Our government is destroying Serbia. Let us understand that, even if we do not all feel the same about it. By all indications, Clinton is intending to step up the bombing campaign against Serbia, as he has been doing since he started it. When this is all over, Serbia will have been "bombed back to the Stone Age", as Vietnam and Iraq were before it. Necessarily this involves a great deal of death. Now this ranges of course from first-degree murder (e.g. the purposeful killing of Serbia's soldiers, who still count as human even after they've been drafted), second-degree murder (e.g. civilians being killed due to indiscriminate bombing or error; at least a hundred civilians have been killed so far, according to the Serb government, though independent journalists have only been able to confirm about twenty), and manslaughter (e.g. the sick dying in hospitals from lack of medicine or water, as is now common in Iraq; this could arguably also include the ethnic Albanians who have died traveling to Macedonia or Albania, especially if Clinton received as much warning about this happening as is now believed).

As I have written before, the burden of proof is not on me to explain why we shouldn't be killing Serbs, in the same way that the courts do not subpoena men to testify as to why they haven't killed their wives. So what has been the argument so far to justify this destruction? "Slobodan Milosevic's repression of the Albanians," says the Clinton apologists. "We had to do something!" The counter to this argument, of course, is that we didn't have to do anything. A reasonable humanitarian foreign policy might be, as some war opponents have suggested, "First do no harm." By such a standard, of course, the bombing has created far worse conditions than have existed since the Nazis occupied Yugoslavia, especially for the ethnic Albanians in Kosovo, but also for the Serbs in Serbia. So, no, we didn't have to bomb.

A fitting analogy has been given by Mark Steel in the London Guardian: "It's like arriving at a burning house with no water, and screaming: 'Well chuck petrol on it then, at least it's something!'" Or, as Noam Chomsky made the same point, "Suppose I see Jones robbing Smith in the street, and I feel I just can't let that happen, so I pick up a gun and shoot them both. Was there an alternative? Well, at least one: don't shoot them."
 

Media Demonization of Serbia and Slobodan Milosevic

According to Time Magazine's "A Kosovo Primer" web site, the modern history of Kosovo begins in 1989. At that time, says Time, "President Slobodan Milosevic revoked [Kosovo's] autonomy in 1989 in keeping with his nationalist campaign for a 'Greater Serbia.' … The revoking of Kosovo's autonomy sparked the current conflict, as the territory's ethnic-Albanian majority sought to restore their cultural rights."

Nobody who has attempted to understand the Kosovo conflict can take this description seriously. An article by David Binder in the New York Times (11/1/87), written shortly after Milosevic first came to power in Serbia and describing sporadic violence in Kosovo, had a different perspective. "Kosovo is becoming what ethnic Albanian nationalists have been demanding for years, and especially strongly since the bloody rioting by ethnic Albanians in Pristina in 1981 - an 'ethnically pure' Albanian region, a 'Republic of Kosovo' in all but name." (The full article is available on the web at http://www.fair.org/articles/memory-hole.html)

Binder's article states that "Milosevic and his supporters appear to be staking their careers on a strategy of confrontation with the Kosovo ethnic Albanians." Now that Milosevic has been thoroughly demonized, his actions in Croatia, Bosnia, and Kosovo being labelled as "ethnic cleansing" and compared freely by Clinton's Administration with Hitler's "Final Solution", such reporting would now seem biased. Even in the Times, the point of view has been reversed from that of Binder's article: now violent separatist groups like the Kosovo Liberation Army are reacting to the brutal repression of Milosevic, instead of Milosevic's repression being a reaction to ethnic Albanian violence. (Binder has since criticized the strong anti-Serb bias he sees in the media.)

It is important to understand that in the wars in both Bosnia and Kosovo, people claiming to represent all sides committed brutal atrocities. Serbia was certainly not innocent, and may even have been the most brutal, but it is irresponsible and unfair to act as though NATO was somehow defending innocent Bosnian Muslims and Croats from evil Serbs, or that NATO is currently defending helpless Kosovo Albanians against vicious Serbs. The currently popular views - that all war criminals are Serbs, that all atrocities are the result of Milosevic's "Greater Serbia" campaign, that Serbs cannot live with other ethnic groups because of ancient hatreds - are destructive and unfair, especially when used to justify NATO's bombing. It is useful first to understand how the Serbs became the Black Knights of Yugoslavia.

Ruder-Finn and Death Camps

Roy Gutman of Newsday would win a Pulitzer Prize for his stories about concentration camps in Bosnia. On August 2, 1992, Gutman's story "Death Camp's Survivors Tell of Captivity, Mass Slaughters in Bosnia" discussed the conditions of a camp at Omarska, in Nothern Bosnia. The implication of the provocative title was clearly that Bosnia's Serbs, who were running the camp, were committing a genocide against other ethnic groups, comparable to the Nazi Holocaust. The British news service ITN shortly after took pictures inside the camps, which were widely broadcast and interpreted as evidence of Nazi-like war crimes. However, it was later discovered that the pictures had been misleading, that prisoners were not actually being held behind barbed-wire fences, as the pictures had implied, and that the emaciation of one man was due to disease, not to starvation as was assumed. (For more on this very interesting story, click here.)

Following this, the Public Relations firm Ruder-Finn, which had been hired by both the Croatian and Bosnian governments, encouraged comparisons between Nazi Germany and Serbia. Its goal was to mobilize Western opinion against the Serbs, thereby encouraging Western governments to support the Croatians and especially the Bosnians with weapons. The French television journalist Jacques Merlino interviewed James Harff, then director of Ruder Finn Global Public Affairs, about Ruder-Finn's handling of the Bosnian war. The interview later appeared in Merlino's book, "Les verites Yougoslaves ne sont pas toutes bonnes a dire" (loosely, "Yugoslav truths are not all good for telling"). In it, Harff describes how he mobilized Jewish opinion against the Serbs, which was especially difficult since the Croatian President had denied the Holocaust and was openly anti-Semitic in his book, while the Bosnian Muslim President had argued for a fundamentalist Islamic state. Harff said that by using the Holocaust terminology repeatedly, he was able to make accusations that were so terrible that no later denial could undue the damage.
(Click here to read some excerpts from the book and the interview.)

Some important and appalling stories about supposed Bosnian Serb atrocities were later discovered to have gaps by human rights groups and United Nations agencies. Of course, we must not let the fact that some stories were discredited make us believe that the Bosnian Serbs were innocent. Some especially outrageous Bosnian Serb crimes are well-documented. But there are also appalling stories about Bosnian Muslims and Croats, and crimes against Bosnian Serbs, which went largely unreported. An initial bias had developed against the Serbs, and some journalists claimed it was extremely difficult to get any stories published which featured Serbian victims instead of Serbian aggressors. The belief that the Serbians were generally responsible for the trouble in Yugoslavia has continued to this day, which helps to explain why media accounts of the Serbia-Kosovo dispute have been altered so dramatically since the Bosnian war.

For more on this subject, see for example, the brochure written by leftist Sara Flounders of the International Action Center, http://www.iacenter.org/bosnia/tragedy.htm; and a Serbian site which has reprinted articles by Peter Brock and parts of the interview by Merlino, http://suc.suc.org/~kosta/tar/mediji/mediji-INDEX.html.
 

Analogies between the Iraq War and the Serbian War

The last war of a similar scale to this one was the bombing and subsequent invasion of Iraq, in 1991. Thus, many commentators who either support or oppose this war have done so by contrasting with the war against Iraq. "Liberals" say there was no compelling humanitarian reason to go into Iraq, unlike in Kosovo. "Conservatives" say there was a well-defined and easy-to-achieve goal in the Iraq war, unlike in Kosovo. But both arguments are superficial at best, because the wars are a good deal more similar than many of these pundits have been willing to admit.

The shift in sentiment among politicians and commentators, between the bombing of Iraq in 1991 and the current bombing of Serbia, has been quite remarkable. We can do a direct comparison: consider the 53 current senators who were also senators in January, 1991, when war was being debated in Congress. Twenty-eight of these were Democrats, and twenty-five were Republican. Of these, 17 were simply warmongers who supported both wars. Only three (Bingaman, D, NM; Grassley, R, IA; and Hollings, D, SC) consistently opposed both wars. Thirty-three switched position so as to agree with the President of their own political party. Twenty Democrats who opposed Bush's Iraq adventure have supported Clinton's Serbia adventure, while thirteen Republicans have switched the other way.

Some similiarities between the two wars:

Both were incited rather suddenly to a President worried about his reputation after lying to the public (Bush about the 'no new taxes' pledge, Iran Contra, etc.; Clinton, about Monica and the impeachment, obviously)

Both Presidents had just finished smaller-scale military adventures, which taught them how to unilaterally go to war, in open contempt for international law (Bush in Panama, kidnapping Noriega; Clinton in Iraq, bombing Saddam Hussein because he accused our spies of being spies)

Both were fought for the benefit of small, non-democratic, brutally repressive groups, who deliberately provoked the enemy country (for Bush, the Kuwaiti government, which had been slant-drilling into Iraq's oil fields; for Clinton, the Kosovo Liberation Army, who made their debut by claiming credit for the assassination of hundreds of Serbian police)

Both Presidents spoke of diplomacy, but in reality they drafted crushing demands which they knew the enemy could not and would not accept. Additionally, both Presidents rejected every peace offer made either by the enemy or by the Russians

Both Presidents convinced the public that their goals were humanitarian by taking advantage of persecuted minority groups. These groups were convenient victims, but they would later be left to the repression of the enemy leader, due to the fear of the same minority groups rebelling in American client state (Bush, of course, used the Kurds in northern Iraq, repeating "he's used chemical weapons on his own people", while supporting Turkey in its repression of the Kurds; Clinton is using the Kosovo Albanians, but does not want them to be independent, for fear that the Macedonian Albanians will try to follow the example and cause trouble for one of our clients)

Both wars were fought over regions with great concentrations of natural resources (of course, Kuwait had its oil; Kosovo has the Stari Trg mine, one of the largest mines in Europe, and considered a valuable prize for the Nazis when they seized control of it)

Both enemy countries were demonized by public relations agencies, using stories later proved to be false. The demonizations resulted in both countries being slapped with heavy sanctions, which in turn prevented the enemy countries from hiring their own public relations firms.

Both wars were a great place to try out the Pentagon's new Stealth aircraft in a real conflict situation. (Bush's F-117 fighters, and Clinton's B-2 bombers)

Both enemies had previously vacillated between the U.S. and the U.S.S.R., but had recently been client states of the U.S. Both had made themselves quite poor following policies recommended by the U.S. government (Iraq by going to war with Iran; Yugoslavia by following IMF advice)

Both enemy governments had received assurances from American officials that the actions they eventually took would not be minded by the United States (Saddam Hussein was told by Ambassador April Glaspie that the U.S. had no opinion on its territorial dispute with Kuwait; Slobodan Milosevic was told by U.S. procunsul Robert Gelbard that the U.S. considered the KLA to be "terrorists", suggesting they were worthy of suppression by the same brutal means that U.S. allies Turkey and Colombia have used)

Despite the fact that Clinton has painted a more heartwarming picture of American bombing of a small and poor country than Bush ever bothered to, the conflicts are not substantially different. And clearly they are not different enough to justify the extremely partisan sentiments already expressed over this war. The fact that many Democrats now think it's OK for great numbers of people to die (and great numbers will die, not only directly from the bombs, but also from the destruction of the country's infrastructure combined with harsh punitive sanctions, as happened in Iraq) because they're still defending him over some indiscriminate fellatio is not only disgusting, it's macabre.
 

How NATO Bombing Made the Situation Worse

Although there has been at least one report indicating that refugees arriving at the Macedonian border with Kosovo fled because of NATO bombing, not the Serbs (see London Sunday-Times, "Truth Chokes on the Fog of War", 3/28/99), the vast majority of refugees have told stories of being deliberately driven from their homes by Serbs. Though little is known about what is actually happening in Kosovo, due to the barring of foreign reporters there by Milosevic at the start of the bombing, it is believed by many that these Serbs are operating under the orders of Milosevic. His plan is believed to be to eliminate the Albanians and replace them with the Serb refugees who fled from their homes in Krajina, in Croatia.

This marks a severe escalation in the Kosovo conflict. Formerly, there had been guerrilla warfare; the Kosovo Liberation Army had admitted assassinating both Serbian police and ethnic Albanians accused of collaborating with Serbs; while the Serb police had fought and killed not only KLA guerrillas, but also Albanian civilians in KLA-held towns. The death toll had been about on par with that in other countries where guerrilla wars are happening, especially Turkey (against the Kurds) and in Colombia (against Communist guerrillas). But now, with hundreds of thousands of refugees fleeing Kosovo, there is clearly a crisis of disastrous proportions.

The question to be asked, though it might seem cynical to even contemplate, is whether the Clinton Administration could have expected this as a result of the NATO bombings. There is some evidence that he and others in his cabinet actually expected something like this to happen. For example, on the Today show, when NATO's supreme military commander Wesley Clark "said he had fully expected that Milosevic would step up aggression against ethnic Albanians, whose plight sparked the NATO action this week. 'This was entirely predictable at this stage,' Clark said." (AP article.) The Washington Post has also reported that CIA director George Tenet had predicted that the bombing might lead to a "Serbian campaign of ethnic cleansing."

But why bomb? What now seems to have happened is that President Clinton and Secretary of State Madeline Albright decided in advance not to negotiate with Milosevic or even the KLA. An agreement was drafted without their inclusion, and Albright then demanded that Milosevic sign or be bombed. (Let us remember, just for the briefest of moments, the Vienna Convention (Article 52 of the UN Charter) which states "A treaty, the signature to which has been obtained through the threat of force...is illegal and void..." But of course, with the explicit and comtemptuous rejection of Security Council involvement, the United States has already demonstrated its apathy about international law.)

Having made the threat to bomb if things did not go the way the Americans wanted, Clinton and Albright then felt obliged to carry out the bombing. To not bomb would have shown weakness, and would have damaged NATO's credibility. So it now appears that Clinton had recklessly endangered the lives of Kosovars, whom he knew to be at risk, in order to preserve NATO, especially before its 50th anniversary in two weeks. As Diana Johnstone has pointed out, it's not that NATO was saving Kosovo; rather, Kosovo was going to save NATO.

Does Clinton Really Care about Human Rights?

Clinton's critics have asked why the Administration is not intervening in other civil wars where the situation is even worse, and the number of deaths even higher, than in Kosovo. His response has been, to paraphrase, "because America cannot be everywhere, does not mean that America should not be anywhere." But his statement suggests that America is not already in many places where human rights are being violated, and this is well-known to be false.

If we take just the Clinton line, that Kosovo is important because it is in Europe, and Europe is important, because, well, we're in NATO, and NATO is important because it provides for the defense of Europe... If we take this line, then obviously the only human rights violations of interest are those occurring in Europe, and so Turkey, as a NATO member, surely qualifies. The deaths of Kurds in southern Turkey are, by conservative estimates, at least as many as those of the Kosovo Albanians, which are believed to have been about 2,000 last year. But in Turkey, we have not only not invaded, we have sold arms to Turkey to help them suppress their minority population. The Turkish government had openly used American aircraft to attack Kurds, which under U.S. law, should make it illegal for us to sell arms to them. But Clinton's Administration worked around the ban, and continued to sell arms, even at the time of the worst abuses. At one point, Turkey was the largest single purchaser of arms from America.

If we take another example even closer to the current enemy, we understand just how cynical is the Clinton's view of human rights. In Croatia, where the current President Tudjman has evoked Croatia's past Nazi ties to justify eliminating the Serb minority in Krajina, Clinton actually supplied Tudjman with American generals to advise him on the indiscriminate bombing of Krajina that would eventually lead to several hundred thousands Serbs fleeing from Croatia. Croatia's population is now almost entirely ethnically Croatian, thanks to crucial covert aid from President Clinton, who now wants us to believe that we are helping to prevent ethnic cleansing in Kosovo. That is just too audacious a lie to be tolerated, and it is arguably such clearly hypocritical stances by the Clinton Administration that makes Milosevic feel as though the Serbs have always been victims, besieged on all sides.

It is difficult to know the real motivation for the bombing of Serbia: it could be for the Stari Trg mine, or it could be to create oil pipelines from Europe to the Caspian Sea, or it could be something else entirely. But now, with prospects for an unconditional Serbian surrender lower than ever, it is reasonable to think we will only win by completely destroying Serbia. And it is because of this reckless machismo -- this belief in victory at any cost, the exact same attitude that Johnson and Nixon had about Vietnam -- that the war will continue to escalate. It may last ten more days, or it may last ten more years, but you can be sure that by the end of it, nobody will be able to recognize what's left of Serbia or Kosovo. And then will we expect the Serbs and Albanians to live together in peace? The only real solution is for Clinton to stop the bombing, accept Milosevic's cease-fire, and pursue a diplomatic agreement through the United Nations. If he does not have the courage to do this, then the inevitable result will be to turn Serbia into a European Iraq, and Kosovo into a colony of NATO, much like Bosnia is today. In the end, both the Serbians and the Kosovars will be defeated, for the sake of nothing more than Bill Clinton's pride.

The following are some useful web sites, to get alternative information about the war:

http://www.antiwar.com (a generally conservative and libertarian point of view, lots of articles)
http://www.zmag.org/ZMag/kosovo.htm (a leftist point of view, several opinion articles)
http://www.suc.org (from the Serbian viewpoint)
http://www.kosovo.org (from the Kosovo Albanian viewpoint)