but he’s not close to a record like that. Comparing Milosevic to Hitler proves that the U.S. government no longer trusts its citizens to make real moral distinctions.
If ethnic massacres bother us so much, why didn’t we send troops to stop the massacre of a half-million Tutsi in Rwanda? Why did we back the Russian bloodbath in Chechnya? Why did the US defend Pol Pot when the Vietnamese interrupted his autogenocide? What’s happening in Kosovo is a parking-lot scuffle compared to these horrors, so why are we going in?
This war has revealed the American media to be a more effective conduit for state propaganda than the state-controlled press of the Soviet Union.
NATO committed a series of rhetorical blasphemies to drum up support for the action. Here’s one word they shouldn’t have used, but did: Genocide. (n) The systematic, planned extermination of a racial or ethnic group. (Greek: genos, race + -CIDE, Latin: caedere, to kill). On March 29th, British Defense Minister George Robertson said: “We are confronting a regime which is intent on genocide,” while German Defense Minister Rudolf Scharping said on the same day that the Serbs were committing a genocide. Folks, in a genocide, you don’t let a single refugee go. You kill every single one of them, either out of hatred or because you fear they might come back some day. The Serbs don’t qualify. Just so we don’t forget, “genocide” means to kill everyone in a race. The Serbs are doing something else: savagely expelling a hostile ethnic group from territory it claims as its own. There are many precedents for this. In 1945, the Czechs expelled over two million ethnic Germans from the Sudetenland, causing horrific human tragedies in the name of ethnically cleansing their nation. No one called that a genocide. It was evil and horrible, but it wasn’t a genocide. As of this past Tuesday, the UN was using words like “extreme brutality and ruthlessness,” and “mass deportations” to describe the Serb actions, while Britain had toned it down to “brutal ethnic cleansing.” This week, now that the West might be forced to take in refugees exactly because they’ve falsely raised the moral stakes so high, the word “genocide” has been dropped, meaning we can intern them behind barbed-wire at Guantanamo Bay with a clear conscience.
NATO’s bombing violates both the UN charter and NATO treaty itself. Article 2, section 7 of the UN Charter expressly forbids UN intervention “in matters which are essentially within the domestic jurisdiction of any state....” Both the United States and NATO are signatories to the UN Charter and bound by it under international law. By bombing Serbia without first getting Security Council approval, NATO broke the law. Making them war criminals. Not that we expect NATO to try itself in the Hague...
It sounds like an old issue, but it’s still valid: the United States Constitution prohibits the use of military force without a 2/3 majority vote in both houses of congress, except in cases of emergency. That Presidents have in this half of this century done so in Korea, Vietnam, the Dominican Republic, Grenada, Panama, Iraq, Afghanistan, and Sudan, among others, does not make it right or even legal. As congressman Tom Campbell (R-CA), a former Stanford law professor, said last week in voicing his objections to yet another “undeclared” war: “Previous constitutional violations do not justify subsequent ones.”
Despite its moral posturing about Serb ethnic cleansing, NATO itself has provided air cover for the same kinds of atrocities it now accuses the Serbs of committing. In 1995, NATO planes, responding to what many now suspect was a Bosnian-government-staged massacre of Muslim civilians, attacked and crippled the Bosnian Serb army with punishing air assaults. At the same time, a massive two-pronged ground assault was unleashed on the Serbs both from Croatia into Serb-populated Krajina and from the Muslim-Croat alliance into Serb-populated regions of central and west Bosnia. Nearly all of Croatia’s 600,000 Serbs were brutally expelled, fulfilling Ante Pavelic’s Ustashe dream. Several hundred thousand more Bosnian Serbs were uprooted in the Croat-Muslim offensive within Bosnia. Altogether, in a matter of weeks, up to a million Serbs were ethnically cleansed. No one knows how many died.
The war marks the return of liberal warmongers. You thought they became extinct in 1968, but you were wrong. NATO head Javiar Solana was a Marxist, Socialist and anti-NATO demonstrator up to the mid-80s; Tony Blair leads the once-left-wing Labor Party; Clinton burned his draft card; Gerhard Schroeder is a Socialist, and his Foreign Minister a Greens Party sellout; French Premier Lionel Jospin is a Socialist; and vermicelli-spined hawk Italian Prime Minister Massimo D’Alema heads the most left-wing government in Italian history. A horrifying bunch of Eurofags trying to pass themselves off as pinstriped “realists”. In other words, meet the New Left, same as the Old Left. America has plenty of its own liberal war groupies, too. Ever on the Easter Egg hunt for an easily-defeatable Hitler to smash, America’s liberals thought they’d found it in Milosevic. Now that the air war has failed (no duh!), they’re crying for a ground war. Among the more conspicuous: Former avuncular nice guy Mark Shields, who now praises Clinton for showing “courage” in flouting popular opinion by bombing the Serbs, and called on him to prepare Americans for some serious slaughter. Other pampered liberals screaming to throw American kids into a Kosovo ground war include Sen. Joe Biden, Joseph Lieberman and Charles Robb. What these liberals never understand is that no matter how bravely they rattle America’s military saber, they’ll never, ever be feared or respected by anyone but their page boys.
Bill Clinton reportedly said “We can’t lose this one” at a White House policy meeting a few nights into the bombing, providing an ugly insight into the extent to which Americans view the entire world, and their role in it, as a sports contest. This is just one more reason why the rest of the world has gradually come to hate America’s guts—because military action is a game for Americans, who have nothing but their careers on the line, while for people in other countries-not just for Serbia, but for Albania, Montenegro, Croatia, Macedonia, even for Italy and the rest of the countries neighboring the Balkans—this is a life-or-death situation. How do you think people in these countries like to see Clinton fretting about losing “this one”?
What’s all this “we,” anyway? Are you planning to join up in time to take part in the first wave of the attack on Kosovo? If not, then drop the “we” stuff. One of the worst verbal consequences of the war is that people who have no intention of volunteering to fight in Kosovo will use the pronoun “we” to describe the NATO forces, saying things like “We kicked some ass!” when discussing the war. Anyone using “we” to describe the NATO forces in Kosovo should be forcibly inducted and sent to the front.
We’ve just about smoked our last pack of cruise missiles, and our bag of stealth planes is dented. Guess who’s paying for the next trip to the store?
Germany Lies Again! Germany has readopted Goebbels’s principle that “The bigger the lie, the more believable.” On April 15 German Defense Minister Rudolf Scharping announced that the refugee column bombed by NATO had in fact been shelled by Serb artillery. On the 19th, he claimed that 3,000 men disappeared from Pristina in a single night—a night whose date he couldn’t name. This followed Scharping’s March 31st statement that Serbia had set up concentration camps, an allegation later quietly dropped. The Germans have apparently decided that the best way to purge that nagging ol’ war guilt is to manufacture a new enemy just as bad as they were, and then destroy that enemy. Now if they could only get their stories straight...
NATO Disinformation. The NATO bombing of the refugee column revealed NATO’s willingess to lie shamelessly. At first, NATO officials denied the slaughter; then they blamed the Serbs for having bombed the refugees with their own jets; then they claimed that after the NATO planes had bombed “only military objects,” Serbs in the convoy went crazy and started shooting Albanian refugees. When televised images of charred, shredded corpses didn’t jibe with a shoot-out, Germany’s Rudolf “Al” Scharping said that the column had been attacked by Serb artillery.
Cowardice. The attack also revealed what wussies NATO are. The pilot was flying at 15,000 feet, the minimum altitude NATO commanders will allow for fear of Serb air defenses. That doesn’t quite show the sort of resolve that will earn you the respect of your enemy—or allow you to distinguish refugees from military convoys.
Priorities. NATO’s unapologetic official reaction to the refugee slaughter makes the whole moral-superiority argument a little difficult to swallow. It seems NATO is more concerned about losing a single pilot than crisping entire convoys of Albanians.
Irrational Numbers. NATO’s estimate for the number of Albanians killed by the Serbs is suffering from hyperinflation. On April 17th, NATO spokesman Jamie Shea claimed that the Serbs had killed more than 3,200 Albanians. On April 18th, the U.S. ambassador for war crimes David Scheffer charged that 3,200 was “a very low estimate,” and upped the figure to 100,000. Not to be outdone, the State Department issued a written report on Monday, April 19th, claiming that the number of Albanians killed could be as high as 500,000. It does seem odd that just when NATO has to admit having killed 75 refugees, Albanian victims of Serb brutality increase fifteen-fold overnight.
Expulsion or Detention? On Friday, April 16th, UNHCR spokesman Kris Janowski accused Serbia of trying “...to expel the entire ethnic [Albanian] population of Kosovo.” On Monday, April 19th, Janowski claimed that Albanians “are being forcibly prevented from leaving Kosovo.” Which is it?
Mad Albright? The following is an excerpt from General Colin Powell’s book My American Journey: “My constant, unwelcome message at all the meetings on Bosnia was simply that we should not commit military forces....Madeleine Albright, our ambassador to the UN, asked me in frustration, ‘What’s the point of having this superb military...if we can’t use it?’”
The eXile is a bi-weekly English language newspaper based in
Moscow, Russia. The editors, Mark Ames and Matt Taibbi, will put out a book
this fall, “The eXile: Sex, Drugs and Libel in the New Russia”, published by
Grove/Atlantic Press. The eXile’s web site address is www.exile.ru
Reprinted with permission
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Updated: 5/6/2000