If there’s anyone out there who is not already thoroughly cynical about those on the board of directors of the planet, the latest chapter in the saga of the bombing of PanAm 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland might just be enough to push them over the edge.

Abdel Basset Ali al-Megrahi, the only person ever convicted for the December 21, 1988 bombing, was released from his Scottish imprisonment August 21 supposedly because of his terminal cancer and sent home to Libya, where he received a hero’s welcome. President Obama said that the jubilant welcome Megrahi received was “highly objectionable”. His White House spokesman Robert Gibbs added that the welcoming scenes in Libya were “outrageous and disgusting”. British Prime Minister Gordon Brown said he was “angry and repulsed”, while his foreign secretary, David Miliband, termed the celebratory images “deeply upsetting.” Miliband warned: “How the Libyan government handles itself in the next few days will be very significant in the way the world views Libya’s reentry into the civilized community of nations.”¹

Ah yes, “the civilized community of nations”, that place we so often hear about but so seldom get to actually see. American officials, British officials, and Scottish officials know that Megrahi is innocent. They know that Iran financed the PFLP-GC, a Palestinian group, to carry out the bombing with the cooperation of Syria, in retaliation for the American naval ship, the Vincennes, shooting down an Iranian passenger plane in July of the same year, which took the lives of more people than did the 103 bombing. And it should be pointed out that the Vincennes captain, plus the officer in command of air warfare, and the crew were all awarded medals or ribbons afterward.² No one in the US government or media found this objectionable or outrageous, or disgusting or repulsive. The United States has always insisted that the shooting down of the Iranian plane was an “accident”. Why then give awards to those responsible?

Today’s oh-so-civilized officials have known of Megrahi’s innocence since 1989. The Scottish judges who found Megrahi guilty know he’s innocent. They admit as much in their written final opinion. The Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission, which investigated Megrahi’s trial, knows it. They stated in 2007 that they had uncovered six separate grounds for believing the conviction may have been a miscarriage of justice, clearing the way for him to file a new appeal of his case.³ The evidence for all this is considerable. And most importantly, there is no evidence that Megrahi was involved in the act of terror.

The first step of the alleged crime, sine qua non — loading the bomb into a suitcase at the Malta airport — for this there was no witness, no video, no document, no fingerprints, nothing to tie Megrahi to the particular brown Samsonite suitcase, no past history of terrorism, no forensic evidence of any kind linking him to such an act.

And the court admitted it: “The absence of any explanation of the method by which the primary suitcase might have been placed on board KM180 [Air Malta to Frankfurt] is a major difficulty for the Crown case.”⁴

The scenario implicating Iran, Syria, and the PFLP-GC was the Original Official Version, endorsed by the US, UK, Scotland, even West Germany — guaranteed, sworn to, scout’s honor, case closed — until the buildup to the Gulf War came along in 1990 and the support of Iran and Syria was needed for the broad Middle East coalition the United States was readying for the ouster of Iraq’s troops from Kuwait. Washington was also anxious to achieve the release of American hostages held in Lebanon by groups close to Iran. Thus it was that the scurrying sound of backtracking could be heard in the corridors of the White House. Suddenly, in October 1990, there was a New Official Version: it was Libya — the Arab state least supportive of the US build-up to the Gulf War and the sanctions imposed against Iraq — that was behind the bombing after all, declared Washington.

The two Libyans were formally indicted in the US and Scotland on Nov. 14, 1991. Within the next 20 days, the remaining four American hostages were released in Lebanon along with the most prominent British hostage, Terry Waite.⁵

In order to be returned to Libya, Megrahi had to cancel his appeal. It was the appeal, not his health, that concerned the Brits and the Americans. Dr. Jim Swire of Britain, whose daughter died over Lockerbie, is a member of UK Families Flight 103, which wants a public inquiry into the crash. “If he goes back to Libya,” Swire says, “it will be a bitter pill to swallow, as an appeal would reveal the fallacies in the prosecution case. … I’ve lost faith in the Scottish criminal justice system, but if the appeal is heard, there is not a snowball’s chance in hell that the prosecution case will survive.”⁶

And a reversal of the verdict would mean that the civilized and venerable governments of the United States and the United Kingdom would stand exposed as having lived a monumental lie for almost 20 years and imprisoned a man they knew to be innocent for eight years.

The Sunday Times (London) recently reported: “American intelligence documents [of 1989, from the Pentagon's Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA)] blaming Iran for the Lockerbie bombing would have been produced in court if the Libyan convicted of Britain’s worst terrorist attack had not dropped his appeal.” Added the Times: “The DIA briefing discounted Libya’s involvement in the bombing on the basis that there was ‘no current credible intelligence’ implicating her.”⁷

If the three governments involved really believed that Megrahi was guilty of murdering 270 of their people, it’s highly unlikely that they would have released their grip on him. Or is even that too much civilized behavior to expect.

One final note: Many people are under the impression that Libyan Leader Moammar Qaddafi has admitted on more than one occasion to Libya’s guilt in the PanAm 103 bombing. This is not so. Instead, he has stated that Libya would take “responsibility” for the crime. He has said this purely to get the heavy international sanctions against his country lifted. At various times, both he and his son have explicitly denied any Libyan role in the bombing.

Humankind shall never fly

All those angry people. Yelling at the president and members of Congress about how the proposed government health plan, and Obama himself, are “socialist”. (See the poster of Obama as the Joker character from Batman with “Socialism” in large letters, as the only word.⁸ ) These good folks wanna get their health care through good ol’ capitalism; better no health care at all than godless-atheist commie health care; better to see your child die than have her saved by a Marxist-Stalinist-collective doctor who works for the government. But these screaming, heckling Americans — like most of their countrymen — might be rather surprised to discover that they don’t really believe what they think they believe. I wrote an essay several years ago, which is still perfectly applicable today, entitled “The United States invades, bombs, and kills for it, but do Americans really believe in free enterprise?”

A common refrain, explicit or implicit, amongst the recent health-care hecklers is that the government can’t do anything better or cheaper than private corporations. Studies, however, have clearly indicated otherwise. In 2003, US federal agencies examined 17,595 federal jobs and found civil servants to be superior to contractors 89 percent of the time. The following year, a study to determine whether 12,573 federal jobs could be done more efficiently by private contractors found in-house workers winning 91 percent of the time, according to an Office of Management and Budget report. And in 2005, a study of tens of thousands of government positions concluded that federal workers had won the job competitions more than 80 percent of the time. All these studies, it should be kept in mind, took place under the administration of George W. Bush, who, upon taking office in 2001, declared it his top management priority that federal workers should compete with contractors for as many as 850,000 government jobs.⁹ Thus, any pressure to influence the outcome of these studies would have been in the opposite direction — putting the outside contractors in the best light.

Since the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991, the Boys of Capital have been chortling in their martinis about the death of socialism. The word has been banned from polite conversation. And they hope that no one will notice that every socialist experiment of any significance in the twentieth century — without exception — was either overthrown, invaded, corrupted, perverted, subverted, destabilized, or otherwise had life made impossible for it, by the United States and its allies. Not one socialist government or movement — from the Russian Revolution to the Sandinistas in Nicaragua, from Communist China to the FMLN in El Salvador — not one was permitted to rise or fall solely on its own merits; not one was left secure enough to drop its guard against the all-powerful enemy abroad and freely and fully relax control at home.

It’s as if the Wright brothers’ first experiments with flying machines all failed because the automobile interests sabotaged each test flight. And then the good and god-fearing folk of the world looked upon these catastrophes, nodded their heads wisely, and intoned solemnly: Humankind shall never fly.

The continual selling of the Afghanistan war

“But we must never forget,” said President Obama recently, “this is not a war of choice. This is a war of necessity. Those who attacked America on 9/11 are plotting to do so again. If left unchecked, the Taliban insurgency will mean an even larger safe haven from which al Qaeda would plot to kill more Americans. So this is not only a war worth fighting. This is fundamental to the defense of our people.”¹⁰

Obama was speaking to the Veterans of Foreign Wars, the ultra-nationalist group whose members would not question such sentiments. Neither would most Americans, including many of those who express opposition to the war when polled. It’s simple — We’re fighting terrorism in Afghanistan. We’re fighting the same people who attacked New York and Washington. Never mind that out of the tens of thousands the United States and its NATO front have killed in Afghanistan not one has been identified as having had anything to do with the events of September 11, 2001. Never mind that the “plot to kill Americans” in 2001 was hatched in Germany and the United States at least as much as in Afghanistan. What is needed to plot to buy airline tickets and take flying lessons in the United States? A room with some chairs? What does “an even larger safe haven” mean? A larger room with more chairs? Perhaps a blackboard? Terrorists intent upon attacking the United States can meet almost anywhere, with Afghanistan probably being one of the worst places for them, given the American occupation.

As to “plotting to do so again” … there’s no reason to assume that the United States has any concrete information of this, anymore than did Bush or Cheney who tried to scare us in the same way for more than seven years to enable them to carry out their agenda.

There are many people in Afghanistan who deeply resent the US presence there and the drones that fly overhead and drop bombs on houses, wedding parties, and funerals. One doesn’t have to be a member of al Qaeda to feel this way. There doesn’t even have to be such a thing as a “member of al Qaeda”. It tells us nothing that some of them can be called “al Qaeda”. Almost every individual or group in that part of the world not in love with US foreign policy, which Washington wishes to stigmatize, is charged with being associated with, or being a member of, al Qaeda, as if there’s a precise and meaningful distinction between people retaliating against American aggression while being a member of al Qaeda and people retaliating against American aggression while NOT being a member of al Qaeda; as if al Qaeda gives out membership cards to fit in your wallet, as if there are chapters of al Qaeda that put out a weekly newsletter and hold a potluck on the first Monday of each month.

In any event, as in Iraq, the American “war on terrorism” in Afghanistan regularly and routinely creates new anti-American terrorists. This is scarcely in dispute even at the Pentagon.

The only “necessity” that draws the United States to Afghanistan is the need for oil and gas pipelines from the Caspian Sea area, the establishment of military bases in this country that is surrounded by the oil-rich Caspian Sea and Persian Gulf regions, and making it easier to watch and pressure next-door Iran. What more could any respectable imperialist nation desire?

But the war against the Taliban can’t be won. Except by killing everyone in Afghanistan. The United States should negotiate the pipelines with the Taliban, as the Clinton administration unsuccessfully tried to do, and then get out.

The revolution was televised

   You will not be able to stay home, brother.
   You will not be able to plug in, turn on, and cop out.
   You will not be able to lose yourself on skag [heroin] and skip out for beer during commercials.
   Because the revolution will not be televised. …

   There will be no highlights on the eleven o’clock news
   The revolution will not be right back after a message
   The revolution will not go better with Coke
   The revolution will not fight the germs that may cause bad breath
   The revolution will not be televised, will not be televised

These are some of the lines of Gil Scott-Heron’s song that told people in the 1970s (which, I maintain, were just as ‘60ish as the fabled 1960s) that a revolution was coming, that they would no longer be able to live their normal daily life, that they should no longer want to live their normal daily life, that they would have to learn to be more serious about this thing they were always prattling about, this thing they called “revolution”.

Fast Forward to 2009 … Gil Scott-Heron, now a ripe old 60, was recently interviewed by the Washington Post:

WP: In the early 1970s, you came out with “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised,” about the erosion of democracy in America. You all but predicted that there would be a revolution in which a brainwashed nation would come to its senses. What do you think now? Did we have a revolution?

GS-H: Yes, the election of President Obama was the revolution.¹¹

Oh? So that’s it? That’s what we took clubs over our heads for? Tear gas, jail cells, and permanent police and FBI files? Published a million issues of the underground press? To get a president who doesn’t have a revolutionary bone in his body? Not a muscle or nerve or tissue or organ that seriously questions cherished establishment beliefs concerning terrorism, permanent war, Israel, torture, marijuana, health care, and the primacy of profit over the environment and all else? Karl Marx is surely turning over in his London grave. If the modern counter-revolutionary United States had existed at the time of the American revolution, it would have crushed that revolution. And a colonial (white) Barack Obama would have worked diligently to achieve some sort of bi-partisan compromise with the King of England, telling him we need to look forward, not backward.

Yugoslavia

During 1998-1999, the United States used the Kosovo conflict to reaffirm its hegemonic role in Europe. US officials deliberately undercut a potential diplomatic solution to the Kosovo war; instead of using diplomacy to resolve the conflict, the United States sought a military solution in which NATO power could once again be demonstrated. The resulting air war, in 1999, succeeded in fully establishing the continued relevance of NATO, thus affirming US hegemony in Europe and undercutting European proclivities for foreign policy independence.

– David Gibbs, First Do No Harm: Humanitarian Intervention and the Destruction of Yugoslavia

There’s no issue of the recent past that has caused more friction internationally amongst those on the left than the question of what really took place in the former Yugoslavia during the 1990s. Gibbs’ new book explores many of the myths surrounding this very complicated and controversial slice of history, particularly those dealing with the supposed humanitarian motivation behind the Western powers intervention and the many alleged Serbian atrocities.

1. Washington Post, August 22 and August 26, 2009.
2. Newsweek magazine, July 13, 1992.
3. Sunday Herald (Scotland), August 17, 2009.
4. ”Opinion of the Court”, Par. 39, issued following the trial in the Hague in 2001.
5. Read many further details about the case.
6. The Independent (London daily), April 26, 2009.
7. Sunday Times (London), August 16, 2009.
8. Washington Post, August 6, 2009, p.C2.
9. Washington Post, June 8, 2005 and March 23, 2006 for this citation plus the three studies mentioned.
10. Talk given at VFW convention in Phoenix, Arizona, August 17, 2009.
11. Washington Post, August 26, 2009.

I’ve said all along that whatever good changes might occur in regard to non-foreign policy issues, such as what’s already taken place concerning the environment and abortion, the Obama administration will not produce any significantly worthwhile change in US foreign policy; little done in this area will reduce the level of misery that the American Empire regularly brings down upon humanity. And to the extent that Barack Obama is willing to clearly reveal what he believes about anything controversial, he appears to believe in the empire.

The Obamania bubble should already have begun to lose some air with the multiple US bombings of Pakistan within the first few days following the inauguration. The Pentagon briefed the White House of its plans, and the White House had no objection. So bombs away — Barack Obama’s first war crime. The dozens of victims were, of course, all bad people, including all the women and children. As with all these bombings, we’ll never know the names of all the victims — It’s doubtful that even Pakistan knows — or what crimes they had committed to deserve the death penalty. Some poor Pakistani probably earned a nice fee for telling the authorities that so-and-so bad guy lived in that house over there; too bad for all the others who happened to live with the bad guy, assuming of course that the bad guy himself actually lived in that house over there.

The new White House press secretary, Robert Gibbs, declined to answer questions about the first airstrikes, saying, “I’m not going to get into these matters.”¹ Where have we heard that before?

After many of these bombings in recent years, a spokesperson for the United States or NATO has solemnly declared: “We regret the loss of life.” These are the same words used by the Irish Republican Army (IRA) on a number of occasions, but their actions were typically called “terrorist”.

I wish I could be an Obamaniac. I envy their enthusiasm. Here, in the form of an open letter to President Obama, are some of the “changes we can believe in” in foreign policy that would have to occur to win over the non-believers like me.

Iran

Just leave them alone. There is no “Iranian problem.” They are a threat to no one. Iran hasn’t invaded any other country in centuries. No, President Ahmadinejad did not threaten Israel with any violence. Stop patrolling the waters surrounding Iran with American warships. Stop halting Iranian ships to check for arms shipments to Hamas. (That’s generally regarded as an act of war.) Stop using Iranian dissident groups to carry out terrorist attacks inside Iran. Stop kidnapping Iranian diplomats. Stop the continual spying and recruiting within Iran. And yet, with all that, you can still bring yourself to say: “If countries like Iran are willing to unclench their fist, they will find an extended hand from us.”²

Iran has as much right to arm Hamas as the US has to arm Israel. And there is no international law that says that the United States, the UK, Russia, China, Israel, France, Pakistan, and India are entitled to nuclear weapons, but Iran is not. Iran has every reason to feel threatened. Will you continue to provide nuclear technology to India, which has not signed the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, while threatening Iran, an NPT signatory, with sanctions and warfare?

Russia

Stop surrounding the country with new NATO members. Stop looking to instigate new “color” revolutions in former Soviet republics and satellites. Stop arming and supporting Georgia in its attempts to block the independence of South Ossetia and Abkhasia, the breakaway regions on the border of Russia. And stop the placement of anti-missile systems in Russia’s neighbors, the Czech Republic and Poland, on the absurd grounds that it’s to ward off an Iranian missile attack. It was Czechoslovakia and Poland that the Germans also used to defend their imperialist ambitions — The two countries were being invaded on the grounds that Germans there were being maltreated. The world was told.

“The U.S. government made a big mistake from the breakup of the Soviet Union,” said former Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev last year. “At that time the Russian people were really euphoric about America and the U.S. was really number one in the minds of many Russians.” But, he added, the United States moved aggressively to expand NATO and appeared gleeful at Russia’s weakness.³

Cuba

Making it easier to travel there and send remittances is very nice (if, as expected, you do that), but these things are dwarfed by the need to end the US embargo. In 1999, Cuba filed a suit against the United States for $181.1 billion in compensation for economic losses and loss of life during the almost forty years of this aggression. The suit held Washington responsible for the death of 3,478 Cubans and the wounding and disabling of 2,099 others. We can now add ten more years to all three figures. The negative, often crippling, effects of the embargo extend into every aspect of Cuban life.

In addition to closing Guantanamo prison, the adjacent US military base established in 1903 by American military force should be closed and the land returned to Cuba.

The Cuban Five, held prisoner in the United States for over 10 years, guilty only of trying to prevent American-based terrorism against Cuba, should be released. Actually there were 10 Cubans arrested; five knew that they could expect no justice in an American court and pled guilty to get shorter sentences.

Iraq

Freeing the Iraqi people to death … Nothing short of a complete withdrawal of all US forces, military and contracted, and the closure of all US military bases and detention and torture centers, can promise a genuine end to US involvement and the beginning of meaningful Iraqi sovereignty. To begin immediately. Anything less is just politics and imperialism as usual. In six years of war, the Iraqi people have lost everything of value in their lives. As the Washington Post reported in 2007: “It is a common refrain among war-weary Iraqis that things were better before the U.S.-led invasion in 2003.”⁴ The good news is that the Iraqi people have 5,000 years experience in crafting a society to live in. They should be given the opportunity.

Saudi Arabia

Demand before the world that this government enter the 21st century (or at least the 20th), or the United States has to stop pretending that it gives a damn about human rights, women, homosexuals, religious liberty, and civil liberties. The Bush family had long-standing financial ties to members of the Saudi ruling class. What will be your explanation if you maintain the status quo?

Haiti

Reinstate the exiled Jean Bertrand Aristide to the presidency, which he lost when the United States overthrew him in 2004. To seek forgiveness for our sins, give the people of Haiti lots and lots of money and assistance.

Colombia

Stop giving major military support to a government that for years has been intimately tied to death squads, torture, and drug trafficking; in no other country in the world have so many progressive candidates for public office, unionists, and human-rights activists been murdered. Are you concerned that this is the closest ally the United States has in all of Latin America?

Venezuela

Hugo Chavez may talk too much but he’s no threat except to the capitalist system of Venezuela and, by inspiration, elsewhere in Latin America. He has every good historical reason to bad-mouth American foreign policy, including Washington’s role in the coup that overthrew him in 2002. If you can’t understand why Chavez is not in love with what the United States does all over the world, I can give you a long reading list.

Put an end to support for Chavez’s opposition by the Agency for International Development, the National Endowment for Democracy, and other US government agencies. US diplomats should not be meeting with Venezuelans plotting coups against Chavez, nor should they be interfering in elections.

Send Luis Posada from Florida to Venezuela, which has asked for his extradition for his masterminding the bombing of a Cuban airline in 1976, taking 73 lives. Extradite the man, or try him in the US, or stop talking about the war on terrorism.

And please try not to repeat the nonsense about Venezuela being a dictatorship. It’s a freer society than the United States. It has, for example, a genuine opposition daily media, non-existent in the United States. If you doubt that, try naming a single American daily newspaper or TV network that was unequivocally against the US invasions of Iraq, Afghanistan, Yugoslavia, Panama, Grenada, and Vietnam. Or even against two of them? How about one? Is there a single one that supports Hamas and/or Hezbollah? A few weeks ago, the New York Times published a story concerning a possible Israeli attack upon Iran, and stated: “Several details of the covert effort have been omitted from this account, at the request of senior United States intelligence and administration officials, to avoid harming continuing operations.”⁵

Alas, Mr. President, among other disparaging remarks, you’ve already accused Chavez of being “a force that has interrupted progress in the region.”⁶ This is a statement so contrary to the facts, even to plain common sense, so hypocritical given Washington’s history in Latin America, that I despair of you ever freeing yourself from the ideological shackles that have bound every American president of the past century. It may as well be inscribed in their oath of office — that a president must be antagonistic toward any country that has expressly rejected Washington as the world’s savior. You made this remark in an interview with Univision, Venezuela’s leading, implacable media critic of the Chavez government. What regional progress could you be referring to, the police state of Colombia?

Bolivia

Stop American diplomats, Peace Corps volunteers, Fulbright scholars, and the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration, from spying and fomenting subversion inside Bolivia. As the first black president of the United States, you could try to cultivate empathy toward, and from, the first indigenous president of Bolivia. Congratulate Bolivian president Evo Morales on winning a decisive victory on a recent referendum to approve a new constitution which enshrines the rights of the indigenous people and, for the first time, institutes separation of church and state.

Afghanistan

Perhaps the most miserable people on the planet, with no hope in sight as long as the world’s powers continue to bomb, invade, overthrow, occupy, and slaughter in their land. The US Army is planning on throwing 30,000 more young American bodies into the killing fields and is currently building eight new major bases in southern Afghanistan. Is that not insane? If it makes sense to you I suggest that you start the practice of the president accompanying the military people when they inform American parents that their child has died in a place called Afghanistan.

If you pull out from this nightmare, you could also stop bombing Pakistan. Leave even if it results in the awful Taliban returning to power. They at least offer security to the country’s wretched, and indications are that the current Taliban are not all fundamentalists.

But first, close Bagram prison and other detention camps, which are worse than Guantanamo.

And stop pretending that the United States gives a damn about the Afghan people and not oil and gas pipelines which can bypass Russia and Iran. The US has been endeavoring to fill the power vacuum in Central Asia created by the Soviet Union’s dissolution in order to assert Washington’s domination over a region containing the second largest proven reserves of petroleum and natural gas in the world. Is Afghanistan going to be your Iraq?

Israel

The most difficult task for you, but the one that would earn for you the most points. To declare that Israel is no longer the 51st state of the union would bring down upon your head the wrath of the most powerful lobby in the world and its many wealthy followers, as well as the Christian-fundamentalist Right and much of the media. But if you really want to see peace between Israel and Palestine you must cut off all military aid to Israel, in any form: hardware, software, personnel, money. And stop telling Hamas it has to recognize Israel and renounce violence until you tell Israel that it has to recognize Hamas and renounce violence.

North Korea

Bush called the country part of “the axis of evil”, and Kim Jong Il a “pygmy” and “a spoiled child at a dinner table.”⁷ But you might try to understand where Kim Jong Il is coming from. He sees that UN agencies went into Iraq and disarmed it, and then the United States invaded. The logical conclusion is not to disarm, but to go nuclear.
Central America

Stop interfering in the elections of Nicaragua, El Salvador and Guatemala, year after year. The Cold War has ended. And though you can’t undo the horror perpetrated by the United States in the region in the 1980s, you can at least be kind to the immigrants in the US who came here trying to escape the long-term consequences of that terrible decade.
Vietnam

In your inauguration speech you spoke proudly of those “who have carried us up the long, rugged path towards prosperity and freedom … For us, they fought and died, in places like … Khe Sanh.” So it is your studied and sincere opinion that the 58,000 American sevicemembers who died in Vietnam, while helping to kill over a million Vietnamese, gave their life for our prosperity and freedom? Would you care to defend that proposition without resort to any platitudes?

You might also consider this: In all the years since the Vietnam War ended, the three million Vietnamese suffering from diseases and deformities caused by US sprayings of the deadly chemical “Agent Orange” have received from the United States no medical attention, no environmental remediation, no compensation, and no official apology.

Kosovo

Stop supporting the most gangster government in the world, which has specialized in kidnaping, removing human body parts for sale, heavy trafficking in drugs, trafficking in women, various acts of terrorism, and ethnic cleansing of Serbs. This government would not be in power if the Bush administration had not seen them as America’s natural allies. Do you share that view? UN Resolution 1244, adopted in 1999, reaffirmed the sovereignty and territorial integrity of the former Federal Republic of Yugoslavia to which Serbia is now the recognized successor state, and established that Kosovo was to remain part of Serbia. Why do we have a huge and permanent military base in that tiny self-declared country?

NATO

From protecting Europe against a [mythical] Soviet invasion to becoming an occupation army in Afghanistan. Put an end to this historical anachronism, what Russian leader Vladimir called “the stinking corpse of the cold war.”⁸ You can accomplish this simply by leaving the organization. Without the United States and its never-ending military actions and officially-designated enemies, the organization would not even have the pretense of a purpose, which is all it has left. Members have had to be bullied, threatened and bribed to send armed forces to Afghanistan.

School of the Americas

Latin American countries almost never engage in war with each other, or any other countries. So for what kind of warfare are its military officers being trained by the United States? To suppress their own people. Close this school (the name has now been changed to protect the guilty) at Ft. Benning, Georgia that the United States has used to prepare two generations of Latin American military officers for careers in overthrowing progressive governments, death squads, torture, holding down dissent, and other charming activities. The British are fond of saying that the Empire was won on the playing fields of Eton. Americans can say that the road to Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo, and Bagram began in the classrooms of the School of the Americas.

Torture

Your executive orders concerning this matter of utmost importance are great to see, but they still leave something to be desired. They state that the new standards ostensibly putting an end to torture apply to any “armed conflict”. But what if your administration chooses to view future counterterrorism and other operations as not part of an “armed conflict”? And no mention is made of “rendition” — kidnaping a man off the street, throwing him in a car, throwing a hood over his head, stripping off his clothes, placing him in a diaper, shackling him from every angle, and flying him to a foreign torture dungeon. Why can’t you just say that this and all other American use of proxy torturers is banned? Forever.

It’s not enough to say that you’re against torture or that the United States “does not torture” or “will not torture”. George W. Bush said the same on a regular basis. To show that you’re not George W. Bush you need to investigate those responsible for the use of torture, even if this means prosecuting a small army of Bush administration war criminals.

You aren’t off to a good start by appointing former CIA official John O. Brennan as your top adviser on counterterrorism. Brennan has called “rendition” a “vital tool” and praised the CIA’s interrogation techniques for providing “lifesaving” intelligence.⁹ Whatever were you thinking, Barack?

Abdelbaset Ali Mohmed al Megrahi

Free this Libyan man from his prison in Scotland, where he is serving a life sentence after being framed by the United States for the bombing of PanAm flight 103 in December 1988, which took the lives of 270 people over Scotland. Iran was actually behind the bombing — as revenge for the US shooting down an Iranian passenger plane in July, killing 290 — not Libya, which the US accused for political reasons. Nations do not behave any more cynical than that. Megrahi lies in prison now dying of cancer, but still the US and the UK will not free him. It would be too embarrassing to admit to 20 years of shameless lying.

Mr. President, there’s a lot more to be undone in our foreign policy if you wish to be taken seriously as a moral leader like Martin Luther King, Jr.: banning the use of depleted uranium, cluster bombs, and other dreadful weapons; joining the International Criminal Court instead of trying to sabotage it; making a number of other long-overdue apologies in addition to the one mentioned re Vietnam; and much more. You’ve got your work cut out for you if you really want to bring some happiness to this sad old world, make America credible and beloved again, stop creating armies of anti-American terrorists, and win over people like me.

And do you realize that you can eliminate all state and federal budget deficits in the United States, provide free health care and free university education to every American, pay for an unending array of worthwhile social and cultural programs, all just by ending our wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, not starting any new ones, and closing down the Pentagon’s 700+ military bases? Think of it as the peace dividend Americans were promised when the Cold War would end some day, but never received. How about you delivering it, Mr. President? It’s not too late.

But you are committed to the empire; and the empire is committed to war. Too bad.

1. Washington Post, January 24, 2009.
2. Interview with al Arabiya TV, January 27, 2009.
3. Gorbachev speaking in Florida, South Florida Sun-Sentinel, April 17, 2008.
4. Washington Post, May 5, 2007, p.1.
5. New York Times, January 11, 2009.
6. Washington Post, January 19, 2009.
7. Newsweek, May 27, 2002.
8. Press Trust of India (news agency), December 21, 2007.
9. Washington Post, November 26, 2008.

According to a Wikileaks press release, “the spy chief claims to have already engaged the BND’s legal machinery.”

Threats against the journalists were triggered, according to Wikileaks, by the publication of my article, “The End of the Affair? The BND, CIA and Kosovo’s Deep State,” (Antifascist Calling, December 7, 2008) on their website.

I did not seek to become part of the story; nevertheless Uhrlau’s threats cannot go unchallenged. The censorship and prior restraint he demands are toxic to a free society.

In addition to my piece, the “files or reports” which the German spook insists they remove is a 2005, 25-page BND dossier on corrupt senior Kosovo politicians as well as unredacted pages from the Bundestag’s 2006 Schaefer Report pertaining to illegal BND domestic operations targeting journalists and left-wing political organizations in Germany.

In denouncing this unwarranted provocation, Wikileaks said: “The BND, like the CIA, is forbidden by law to engage in domestic activities. Yet the threats, which were made in German as well as in English, hold no legal power outside of Germany. They must be assumed to be an attempt to engage Wikileaks via its German component–or does Mr. Uhrlau suggest it is now BND policy to kidnap foreign journalists and try them before German courts?”

My article explored the parapolitical connections to a recent scandal in which three BND officers working under deep cover, were arrested and deported from Kosovo. What sparked the scandal was the arrest of one of the operatives when he was caught photographing the headquarters of the European Union Special Representative in Pristina, bombed under mysterious circumstances November 14.

The affair exposed the agency’s extensive covert operations in Kosovo through a cut-out, the “private security firm” Logistics-Coordination & Assessment Services (LCAS). Information on LCAS was in the public domain after exposure by German investigative reporters writing in Spiegel International. Compromising notebooks and electronic files were subsequently seized by Kosovan authorities.

While the “evidence” presented linking the agents to the blast was slim at best, one cannot rule out that Thaci’s intelligence service, with prompting by some “other government agency (OGA),” a foreign service with close ties to the corrupt statelet perhaps, exploited the agents’ poor tradecraft to roll-up their operation because of fears of what they might have discovered.

I speculated whether the operatives were convenient foils of a plot hatched by the Kosovan government in cahoots with the CIA over BND disclosure of extensive links amongst Thaci and his henchmen to international criminal syndicates involved in the global drugs, arms and sordid trade in human beings. Revelations which Thaci and the CIA would prefer never come to light. I speculated that one motive for rolling-up the BND’s operation may have been that the seized operative’s notebook contained information that Camp Bondsteel continues to serve as a CIA “black site” where prisoners are illegally detained and tortured.

Additionally, I cited Wikileaks documents that revealed the BND’s illegal manipulation of the media to influence domestic coverage of the spy agency through the infiltration of Focus Magazine as well as intelligence operations that sought to gain knowledge of journalists’ confidential sources.

Wikileaks German correspondent Daniel Schmitt and Investigative Editor Julian Assange, said that the Schaefer Report “in general shows the extent to which the collaboration of journalists with intelligence agencies has become common and to what dimensions consent is manufactured in the interests of those involved.”

Following Schmitt and Assange’s reporting, one must now add the criminal lengths that unaccountable spy agencies will go to prevent journalists from exposing their dirty and illegal operations.

Wikileaks also disclosed and posted a document that revealed the IP addresses “of an internally distributed mail from German telecommunications company T-Systems (Deutsche Telekom)” containing over two dozen IP “address ranges” used by the BND.

I cited this document in relation to a Berlin internet prostitution service (Belle-Escort.de) and said the following: “While the document does not spell out who was running the sex-for-hire website, one can’t help but wonder whether Balkan-linked organized crime syndicates, including Kosovan and Albanian sex traffickers, are working in tandem with the BND in return for that agency turning a blind eye to the sordid trade in kidnapped women.”

That question, as well as many others, is still unanswered.

My article cited open-source media reports from Spiegel International, the World Socialist Website, Mother Jones Magazine, as well as the work of scholars and investigative journalists Misha Glenny, Christopher Deliso, Michel Chossudovsky and Peter Dale Scott. Are journalists and researchers now expected to submit copy to spooky censors for appropriate redactions before publishing their findings? I think not.

I stand by my conclusions and denounce Uhrlau’s threats as an attack on the rights of investigative- and citizen journalists to reveal information that agencies such as the BND would rather never see the light of day.

Wikileaks should be commended, not attacked, for their brave documentary project and supported by everyone who upholds the rule of law, a free press and an open, democratic society.

As the heroic Israeli journalist Amira Hass told The Independent’s Robert Fisk “our job is to monitor the centers of power,” not shill for them.

On November 14, a bomb planted at the office of the European Union Special Representative was detonated in downtown Pristina. While damage was light and there were no injuries, U.N. “peacekeepers” detained one of the BND officers hours after the blast when he was observed taking photos of the damaged building. Two of his colleagues waited in a car and acted as lookouts. The officer named these two colleagues as witnesses that he was in his office at the time of the attack.

That office, identified by the press as the “private security firm” Logistics-Coordination & Assessment Service or LCAS, in reality was a front company for BND operations. Its premises were searched three days later and the trio were subsequently arrested and accused by Kosovan authorities of responsibility for bombing the EU building. As a result of the arrests, the BND was forced to admit the real identities of their agents and the true nature of LCAS.

A scandal erupted leading to a diplomatic row between Berlin and Pristina. The German government labeled the accusations “absurd” and threatened a cut-off of funds to the Kosovo government. A circus atmosphere prevailed as photos of the trio were shown on Kosovan TV and splashed across the front pages of the press. Rumors and dark tales abounded, based on leaks believed by observers to have emanated from the office of Kosovo’s Prime Minister, the “former” warlord Hashim Thaci, nominal leader of the statelet’s organized crime-tainted government.

When seized by authorities one of the BND officers, Andreas J., demonstrated very poor tradecraft indeed. Among the items recovered by police, the operative’s passport along with a notebook containing confidential and highly incriminating information on the situation in Kosovo were examined. According to media reports, the notebook contained the names of well-placed BND informants in the Prime Minister’s entourage. According to this reading, the arrests were an act of revenge by Thaci meant to embarrass the German government.

But things aren’t always as they seem.

On November 29, the trio–Robert Z., Andreas J. and Andreas D.–departed Kosovo on a special flight bound for Berlin where they “will face a committee of German parliamentarians who have taken an interest in their case,” according to an account in Spiegel Online.

More curious than a violent attack on the streets of Pristina, a city wracked by gangland killings, car hijackings, kidnappings and assaults is the provenance of the bomb itself. In other words, why would German intelligence agents attack their own? But before attempting to answer this question, a grim backstory to the affair rears its ugly head.

An Agency Mired in Scandal

This latest scandal comes as yet another blow to the BND considering August’s revelations by the whistleblowing website Wikileaks that Germany’s external intelligence agency had extensively spied on journalists. Like their counterparts at the CIA, the BND is forbidden by law from carrying out domestic operations.

According to Wikileaks documents, journalists working for Focus Magazine and Der Spiegel were collaborators in a scheme by the agency to learn their sources as well as obtaining information on left-wing politicians, including Party of Democratic Socialism (PDS) leaders Gregor Gysi and Andreas Lederer.

Indeed Focus Magazine journalist Josef Hufelschulte, code name ‘Jerez, wrote articles based on reports provided by the BND “intended to produce favorable coverage.” Wikileaks correspondent Daniel Schmitt and investigations editor Julian Assange comment that, “The document in general shows the extent to which the collaboration of journalists with intelligence agencies has become common and to what dimensions consent is manufactured in the interests of those involved.”

In November, Wikileaks published a subsequent document obtained from the telecommunications giant T-Systems. In addition to revealing two dozen secret IP addresses used by the BND for surveillance operations, the document provides “Evidence of a secret out of control BND robot scanning selected web-sites. In 2006 system administrators had to ban the “BVOE” IP addresses to prevent servers from being destroyed.” Additionally, Wikileaks revealed the “activity on a Berlin prostitution service website–evidence that intelligence seductions, the famed cold-war ‘honeytrap’, is alive and well?”

While the document does not spell out who was running the sex-for-hire website, one can’t help but wonder whether Balkan-linked organized crime syndicates, including Kosovan and Albanian sex traffickers are working in tandem with the BND in return for that agency turning a blind eye to the sordid trade in kidnapped women.

Kosovo: A European Narco State

When Kosovo proclaimed its “independence” in February, the Western media hailed the provocative dismemberment of Serbia, a move that completed the destruction of Yugoslavia by the United States, the European Union and NATO, as an exemplary means to bring “peace and stability” to the region.

If by “peace” one means impunity for rampaging crime syndicates or by “stability,” the freedom of action with no questions asked by U.S. and NATO military and intelligence agencies, not to mention economic looting on a grand scale by freewheeling multinational corporations, then Kosovo has it all!

From its inception, the breakaway Serb province has served as a militarized outpost for Western capitalist powers intent on spreading their tentacles East, encircling Russia and penetrating the former spheres of influence of the ex-Soviet Union. As a template for contemporary CIA destabilization operations in Georgia and Ukraine, prospective EU members and NATO “partners,” Kosovo should serve as a warning for those foolish enough to believe American clichés about “freedom” or the dubious benefits of “globalization.”

Camp Bondsteel, located on rolling hills and farmland near the city of Ferizaj/Urosevac, is the largest U.S. military installation on the European continent. Visible from space, in addition to serving as an NSA listening post pointed at Russia and as the CIA’s operational hub in the Balkans and beyond, some observers believe that Andreas J.’s notebook may have contained information that Camp Bondsteel continues to serve as a CIA “black site.” One motive for rolling up the BND intelligence operation may have been U.S. fears that this toxic information would become public, putting paid U.S. claims that it no longer kidnaps and tortures suspected “terrorists.”

When NATO partners Germany and the U.S. decided to drive a stake through Yugoslavia’s heart in the early 1990s during the heady days of post-Cold War triumphalism, their geopolitical strategy could not have achieved “success” without the connivance, indeed active partnership amongst Yugoslavia’s nationalist rivals. As investigative journalist Misha Glenny documented,

Most shocking of all, however, is how the gangsters and politicians fueling war between their peoples were in private cooperating as friends and close business partners. The Croat, Bosnian, Albanian, Macedonian, and Serb moneymen and mobsters were truly thick as thieves. They bought, sold, and exchanged all manner of commodities, knowing that the high levels of personal trust between them were much stronger than the transitory bonds of hysterical nationalism. They fomented this ideology among ordinary folk in essence to mask their own venality. As one commentator described it, the new republics were ruled by “a parastate Cartel which had emerged from political institutions, the ruling Communist Party and its satellites, the military, a variety of police forces, the Mafia, court intellectuals and with the president of the Republic at the center of the spider web…Tribal nationalism was indispensable for the cartel as a means to pacify its subordinates and as a cover for the uninterrupted privatization of the state apparatus. (McMafia: A Journey Through the Global Criminal Underworld, New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2008, p. 27)

Glenny’s description of the 1990s convergence of political, economic and security elites with organized crime syndicates in Western intelligence operations is the quintessential definition of the capitalist deep state.

In Deep Politics and the Death of JFK, Peter Dale Scott describes how the deep state can be characterized by “the symbiosis between governments (and in particular their intelligence agencies) and criminal associations, particularly drug traffickers, in the stabilization of right-wing terror in Vietnam, Italy, Bolivia, Afghanistan, Nicaragua, and other parts of the world.” Indeed, “revelations in the 1970s and 1980s about the ’strategy of tension,’ whereby government intelligence agencies, working in international conjunction, strengthened the case for their survival by actually fomenting violence, recurringly in alliance with drug-trafficking elements.”

Scott’s analysis is perhaps even more relevant today as “failed states” such as Kosovo, characterized by economic looting on an industrial scale, the absence of the rule of law, reliance on far-right terrorists (of both the “religious” and “secular” varieties) to achieve policy goals, organized crime syndicates, as both assets and executors of Western policy, and comprador elites are Washington’s preferred international partners.

For the ruling elites of the former Yugoslavia and their Western allies, Kosovo is a veritable goldmine. Situated in the heart of the Balkans, Kosovo’s government is deeply tied to organized crime structures: narcotrafficking, arms smuggling, car theft rings and human trafficking that feeds the sex slave “industry.” These operations are intimately linked to American destabilization campaigns and their cosy ties to on-again, off-again intelligence assets that include al-Qaeda and other far-right terror gangs. As investigative journalist Peter Klebnikov documented in 2000,

The Kosovar traffickers ship heroin exclusively from Asia’s Golden Crescent. It’s an apparently inexhaustible source. At one end of the crescent lies Afghanistan, which in 1999 surpassed Burma as the world’s largest producer of opium poppies. From there, the heroin base passes through Iran to Turkey, where it is refined, and then into the hands of the 15 Families, which operate out of the lawless border towns linking Macedonia, Albania, and Serbia. Not surprisingly, the KLA has also flourished there. According to the State Department, four to six tons of heroin move through Turkey every month. “Not very much is stopped,” says one official. “We get just a fraction of the total.” (”Heroin Heroes,” Mother Jones, January-February 2000)

Not much has changed since then. Indeed, the CIA’s intelligence model for covert destabilization operations is a continuing formula for “success.” Beginning in the 1940s, when the Corsican Mafia was pegged by the Agency to smash the French Communist Party, down to today’s bloody headlines coming out of Afghanistan and Pakistan, global drug lords and intelligence operators go hand in hand. It is hardly surprising then, that according to a report by the Berlin Institute for European Policy, organized crime is the only profitable sector of the Kosovan economy. Nearly a quarter of the country’s economic output, some €550 million, is derived from criminal activities.

Though the role of the United States and their NATO partners are central to the drama unfolding today, the BND affair also reveals that beneath the carefully-constructed façade of Western “unity” in “Freedom Land,” deep inter-imperialist rivalries simmer. As the socialist journalist Peter Schwarz reports,

Speculation has since been rife about the background to the case, but it is doubtful whether it will ever be clarified. Kosovo is a jungle of rival secret services. In this regard, it resembles Berlin before the fall of the Wall. The US, Germany, Britain, Italy and France all have considerable intelligence operations in the country, which work both with and against one another. Moreover, in this country of just 2.1 million inhabitants, some 15,000 NATO soldiers and 1,500 UN police officers are stationed, as well as 400 judges, police officers and security officers belonging to the UN’s EULEX mission. (Peter Schwarz, “Kosovo’s Dirty Secret: The Background to Germany’s Secret Service Affair,” World Socialist Web Site, December 1, 2008)

Into this jungle of conflicting loyalties and interests, international crime syndicates in close proximity–and fleeting alliance–with this or that security service rule the roost. It is all the more ironic that the Thaci government has targeted the BND considering, as Balkan analyst Christopher Deliso revealed:

In 1996, Germany’s BND established a major station in Tirana…and another in Rome to select and train future KLA fighters. According to Le Monde Diplomatique, “special forces in Berlin provided the operational training and supplied arms and transmission equipment from ex-East German Stasi stocks as well as Black uniforms.” The Italian headquarters recruited Albanian immigrants passing through ports such as Brindisi and Trieste, while German military intelligence, the Militaramschirmdienst, and the Kommando Spezialkräfte Special Forces (KSK), offered military training and provisions to the KLA in the remote Mirdita Mountains of northern Albania controlled by the deposed president, Sali Berisha. (The Coming Balkan Caliphate, Westport: Praeger Security International, 2007, p. 37)

But as Schwarz observed, why would the Thaci government risk alienating the German state, given the fact that after the U.S., Germany “is the second largest financial backer of Kosovo and ranks among the most important advocates of its independence.” Why indeed?

According to Balkan Analysis, the International Crisis Group (ICG) funded by billionaire George Soros’ Open Society Institute (OSI) and closely aligned with “liberal interventionists” in the United States, were instrumental in arguing that the United States and Germany, should guarantee “future stability,” by building up the Kosovo Protection Corps (TMK), the KLA’s successor organization, into a well-equipped army. Towards this end, the U.S. and Germany, in addition to arming the organized crime-linked statelet, have provided funds and equipment for a sophisticated military communications center in the capital.

Speculation is rife and conflicting accounts proliferate like mushrooms after a warm rain. One theory has it that senior Kosovan politicians were angered by BND criticisms linking KLA functionaries, including personal associates of Thaci and the Prime Minister himself, with organized crime. Tellingly, Schwarz reports, this “is contrary to the position taken by the CIA.”

Is the affair then, merely a falling-out among thieves on how the spoils will be divided?

The CIA: Drugs & Thugs International

As noted above, U.S. destabilization programs and covert operations rely on far-flung networks of far-right provocateurs and drug lords (often interchangeable players) to facilitate the dirty work for U.S. policy elites and American multinational corporations. Throughout its Balkan adventure the CIA made liberal use of these preexisting narcotics networks to arm the KLA and provide them with targets. In their public pronouncements and analyses however, nary a harsh word is spoken.

According to the CIA, by any standard Kosovo’s economy is a disaster, but that doesn’t prevent the Agency from seeing “significant progress”!

Over the past few years Kosovo’s economy has shown significant progress in transitioning to a market-based system, but it is still highly dependent on the international community and the diaspora for financial and technical assistance. Remittances from the diaspora–located mainly in Germany and Switzerland–account for about 30% of GDP. Kosovo’s citizens are the poorest in Europe with an average annual per capita income of only $1800–about one-third the level of neighboring Albania. Unemployment–at more than 40% of the population–is a severe problem that encourages outward migration. (Central Intelligence Agency, The World Factbook, November 20, 2008)

Needless to say, one unmentionable “fact” disappeared from the CIA’s country profile is the statelet’s overwhelming dependence on the black economy. I suppose this is what the Agency means when it lauds Kosovo’s transition to a “market-based system”! But as former DEA investigator and whistleblower Michael Levine, author of The Big White Lie, told B92, one of the wings of the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) was “linked with every known narco-cartel in the Middle East and the Far East”, and that almost every European intelligence service and police has files on “connections between ethnic Albanian rebels and drug trafficking”. And dare I say by extension, the CIA itself.

One bone of contention which could have led Thaci and his henchmen to seek revenge against his erstwhile German allies was a 67-page BND analysis about organized crime in Kosovo. As Schwarz noted the dossier, produced in February 2005 and subsequently leaked to the press, “accuses Ramush Haradinaj (head of government from December 2004 to March 2005), Hashim Thaci (prime minister since January 2008) and Xhavit Haliti, who sits in the parliament presidium, of being deeply implicated in the drugs trade.”

According to the BND report, “Regarding the key players (e.g., Haliti, Thaci, Haradinaj), there exists the closest ties between politics, business and internationally operating OC [organized crime] structures in Kosovo. The criminal networks behind this are encouraging political instability. They have no interest in building a functioning state, which could impair their flourishing trade.” (WSWS, op. cit.)

Haradinaj, an American protégé, became Prime Minister in 2004. However, he was forced to resign his post in March 2005 when the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia indicted him for crimes against humanity. Among other things, Haradinaj was accused of abducting civilians, unlawful detention, torture, murder and rape. Schwarz notes he was acquitted in April 2008 “for lack of evidence, after nine out of ten prosecution witnesses died violently and the tenth withdrew his statement after narrowly escaping an assassination attempt.” Talk about friends in high places!

Mirroring evidence uncovered by journalists and investigators regarding the control of the drugs trade by 15 Albanian crime families, the Berlin Institute for European Policy laid similar charges against Thaci, stating that real power in Kosovo is wielded by 15 to 20 family clans who control “almost all substantial key social positions” and are “closely linked to prominent political decision makers.”

According to Spiegel, when the BND operation was run to ground with the possible connivance of the CIA, its secret network of informants, instrumental to gaining insight into the interconnections amongst state actors and organized crime were compromised. The BND’s Department Five, responsible for organized crime wrote a confidential report linking Thaci as “a key figure in a Kosovar-Albanian mafia network.”

Department Two, according to Spiegel, was responsible for telecommunications surveillance. In 1999, the BND launched operation “Mofa99,” a wiretap intercept program that targeted high-ranking members of the KLA–and exposed their links to dodgy criminal syndicates and Islamist allies, al-Qaeda. The program was so successful according to Spiegel that since then, “the BND has maintained an extensive network of informants among high-ranking functionaries of the KLA and the Kosovar administration.”

Functionaries in possession of many dangerous secrets and inconvenient truths!

As researcher and analyst Michel Chossudovsky wrote back in 2001, among the “inconvenient truths” unexplored by Western media is the close proximity of far-right Islamist terror gangs and planetary U.S. destabilization operations.

Since the Soviet-Afghan war, recruiting Mujahedin (”holy warriors”) to fight covert wars on Washington’s behest has become an integral part of US foreign policy. A report of the US Congress has revealed how the US administration–under advice from the National Security Council headed by Anthony Lake–had “helped turn Bosnia into a militant Islamic base” leading to the recruitment through the so-called “Militant Islamic Network,” of thousands of Mujahedin from the Muslim world.

The “Bosnian pattern” has since been replicated in Kosovo, Southern Serbia and Macedonia. Among the foreign mercenaries now fighting with the KLA-NLA are Mujahedin from the Middle East and the Central Asian republics of the former Soviet Union as well as “soldiers of fortune” from several NATO countries including Britain, Holland and Germany. Some of these Western mercenaries had previously fought with the KLA and the Bosnian Muslim Army. (Michel Chossudovsky, “Washington Behind Terrorist Assaults in Macedonia,” Global Research, September 10, 2001)

Fast forward seven years and one can hypothesize that the BND, stepping on the CIA’s toes and that agency’s cosy intelligence “understanding” with Mafia-linked KLA fighters and al-Qaeda assets, would have every reason to sabotage the BND’s organized crime operations–not that the German military intelligence service’s hands are any cleaner!

While we may never know all the facts surrounding this curious affair, one thing is certain: the role played by powerful Mafia gangs as a source for black funds, intelligence assets and CIA “agents of influence” will continue. Administrations come and go, but like motherhood and apple pie the shadowy workings of America’s deep state is an eternal verity you can count on!

The court’s opinion on Kosovo, which experts say could take one to three years, is not binding, but it will put a break on further efforts to integrating Kosovo into the world community as an independent country.

The move was a much-needed victory for Serbia, which lobbied heavily during the build-up to the vote. Despite the fact that 90 percent of Kosovars are nominally Muslim and despite the popular image of Serbia as anti-Muslim, Egypt, Algeria, Indonesia and Iran supported Serbia, showing that this is not a Muslim issue. 74 nations abstained, including most European and Muslim nations, strange bedfellows, but understandably so.

The Europeans don’t want to oppose a legitimate recourse to international law. Some European and most Muslim nations have separatist movements like Indonesia, which has to deal with ethnic conflicts in Aceh and Irian Jaya, and Azerbaijan, with its Armenian breakaway enclave Nagorno-Karabakh. Separatist concerns also lie behind the reluctance of some European Union countries to recognize Kosovo. Only 20 of the union’s 27 members have done so, with those opposed to the move including Spain, Cyprus and Romania.

It was also a victory for Russia, which has been explaining to the Muslim world ever since Kosovo declared independence in February what a dangerous precedent it is. In mid-March, Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said before beginning a Middle East visit that Moscow was urging Muslim states to withstand pressure to recognize Kosovo, a state he said had been “illegally formed. I would like to warn against the temptation to give in to calls from non-Arab and non-Islamic states addressed to Islamic countries to show Islamic solidarity and recognize Kosovo,” he told Rossiiskaya Gazeta. Lavrov also pointed to unrest taking place in Tibet at the time, suggesting that Kosovo’s breakaway had helped to trigger the “disorder” there.

In contrast to Kosovo, which was an integral part of Serbia until NATO bombed Serbia and invaded Kosovo in 1999, Georgia’s secessionist provinces had been functioning as independent countries from 1991-2 and South Ossetia was invaded by the Georgian army and its capital flattened by Georgian bombs, which the Serbs never did to Kosovo. So despite the contrary view of the two tragic incidents in the Western media, Serbia and Russia ’s arguments against Kosovo have found a sympathetic ear.

Only six members of the 57-state Organization of the Islamic Conference (OIC) have recognized its independence. The day after the independence declaration, OIC Secretary-General Ekmeleddin Ihsanoglu issued a statement declaring “our solidarity with and support to our brothers and sisters there. There is no doubt that the independence of Kosovo will be an asset to the Muslim world and will further enhance joint Islamic action.” But at an OIC summit in Dakar, Senegal, a month later, OIC heads of state resisted a Turkish initiative and merely voiced “solidarity”, leaving recognition up to individual member states. The only six to have taken the step so far are Turkey, Albania, Afghanistan, Burkino Faso, Sierra Leone and Senegal.

“We strongly believe that the support we got from the international community to gain our freedom is the largest miracle of Allah and the largest sign of his mercy towards his people in Kosovo,” Blerim Gashi, public information officer of the Kosovar-Arab friendship and economic cooperation chamber, wrote on the Al-Arabiya television channel’s website. “We do hope that our brothers in faith will take their rightful place on our side.” It is the poorest country in Europe, notorious for drug, arms and human smuggling, and with an unemployment rate of 40 percent. Kosovo authorities have no control over about 15 per cent of its territory where about 200,000 Serbs live. Local Serbs in those areas recognize only the Serbian government, despite opposition from Kosovo’s UN and European Union administrators.

On his way to New York for last minute lobbying, Kosovo Foreign Minister Skender Hyseni visited OIC headquarters in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, where he met with Ihsanoglu and “expressed the hope that more OIC member states would recognize the independence of Kosovo.” While the Kosovar was in Jeddah at the OIC, his Serbian counterpart, Vuk Jeremic, was in Cairo at the Arab League — all 22 of whose members are also in the OIC.

As if to emphasize where Kosovo’s interests really lie, US Defense Secretary Robert Gates was in Pristina at about the same time, the first US Cabinet member to Kosovo since the country declared independence, where he met with the president and prime minister of Kosovo and lunched with the 1,600 US troops at Camp Bondsteel. He just happened to be on his way to nearby Hungary for a meeting of NATO defense chiefs. The US pledged $400 million at a donors’ conference earlier this year.

Gates dismisses Russia’s vehement opposition as sour grapes, an attempt to “exorcise past humiliations,” but a less tendentious look reveals a sophisticated diplomatic offensive by Russia with regards, not so much Kosovo, as the Muslim world in general. Russia sees Kosovo as a US-EU invention with dangerous implications for the world. It views the war in Iraq in a similar light, is increasingly critical of the war in Afghanistan, and as such is being actively courted by Arab countries, not to mention Iran.

Moscow’s new friends include Syria, eager for Russian arms and more than willing to restore the old Soviet naval base at Tartus, and Hamas, which went so far as to recognize Abkhazia and South Ossetia, putting it in league with Russia’s close friend Nicaragua. Moscow is seen as less beholden to Israel, and has shown it is eager to be considered an even-handed broker in the Palestinian issue, having hosted a peace conference last June for the first time.

As president, Vladimir Putin visited Iran last October, Saudi Arabia in January, and Libya in April, his last official visit as president. Recently Russia, with its large Muslim population, has expressed interest in joining the OIC. This thaw in relations has been a two-way street. Russia signed a deal to build a railway in Saudi Arabia and another on gas production in Libya, forgave Iraq $12 billion in Soviet-era debt, and has forgiven past Saudi and Iranian support to Chechen rebels.

Arab nations see in Russia not only an important ally and counterweight to the US, but a role model of sorts. Political analyst Abdel-Fattah Mady at Alexandria University writes at IslamOnline.net, “Arab countries fail to define a framework for their common national security. Unfortunately, Arab regimes cannot distinguish between their peoples’ interests and those of the United States. Russia teaches Arabs a very important lesson: Arabs must settle their internal divisions if they want to join the club of nations that defend their interests without fearing the US. Unfortunately, Arabs lack strong leadership with a clear vision of national security. Neither do they have the political determination to change facts on the ground.”

Saakashvili, in an effort to establish effective control over his whole country, sent troops into the breakaway region of South Ossetia August 7 (just before the Olympic Games opening ceremony in Beijing). Russia used this as an excuse to flex its muscle, invading a country for the first time since the USSR invaded Afghanistan in December 1979. It not only drove Georgian troops from South Ossetia but along with allies in the separatist Abkhazia region attacked targets throughout Georgia. It’s a clear case of unwarranted aggression.

This narrative has been effectively challenged or at least contextualized in columns by Charles King in the Christian Science Monitor, Brendan O’Neill on Spiked, and Justin Raimondo on Antiwar.com, among others. Here I’d like to list some of their main points, along with some historical background:

1. Saakashvili, who owes his position to U.S. interference in Georgian politics, is no liberal democrat but an autocrat who jails political enemies and media critics and uses force to quash anti-government demonstrations. He accuses foes of coup plots which he equates with “aiding terrorism.”

2. Russia is alarmed at the unceasing expansion of NATO, an alliance formed to secure western Europe against a Soviet attack that never happened. Russian leaders expected NATO to dissolve along with the Warsaw Pact at the end of the Cold War. Instead it has expanded to include Poland, the Czech Republic and Hungary in 1997 and Bulgaria, Estonia, Lithuania, Latvia, Romania, Slovakia and Slovenia in 2004. Inclusion of the Baltic states brings NATO right up to the Russian border. Washington is pushing for the eventual inclusion of Ukraine (another country where Washington has been meddling politically) and Georgia in the alliance. Russia has repeatedly warned that it can not tolerate this.

3. The whole of Georgia was part of the Russian Empire from 1801, and was absorbed into the USSR in 1922. It became independent with the breakup of the Soviet Union in 1991. During the Soviet period, South Ossetia and Abkhazia (as well as the Adjara region) had autonomous status within the Soviet Republic of Georgia. Use of the native languages was encouraged by the state and South Ossetians, Abkhazis, and Adjaris favored over Georgians or Russians for bureaucratic posts in their regions. In the last couple years of the USSR, new laws imposing the Georgian language nationwide and banning regional-based political parties caused South Ossetians to declare a Soviet Democratic Republic. In 1991 polls showed that they overwhelmingly favored the preservation of the Soviet Union and opposed integration into a new Georgian state. At the time Georgian president Zviad Gamsakhurdia called South Ossetian separatists “direct agents of the Kremlin, its tools and terrorists.”

In 1992 the new regime of Eduard Shevardnadze in post-Soviet Georgia announced its intention to restore a 1921 constitution stripping these regions of autonomy. In response the South Ossetians conducted a referendum, voting overwhelmingly for independence. Violence in the region drew Russian concern and in June, after hundreds had died, Tblisi agreed to the creation of a tripartite peace-keeping force of Russians, Georgians and South Ossetians in the region. The following month Abkhazia proclaimed itself independent, and Tblisi sent 3000 troops into the poorly defended region and engaged in wanton destruction. The majority in both regions apparently want a divorce from Georgia and either independence or incorporation into the Russian Federation. In 2002 South Ossetia’s elected president, Eduard Kokoity, officially requested that Moscow recognize the Republic of South Ossetia and its absorption into the Russian Federation.

4. While Vladimir Putin was president, Russia conferred citizenship and passports on most South Ossetians and can thus argue that it has an obligation to defend them from aggression. Russia can also argue that it has an obligation to defend its peace-keeping troops from attack.

5. Saakashvili has cultivated an alliance with the U.S., even supplying the third largest detachment of troops (2000) to the “Coalition forces” in Iraq. (Georgia has only a population of 4.7 million people.) The Georgian Army has been trained by U.S. and Israeli forces. Saakashvili has sought membership in NATO, depicting Georgia as a European democracy confronted with a bullying undemocratic neighbor. Moscow finds Saakasvili’s rhetoric provocative.

6. While the MSM has depicted the Georgia crisis as the result of Russian aggression, the initial large-scale military action was a surprise aerial attack on the regional capital of Tskhinvali on August 7 followed up by a tank and mortar assault August 8. This produced a prompt Russian military response. However, it does not appear to have been planned well in advance. A senior U.S. official told the New York Times, “It doesn’t look like this was premeditated, with a massive staging of equipment. Until the night before the fighting, Russia seemed to be playing a constructive role [in maintaining peace between Tblisi and the Ossetians].”

7. Georgia plays an important role in the geopolitics of oil, since the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan pipeline completed 2005 passes through it, connecting the Caspian Sea oil fields to NATO member Turkey, bypassing Russia. Many Russian officials feel it an effort to diminish Russian influence in the Caucasus and justify the stationing of U.S. troops in the region. It may be that Saakashvili believed Georgia so valuable to the U.S. bloc, because of the pipeline, military cooperation and political allegiance, that he could assault South Ossetia counting on the U.S. to restrain any Russian response. But as the MSM reports, a U.S. military response is highly unlikely.

8. The Russians have justified their actions by making pointed references to U.S. actions in recent years. In February, when the U.S. recognized the Serbian breakaway province of Kosovo, split off from then-Yugoslavia by a NATO bombing campaign in 1999, the Russians denounced the move. They stated that the U.S.-led attack (the first war in Europe, including the first aerial attack on a national capital, since 1945) and the detachment of part of a sovereign state, ostensibly to protect an ethnic group, was a dangerous precedent. One can thus read the Russian actions of the last week as a tit-for-tat response to the arrogant use of American power in Russia’s immediate backyard.

I wrote after Kosovo’s U.S.-backed declaration of independence six months ago:

[The Russians’] opposition to Kosovo’s independence might be perceived as a slight irritation in Washington among those eager to establish a new client-state and drag it into NATO. But this move comes on the heels of U.S. meddling in Georgia, Belarus, and the Ukraine, the relentless eastward expansion of NATO, and moves to locate missile defense systems in Poland and the Czech Republic. The Russian government is in effect saying: “Look, you intervene at will in Latin America, forming and toppling governments as you will, arguing it’s necessary for your ‘national security.’ We who have been invaded many times from the west have legitimate reasons to support our friends in the Balkans, including the Serbs whom you’ve maligned and mistreated disgracefully. Do you really think you can just wrench away a province from a Slavic country friendly to us, through brutal military force, and expect us to take it lying down?” I have the feeling that Washington blew it here–and that there will be some blowback.

Here’s indeed some blowback. The Georgian regime is humiliated, and Washington embarrassingly impotent to go to Saakashvili’s aid. Quite likely the young president’s constituents will turn on him, shocked by the utter folly of his provoking the Russian bear.

And the MSM take will be: Russia is flexing its muscles, secure in the knowledge that Europe needs its oil and natural gas and so the West cannot prevent its bullying antidemocratic actions. Some will call it a new Cold War. But don’t expect much genuine historical analysis.

The parallel between Kosovo and South Ossetia is not of course exact. Kosovo plays a more important role in Serbian history than South Ossetia in Georgian history. It experienced a far more dramatic ethno-demographic change in the last century and a half than South Ossetia. (A 1871 report by an Austrian officer indicates that Kosovo was 64% Serb, 32% Albanian, whereas the Kosovars are now 92% of the total.) Serbs can protest that the mere reproduction rate of Albanians in Kosovo shouldn’t have entitled the Kosovars to seize the Serbian heartland with its churches, monasteries and battlefields rich in heroic historical memory. I don’t think Georgians can make a similar argument about South Ossetia; the Ossetians (who may be related to Iranians) seem to have predominated in the region since around the fourteenth century.

The premise for the U.S./NATO intervention in Kosovo in 1999 was that Kosovars were being persecuted by Serbian authorities. U.S. Defense Secretary William Cohen declared, “We’ve now seen about 100,000 military-aged men missing… They may have been murdered,” while a State Department spokesman warned, “There are indications genocide is unfolding in Kosovo.” (One thinks of the Russian accusation of “genocide” as it was reported 1500-2000 Ossetian civilians had been killed in the Georgian attack.) Actually it turns out only about 2000 civilians were killed in Kosovo between 1998 and 1999–around the number of South Ossetians killed by Georgians in just a few days. (To put this into perspective, there are about 100,000 South Ossetians in a region measuring 3,900 square kilometers and about two million inhabitants of Kosovo measuring 11,000 square kilometers.) A German court determined in March 1999 that, “Ethnic Albanians in Kosovo have neither been nor are now exposed to regional or countrywide group persecution in the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia.” Does it not look as though the premise of persecution justifying outside intervention is much stronger in the South Ossetia case?

Before commencing the bombardment of Yugoslavia (again, the first such bombardment in Europe since World War II), the U.S. presented Belgrade with the “Rambouillet Accords” ultimatum: either allow NATO forces to operate at will and tax-free throughout the entire territory of Yugoslavia (once proudly non-aligned during the Cold War), while they secured Kosovo as Yugoslav federal troops withdrew–or be subject to attack. The U.S. made demands no sovereign state could accept. Russia in contrast has not demanded the right to move its troops at will throughout Georgia. It gave Tblisi no ultimatum before responding to what appears to have been a brutal sneak attack.

NATO bombed Belgrade for three months in 1999. The bombing of the Serb Radio and Television (RTS) headquarters in Belgrade on April 23 killed 16 RTS civilian technicians. Russia has reportedly attacked the Vaziani military airbase outside Tbilisi and military targets in the capital city to “punish” Georgia for the South Ossetia attack and, no doubt, its embrace of an unofficial military alliance threatening to Russia. Perhaps if the proposed cease-fire does not hold, Tblisi will encounter the same fate as Belgrade. But I think it more likely that the Georgian authorities will capitulate immediately to the invaders’ demands, which are more measured than the demands presented Milosevic.

Regardless of these differences between Kosovo and South Ossetia, Moscow seems to be saying: You cannot violate international law with your constant aggressions and provocations of Russia–a country seeking warm ties with the U.S. and Europe–without expecting us, at some point, to respond in kind. You cannot say it’s fine, as a “special exception” to violate the sovereignty of our traditional Serbian allies by delivering a state to the Kosovars while damning us for invading Georgia to defend the Ossetians. You have created this problem, and more to come.

Saakashvili explains Russia’s actions by saying, “They just don’t want freedom and that’s why they want to stamp on Georgia and destroy it.” The buffoon seems to echo Bush’s explanation for the 9-11 attacks: “They hate our freedoms.” Some see here the re-emergence of a Cold War, a pitting of democracy versus the specter of communist totalitarianism. Surely there are policy wonks nostalgic for the Cold War era and its simplicity. But it really has little to do with “freedom,” and we do not have here a clash of systems and ideologies. Russia is in its own way as capitalistic and imperialistic as the U.S. Rather, there’s a clash between those governing the U.S. and Russia, comparable to the inter-imperialist clashes and turf-battles of the past century and a half. Like those it has a lot to do with competition for the control of raw materials and markets. Within that big game, Russia suddenly seems much more competitive.

The cartoon makes fun of the idea that Barack and Michelle Obama are some kind of mixture of Black Panther, Islamist jihadist, and Marxist revolutionary. But how much more educational for the American public and the world it would be to make fun of the idea that Obama is even some kind of progressive.

I’m more concerned here with foreign policy than domestic issues because it’s in this area that the US government can do, and indeed does do, the most harm to the world, to put it mildly. And in this area what do we find? We find Obama threatening, several times, to attack Iran if they don’t do what the United States wants them to do nuclear-wise; threatening more than once to attack Pakistan if their anti-terrorist policies are not tough enough or if there would be a regime change in the nuclear-armed country not to his liking; calling for a large increase in US troops and tougher policies for Afghanistan; wholly and unequivocally embracing Israel as if it were the 51st state; totally ignoring Hamas, an elected ruling party in the occupied territory; decrying the Berlin Wall in his recent talk in that city, about the safest thing a politician can do, but with no mention of the Israeli Wall while in Israel, nor the numerous American-built walls in Baghdad while in Iraq; referring to the Venezuelan government of Hugo Chávez as “authoritarian”, but never referring similarly to the government of George W. Bush, certainly more deserving of the label; talking with the usual disinformation and hostility about Cuba, albeit with a token reform re visits and remittances. But would he dare mention the outrageous case of the imprisoned Cuban Five¹ in his frequent references to fighting terrorism?

While an Illinois state senator in January 2004, Obama declared that it was time “to end the embargo with Cuba” because it had “utterly failed in the effort to overthrow Castro.” But speaking as a presidential candidate to a Cuban-American audience in Miami in August 2007, he said he would not “take off the embargo” as president because it is “an important inducement for change.”² He thus went from a good policy for the wrong reason to the wrong policy for the wrong reason. Does Mr. Obama care any more than Mr. Bush that the United Nations General Assembly has voted — virtually unanimously — 16 years in a row against the embargo?

In summary, it would be difficult to name a single ODE (Officially Designated Enemy) that Obama has not been critical of or to name one that he has supported. Can this be mere coincidence?

The fact that Obama says he’s willing to “talk” to some of the “enemies” more than the Bush administration has done sounds good, but one doesn’t have to be too cynical to believe that it will not amount to more than a public relations gimmick. It’s only change of policy that counts. Why doesn’t he simply and clearly state that he would not attack Iran unless Iran first attacked the US or Israel or anyone else?

As to Iraq, if you’re sick to the core of your being about the horrors US policy brings down upon the heads of the people of that unhappy land, then you must support withdrawal –- immediate, total, all troops, combat and non-combat, all the Blackwater-type killer contractors, not moved to Kuwait or Qatar to be on call. All bases out. No permanent bases. No permanent war. No timetables. No approval by the US military necessary. No reductions in forces. Just OUT. ALL. Just like what the people of Iraq want. Nothing less will give them the opportunity to try to put an end to the civil war and violence instigated by the American invasion and occupation and to recreate their failed state.

George W. Bush, 2006: “We’re going to stay in Iraq to get the job done as long as the government wants us there.”³

George W. Bush, 2007: “It’s their government’s choice. If they were to say, leave, we would leave.”⁴

Iraqi National Security Adviser Mowaffak al-Rubaie, 2008: “said his government was ‘impatiently waiting’ for the complete withdrawal of U.S. troops.”⁵

Barack Obama, 2008: We can “redeploy combat brigades from Iraq at a pace of 1 to 2 brigades a month that would remove them in 16 months.”⁶

Obama’s terms of withdrawal equals no withdrawal. Literally. Has he ever said that the war is categorically illegal and immoral? A war crime? Or that anti-American terrorism in the world is the direct result of oppressive US policies? Instead he calls for a troop increase and “the first truly 21st century military … We must maintain the strongest, best-equipped military in the world.”⁷ Why of course, that’s what the people of the United States and the people of Iraq and Afghanistan and the rest of the people in this sad world desperately desire and need — greater American killing power! Obama is not so much concerned with ending America’s endless warfare as he is with “succeeding” in them, by whatever perverted definition of that word.

And has he ever dared to raise the obvious question: Why would Iran, even if nuclear armed, be a threat to attack the US or Israel? Any more than Iraq was such a threat. Which was zero. Instead, he has said things like “Iran continues to be a major threat” and repeats the tiresome lie that the Iranian president called for the destruction of Israel.⁸

Obama, one observer has noted, “opposes the present US policy in Iraq not on the basis of any principled opposition to neo-colonialism or aggressive war, but rather on the grounds that the Iraq war is a mistaken deployment of power that fails to advance the global strategic interests of American imperialism.”⁹

He and his supporters have made much of the speech he delivered in the Illinois state legislature in 2002 against the upcoming US invasion of Iraq. But two years later, when he was running for the US Senate, he declared: “There’s not that much difference between my position and George Bush’s position at this stage.”¹⁰ Since taking office in January 2005, he has voted to approve every war appropriation the Republicans have put forward. He also voted to confirm Condoleezza Rice as Secretary of State despite her complicity in the Bush Administration’s false justifications for going to war in Iraq. In doing so, he lacked the courage of 12 of his Democratic Party Senate colleagues who voted against her confirmation.

If you’re one of those who would like to believe that Obama has to present moderate foreign policy views to be elected, but once he’s in the White House we can forget that he lied to us repeatedly and the true, progressive man of peace and international law and human rights will emerge … keep in mind that as a US Senate candidate in 2004 he threatened missile strikes against Iran.¹¹ and winning that election apparently did not put him in touch with his inner peacenik.

When, in 2005, the other Illinois Senator, Dick Durbin, stuck his neck out and compared American torture at Guantanamo to “Nazis, Soviets in their gulags, or some mad regime — Pol Pot or others — that had no concern for human beings”, and was angrily denounced by the right wing, Obama stood up in the Senate and … defended him? No, he joined the critics, thrice calling Durbin’s remark a “mistake.”¹²

One of Obama’s chief foreign policy advisers is Zbigniew Brzezinski, a man instrumental in provoking Soviet intervention in Afghanistan in 1979, which was followed by massive US military supplies to the opposition and widespread war. This gave rise to a generation of Islamic jihadists, the Taliban, Osama bin Laden, al Qaeda, and more than two decades of anti-American terrorism. Asked later if he had any regrets about this policy, Brzezinski replied: “Regret what? That secret operation was an excellent idea. It had the effect of drawing the Russians into the Afghan trap and you want me to regret it? The day that the Soviets officially crossed the border, I wrote to President Carter, in substance: We now have the opportunity of giving to the USSR its Vietnam war.”¹³

Another prominent Obama adviser — from a list entirely and depressingly establishment-imperial — is Madeleine Albright, who should always wear gloves because her hands are caked with blood from her roles in the bombings of Iraq and Yugoslavia in the 1990s.

In a primary campaign talk in March, Obama said that “he would return the country to the more ‘traditional’ foreign policy efforts of past presidents, such as George H.W. Bush, John F. Kennedy and Ronald Reagan.”¹⁴ Use your imagination. Bloody serial interventionists, all.

Why have well-known conservatives like George Will, David Brooks, Rush Limbaugh, Joe Scarborough, and others spoken so favorably about Obama’s candidacy?¹⁵ Whatever else, they know he’s not a threat to their most cherished views and values.

Given all this, can we expect a more enlightened, less bloody, more progressive and humane foreign policy from Mr. Barack Obama? Forget the alleged eloquence and charm; forget the warm feel-good stuff; forget the interminable clichés and platitudes about hope, change, unity, and America’s indispensable role as world leader; forget all the religiobabble; forget John McCain and George W. Bush … All that counts is putting an end to the horror — the bombings, the invasions, the killings, the destruction, the overthrows, the occupations, the torture, the American Empire.

Al Gore and John Kerry both took the progressive vote for granted. Neither had ever been particularly progressive himself. Each harbored a measure of disdain for the left. Both paid a heavy price for the neglect. I and millions like me voted for Ralph Nader, or some other third-party candidate, or stayed home. Obama is doing the same as Gore and Kerry. Progressives should let him know that his positions are not acceptable, keeping up the anti-war pressure on him and the Democratic Party at every opportunity. For whatever good it just might do.

I’m afraid that if Barack Obama becomes president he’s going to break a lot of young hearts. And some older ones as well.

Writer Norman Solomon has written: “These days, an appreciable number of Obama supporters are starting to use words like ‘disillusionment.’ But that’s a consequence of projecting their political outlooks onto the candidate in the first place. The best way to avoid becoming disillusioned is to not have illusions in the first place.”

Victors’ justice and impunity

So, former Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic has finally been apprehended. He’s slated to appear before the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY) in The Hague, Netherlands, charged with war crimes, genocide, and crimes against humanity. And now all the law-abiding governments of the world, and all the right-minded media of the world, and all the decent citizens of the world join together in celebrating this triumph of justice.

The ICTY was created by the United Nations in 1993. Its full name is “The International Tribunal for the Prosecution of Persons Responsible for Serious Violations of International Humanitarian Law Committed in the Territory of the Former Yugoslavia since 1991″. Notice the “who” — “Persons Responsible for Serious Violations of International Humanitarian Law”. Notice the “where” — “Territory of the Former Yugoslavia”. This is all spelled out in the statute of the Tribunal.¹⁶

In 1999, NATO (primarily the United States) bombed the Yugoslav republic of Serbia for 78 consecutive days, ruining the economy, the ecology, power supply, bridges, apartment buildings, transportation, infrastructure, churches, schools, pushing the country many years back in its development, killing hundreds or thousands of people, traumatizing countless children who’ll be reacting unhappily to certain sounds and sights for perhaps the remainder of their days; the most ferocious sustained bombing of a nation in the history of the world. Nobody has ever suggested that Serbia had attacked or was preparing to attack a member state of NATO, and that is the only event which justifies a reaction under the NATO treaty. But Serbia was guilty of a greater crime: It had refused to happily fall under the dominion of the US/NATO/European Union/World Bank/IMF/WTO world government. The quasi-socialist Serbian state was Europe’s last communist holdout. Moreover, post-cold war, NATO needed to demonstrate a raison d’être if it was to remain alive as Washington’s enforcement thug.

The ICTY has already held one high-level trial in an attempt to convince the world of the justice of the NATO bombing — former Yugoslav president Slobodan Milosevic, who died in the Hague prison while trying to defend himself against charges that remain unproven. Radovan Karadzic is now next. When will the Western leaders behind the bombing of Serbia be tried for war crimes, as called for by the Tribunal’s own statute?

Shortly after the bombing began in March, 1999, professionals in international law from Canada, the United Kingdom, Greece, and the United States began to file complaints with the ICTY charging leaders of NATO countries with “grave violations of international humanitarian law”, including “wilful killing, wilfully causing great suffering and serious injury to body and health, employment of poisonous weapons and other weapons to cause unnecessary suffering, wanton destruction of cities, towns and villages, unlawful attacks on civilian objects, devastation not necessitated by military objectives, attacks on undefended buildings and dwellings, destruction and wilful damage done to institutions dedicated to religion, charity and education, the arts and sciences.”

The Canadian suit named 68 leaders, including William Clinton, Madeleine Albright, William Cohen, Tony Blair, Canadian Prime Minister Jean Chretien, and NATO officials Javier Solana, Wesley Clark, and Jamie Shea. The complaint also alleged “open violation” of the United Nations Charter, the NATO treaty itself, the Geneva Conventions, and the Principles of International Law Recognized by the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg.

The complainants’ briefs pointed out that the prosecution of those named by them was “not only a requirement of law, it is a requirement of justice to the victims and of deterrence to powerful countries such as those in NATO who, in their military might and in their control over the media, are lacking in any other natural restraint such as might deter less powerful countries.” Charging the war’s victors, not only its losers, it was argued, would be a watershed in international criminal law.

In a letter to Louise Arbour, the court’s chief prosecutor, Michael Mandel, a professor of law in Toronto and the initiator of the Canadian suit, stated:

Unfortunately, as you know, many doubts have already been raised about the impartiality of your Tribunal. In the early days of the conflict, after a formal and, in our view, justified complaint against NATO leaders had been laid before it by members of the Faculty of Law of Belgrade University, you appeared at a press conference with one of the accused, British Foreign Secretary Robin Cook, who made a great show of handing you a dossier of Serbian war crimes. In early May, you appeared at another press conference with US Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, by that time herself the subject of two formal complaints of war crimes over the targeting of civilians in Yugoslavia.¹⁷

Arbour herself made little attempt to hide the pro-NATO bias she wore beneath her robe. She trusted NATO to be its own police, judge, jury, and prison guard. Here are her own words:

I am obviously not commenting on any allegations of violations of international humanitarian law supposedly perpetrated by nationals of NATO countries. I accept the assurances given by NATO leaders that they intend to conduct their operations in the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia in full compliance with international humanitarian law.¹⁸

The ICTY on its website tells us: “By holding individuals accountable regardless of their position, the ICTY’s work has dismantled the tradition of impunity for war crimes and other serious violations of international law, particularly by individuals who held the most senior positions.”¹⁹ US/NATO leaders, however, are immune not only for the 1999 bombings of Serbia, but the many bombings of Bosnia in the period 1993-95, including the use of depleted uranium. Impunity indeed.

1. William Blum, “Cuban Political Prisoners … in the United States.”
2. Washington Post, February 25, 2008; p.A4.
3. New York Times, December 1, 2006, p.1.
4. White House press conference, May 24, 2007.
5. Washington Post, July 9, 2008.
6. Obama’s website.
7. Speech to the Chicago Council on Global Affairs, April 23, 2007.
8. Haaretz.com (leading Israeli newspaper), May 16, 2007.
9. Bill Van Auken, Global Research, July 18, 2008.
10. Chicago Tribune, July 27, 2004.
11. Chicago Tribune, September 25, 2004.
12. Congressional Record, June 21, 2005, p.S6897.
13. For the full Brzezinski interview.
14. Associated Press, March 28, 2008.
15. See, for example, Peter Wehner, “Why Republicans Like Obama”, Washington Post, February 3, 2008, p.B7.
16. “Updated Statute of the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia.”
17. This and most of the other material concerning the complaints to the Tribunal mentioned here were transmitted to this writer by Mandel and other complainants. See also: Michael Mandel, How America Gets Away With Murder (2004).
18. Press Release from Chief Prosecutor Louise Arbour, The Hague, May 13, 1999.
19. Fact sheets.

It seems that Karadzic broke that deal and pissed off the CIA.

The chief US peace negotiator in Bosnia, Richard Holbrooke, called any such deal a “flat-out lie.”

The Independent says that two top officials — former Bosnian Serb foreign minister Aleksa Buha and former Bosnian foreign minister Mohamed Sacirbey — have corroborated the existence of the deal.

Holbrooke, however, states, “It would have been morally reprehensible and illegal to do such a thing … We made no deal…”

The US has a long history of creating pretexts (i.e., lying) to aggress other nations,² so what verisimilitude does a statement from a US official carry?

The two reasons (moral reprehensibility and illegality) that Holbrooke uses to buttress his contention of there being no deal, bear examination.

I. Would the United States engage in an act of moral reprehensibility?

Case One: The US is founded on the theft of land from the Original Peoples of Turtle Island and the greatest genocide in human history.

Case Two: The US staunchly supports the Jewish state of Israel in its usurpation of the Palestinians’ homeland, the forced transfer of Palestinians, a slow-motion genocide, and refusal to honor the international right of return to refugees. (Much of this similarly characterizes what happened in Bosnia in microcosm).

Case Three: The US aggressed Iraq in 2003 — building on the genocide wreaked on Iraqis since 1991 — to kill another million plus Iraqis and send over 4 million to live as refugees abroad.

The facts in the three cases (and there are many more cases to draw from) are indisputable. The question is whether or not such acts — acts which dwarf any genocide alleged to have occurred in Bosnia — are morally reprehensible. I think the answer is quite clear.

II. Would the United States engage in an act of illegality?

The present ongoing aggression-occupation of Iraq provides an excellent scenario to examine whether the US would commit an act of illegality. Aggression is what the Nuremberg Tribunal deemed the “supreme internal crime,” an act so vile that former US Supreme Court justice Robert Jackson, the chief United States prosecutor at Nuremberg, considered it “differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole.”

The pretext of Iraq possessing weapons-of-mass-destruction was knowingly false. The Downing Street memos clearly reveal that “the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy.” Then UN secretary general Kofi Annan stated that the invasion violated the UN Charter and was illegal.

In fact, the US has a long history of disdaining international law and acting with impunity.³

Holbrooke’s reasoning that accuses Karadzic of lying does not stand him in good stead.

1. Vesna Peric Zimonjic, “Karadzic ‘lived under protectionof CIA agents until he broke deal,’” Independent, 4 August 2008.
2. Kim Petersen, “Grasping at Straws: Searching for a War Pretext,” Dissident Voice, 4 March 2003.
3. Nils Andersson, Daniel Iagolnitzer, and Diana G. Collier (Eds.), International Justice and Impunity: The Case of the United States (Clarity Press, 2008). See review at Kim Petersen, “Getting Away with the Supreme International Crime,” Dissident Voice, 18 June 2008.

Karadzic and Bosnian Serb military leader Ratko Mladic, who is still at large, have been indicted by the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY), located in the Hague, in connection with the siege of Sarajevo, during which up to 11,000 people were killed, and the massacre of 8,000 Muslim men and boys in the town of Srebrenica.

That Karadzic is responsible for war crimes should not be in question. Under his political leadership, Serbian nationalists engaged in terrible atrocities–including the shelling of cities and towns, massacres of civilians, rapes and herding people into concentration camps–to drive people out and create an “ethnically pure” swath of Bosnia and the Krajina region of Croatia that they hoped to annex to Serbia.

But this fact alone does not close the case. As with all war crimes tribunals in history, there is selectiveness about what is considered a war crime and who ends up on the dock.

After the Second World War, some Nazis were put on trial in Nuremburg (though because of U.S. Cold War interests in establishing a strong German state and utilizing former Nazis as spies and scientists, the trials were wound up quickly). But as a court of the victors, no Americans were tried for the nuclear obliteration of Hiroshima and Nagasaki or for the firebombing of Tokyo and Dresden.

Throughout the Balkans conflict, Serbs were systematically demonized in the Western press, while atrocities and ethnic cleansing committed by Croats and Muslims were either omitted or played down.

On first look, the ICTY offers an image of impartiality. In addition to indicting Slobodan Milosevic, Karadzic and Mladic, it has also indicted Milan Babić, president of the Republika Srpska Krajina; Ramush Haradinaj, former prime minister of Kosovo (recently acquitted); Rasim Delić, who served as commander of the main staff of the Army of Bosnia and Herzegovina from June 1993 until September 200; and Ante Gotovina, former general of the Croatian Army (currently on trial).

However, of the 161 individuals indicted by the ICTY, from common soldiers to generals, police commanders and political leaders, three-quarters are Serbs or Montenegrins. This is not surprising considering the court was established by the UN Security Council, under pressure from the U.S.–making it, again, a “court of the victors.”

While it is true that the conflict in the region developed out of the ambitions of Slobodan Milosevic for a greater Serbia, uniting the Serbs of Serbia with those living in Bosnia and Croatia, Croatia’s nationalists under Franjo Tudjman were no less ruthless in their efforts to create a “greater Croatia,” based on the ethnic cleansing of Serbs from the Krajina and Serbs and Muslims from parts of Bosnia.

Croatian paramilitaries massacred hundreds of Muslim civilians in the town of Ahmici, to give just one example. After shelling the town to force townspeople to flee, Croatian forces sprayed them with machine gun fire across an open field through which the people were forced to run, a scenario similar to the atrocities committed by Serbian forces in many Bosnian villages during the war.

Indeed, as Bosnia came under attack from Serbian and Croatian paramilitaries, Muslim nationalists, with (eventually) military aid and air support from the U.S. and Europe, engaged in similar acts of ethnic cleansing as their Serbian and Croatian counterparts. Journalist Misha Glenny, in his excellent book The Fall of Yugoslavia, offers an example:

Wherever they could, the Muslims used the considerable sympathy which they enjoyed in the outside world as a cover to undertake military operations.

In December and early January [1993], they launched an intensive offensive from Srebrenica with the aim of regaining control of Bratunac, to the east on the river Drina. The Serbs were caught unawares by the attack, and the Muslims moved swiftly through Serbian villages, slaughtering a large number of civilians on the way. Because the atrocities were being perpetrated by the Muslims, they received relatively little attention in the world media.

They also provoked a fearsome counter-attack by the Serbs, who had soon driven the Muslims back to Srebrenica. Politicians and journalists were quick to condemn the Serbs for this operation, but they entirely neglected to point out that it had been provoked by the original Muslim offensive.

But what really throws the impartiality of the court into question is that no individuals–military or political leaders–from NATO countries that intervened in the war have been indicted. Yet there can be no doubt that the United States and NATO forces committed war crimes in the former Yugoslavia–first, in the Bosnian war, and later, in the air war against Serbia in 1999 during the conflict over Kosovo.

From the start, there was the complicity of the Western powers in creating the conditions that made war and ethnic cleansing inevitable. As Phil Gasper wrote:

In the end, Germany’s recognition of Croatia’s independence–without any guarantees of the Serb minority’s national rights in Croatia–made the outbreak of war and the disintegration of Yugoslavia inevitable. The same holds true for Bosnia. Germany and the U.S. recognized Bosnian independence even though the majority of Bosnian Serbs and Croats–about 51 percent of the republic–had rejected it. By doing so, they put their seal of approval on Bosnia’s descent into war.

Then there is the direct complicity of the United States in the greatest single act of ethnic cleansing that took place during the war–Operation Storm in August 1995.

By 1993, the U.S. was finally able to strong-arm its reluctant European war partners into adopting a new policy (the old one being an arms embargo on Bosnia)–NATO air strikes against the Bosnian Serbs, combined with arming the Bosnian Muslim army. The policy was called “lift and strike.”

Peter Galbraith, U.S. ambassador to Croatia, brokered a new alliance–after the two sides had been fighting for months in central Bosnia–between Croatia and the Bosnian Muslims.

To “level the playing field” further, a group of retired U.S. generals helped Croatia to devise a military plan, with U.S. and German military aid, to overrun the Serb-held Krajina region. A private U.S. mercenary company, Military Professional Resources Inc., provided training to the Croatian Army.

The August 4, 1995, Croatian offensive, dubbed “Operation Storm,” drove upwards of 200,000 Krajina Serbs from their homes. Human rights observers reported the burning of homes, looting and massacres of elderly Serbs too old to flee the region. Croatia was completely “cleansed” of its historic Serbian population, and in the following weeks, U.S. air support for Muslim and Croatian forces allowed them to seize 20 percent of Bosnia back from the Serbs.

According to Mark Danner, writing in the New York Review of Books:

During two weeks beginning at the end of August, NATO pilots flew 3m400 sorties, destroying Serb antiaircraft batteries, radar sites, ammunition depots, command bunkers, bridges. Meanwhile, the Croats and Bosnians pressed their combined attacks in northwest Bosnia, conquering town after town. Indeed, NATO planes had in effect become the Croatian and Bosnian air force, ensuring that they would succeed, in just over two weeks, in changing the balance of power in Bosnia.

Bill Clinton praised Operation Storm, saying that he was “hopeful Croatia’s offensive will turn out to be something that will give us an avenue to a quick diplomatic solution.” The three-pronged offensive–the Croat invasion of Krajina, a Muslim attack in central Bosnia and punishing air strikes–pushed all sides to the negotiating table in 1995 to sign the Dayton Accords.

Today, Ante Gotovina, the Croatian general who led Operation Storm, along with two other generals, is currently facing trial on war crimes charges associated with that operation. But Bill Clinton and the U.S. generals who helped plan it and gave the green light for it remain at large.

Finally, the 11-week NATO air assault on Serbia during the Kosovo war in 1999 is a war crime that the tribunal won’t touch.

The U.S. claimed that it went to war to help Kosovar Albanian refugees under attack by Serbian forces. However, the NATO bombing produced another several hundred thousand Kosovar refugees and later helped facilitate the cleansing of the Serb minority from Kosovo.

U.S. and NATO planes conducted several thousand sorties, destroying Serbia’s power grid, factories (372 industrial sites), railways, bridges, schools and hospitals. Between 1,200 and 1,500 Serb civilians and as many as 5,000 Serbian military personnel were killed. At one point, NATO planes destroyed a bridge filled with fleeing refugees, killing 87 people. After blowing up Belgrade’s TV station with a cruise missile, killing 16 people, NATO officials justified it by claiming that the station had been a source of “propaganda.”

Directing and encouraging ethnic cleansing, playing one nationality off of another, bombing civilian infrastructure and murdering civilians–these acts engaged in by the U.S. and its NATO allies took place under the pleasant halo of “humanitarian intervention.”

The perpetrators of these great “humanitarian” deeds will likely never see the inside of a jail cell or face criminal prosecution for their crimes against humanity without a massive alteration in the balance of forces in the world between the powerful and the dispossessed.

Throughout modern imperial history, ‘Divide and Conquer’ has been the essential ingredient in allowing relatively small and resource-poor European countries to conquer nations vastly larger in size and populations and richer in natural resources. It is said that for every British officer in India, there were fifty Sikhs, Gurkhas, Muslims and Hindus in the British Colonial Army. The European conquest of Africa and Asia was directed by white officers, fought by black, brown and yellow soldiers so that white capital could exploit colored workers and peasants. Regional, ethnic, religious, clan, tribal, community, village and other differences were politicized and exploited allowing imperial armies to conquer warring peoples. In recent decades, the US empire builders have become the grand masters of ‘divide and conquer’ strategies throughout the world. By the 1970’s, the CIA made a turn from promoting the dubious virtues of capitalism and democracy, to linking up with, financing and directing, religious, ethnic and regional elites against national regimes, independent or hostile to US world empire building.

The key to US military empire building follows two principles: direct military invasions and fomenting separatist movements, which can lead to military confrontation.

Twenty-first century empire building has seen the extended practice of both principles in Iraq, Afghanistan, Iran, Lebanon, China (Tibet), Bolivia, Ecuador, Venezuela, Somalia, Sudan, Burma and Palestine — any country in which the US cannot secure a stable client regime, it resorts to financing and promoting separatist organizations and leaders using ethnic, religious and regional pretexts.

Consistent with traditional empire building principles, Washington only supports separatists in countries that refuse to submit to imperial domination and opposes separatists who resist the empire and its allies. In other words, imperial ideologues are neither ‘hypocrites’ nor resort to ‘double standards’ (as they are accused by liberal critics); they publicly uphold the ‘Empire first’ principle as their defining criteria for evaluating separatist movements and granting or denying support. In contrast, many seemingly progressive critics of empire make universal statements in favor of the ‘right to self-determination’ and even extend it to the most rancid, reactionary, imperial-sponsored ‘separatist groups’ with catastrophic results. Independent nations and their people, who oppose US-backed separatists, are bombed to oblivion and charged with ‘war crimes’. People, who oppose the separatists and who reside in the ‘new state’, are killed or driven into exile. The ‘liberated people’ suffer from the tyranny and impoverishment induced by the US-backed separatists and many are forced to immigrate to other countries for economic survival.

Few if any of the progressive critics of the USSR and supporters of the separatist republics have ever publicly expressed second thoughts, let alone engaged in self-critical reflections, even in the face of decades long socio-economic and political catastrophes in the secessionist states. Yet it was and is the case that these self-same progressives today, who continue to preach high moral principles to those who question and reject some separatist movements because they originate and grow out of efforts to extend the US empire.

Washington’s success in co-opting so-called progressive liberals in support of separatist movements soon to be new imperial clients in recent decades is long and the consequences for human rights are ugly.

Most European and US progressives supported the following:

1. US-backed Bosnian fundamentalists, Croatian neo-fascists and Kosova-Albanian terrorists, leading to ethnic cleansing and the conversion of their once sovereign states into US military bases, client regimes and economic basket cases — totally destroying the multinational Yugoslavian welfare state.

2. The US funded and armed overseas Afghan Islamic fundamentalists who destroyed a secular, reformist, gender-equal Afghan regime, carrying out vast anti-feudal campaigns involving both men and women, a comprehensive agrarian reform and constructing extensive health and educational programs. As a result of US-Islamic tribal military successes, millions were killed, displaced and dispossessed and fanatical medieval anti-Communist tribal warlords destroyed the unity of the country.

3. The US invasion destroyed Iraq’s modern, secular, nationalist state and advanced socio-economic system. During the occupation, US backing of rival religious, tribal, clan and ethnic separatist movements and regimes led to the expulsion of over 90% of its modern scientific and professional class and the killing of over 1 million Iraqis… all in the name of ousting a repressive regime and above all in destroying a state opposed to Israeli oppression of Palestinians.

Clearly US military intervention promotes separatism as a means of establishing a regional ‘base of support’. Separatism facilitates setting up a minority puppet regime and works to counter neighboring countries opposed to the depredations of empire. In the case of Iraq, US-backed Kurdish separatism preceded the imperial campaign to isolate an adversary, create international coalitions to pressure and weaken the central government. Washington highlights regime atrocities as human rights cases to feed global propaganda campaigns. More recently this is evident in the US-financed ‘Tibetan’ theocratic protests at China.

Separatists are backed as potential terrorist shock troops in attacking strategic economic sectors and providing real or fabricated ‘intelligence’ as is the case in Iran among the Kurds and other ethnic minority groups.

Why Separatism?

Empire builders do not always resort to separatist groups, especially when they have clients at the national levels in control of the state. It is only when their power is limited to groups, territorially or ethnically concentrated, that the intelligence operatives resort to and promote ‘separatist’ movements. US backed separatist movements follow a step-by-step process, beginning with calls for ‘greater autonomy’ and ‘decentralization’, essentially tactical moves to gain a local political power base, accumulate economic revenues, repress anti-separatist groups and local ethnic/religious, political minorities with ties to the central government (as in the oppression of the Christian communities in northern Iraq repressed by the Kurdish separatists for their long ties with the Central Baath Party or the Roma of Kosova expelled and killed by the Kosova Albanians because of their support of the Yugoslav federal system). The attempt to forcibly usurp local resources and the ousting of local allies of the central government results in confrontations and conflict with the legitimate power of the central government. It is at this point that external (imperial) support is crucial in mobilizing the mass media to denounce repression of ‘peaceful national movements’ merely ‘exercising their right to self-determination’. Once the imperial mass media propaganda machine touches the noble rhetoric of ‘self-determination’ and ‘autonomy’, ‘decentralization’ and ‘home rule’, the great majority of US and European funded NGO’s jump on board, selectively attacking the government’s effort to maintain a stable unified nation-state. In the name of ‘diversity’ and a ‘pluri-ethnic state’, the Western-bankrolled NGO’s provide a moralist ideological cover to the pro-imperialist separatists. When the separatists succeed and murder and ethnically cleanse the ethnic and religious minorities linked to the former central state, the NGO’s are remarkably silent or even complicit in justifying the massacres as ‘understandable over-reaction to previous repression’. The propaganda machine of the West, even gloats over the separatist state expulsion of hundreds of thousands of ethnic minorities — as in the case of the Serbs and Roma from Kosova and the Krijina region of Croatia… with headlines blasting — “Serbs on the Run: Serves Them Right!” followed by photos of NATO troops overseeing the ‘transfer’ of destitute families from their ancestral villages and towns to squalid camps in a bombed out Serbia. And the triumphant Western politicians mouthing pieties at the massacres of Serb civilians by the KLA, as when former German Foreign Minister “Joschka” Fischer (Green Party) mourned, “I understand your (the KLA’s) pain, but you shouldn’t throw grenades at (ethnic Serb) school children.”

The shift from ‘autonomy’ within a federal state to an ‘independent state’ is based on the aid channeled and administered by the imperial state to the ‘autonomous region’, thus strengthening its ‘de facto’ existence as a separate state. This has clearly occurred in the Kurdish run northern Iraq ‘no fly zone’ and now ‘autonomous region’ from 1991 to the present.

The same principle of self-determination demanded by the US and its separatist client is denied to ‘minorities’ within the realm. Instead, the US propaganda media refer to them as ‘agents’ or ‘trojan horses’ of the central government.

Strengthened by imperial ‘foreign aid’, and business links with US and EU MNCs, backed by local para-military and quasi-military police forces (as well as organized criminal gangs), the autonomous regime declares its ‘independence’. Shortly thereafter, it is recognized by its imperial patrons. After ‘independence’, the separatist regime grants territorial concessions and building sites for US military bases. Investment privileges are granted to the imperial patron, severely compromising ‘national’ sovereignty.

The army of local and international NGO’s rarely raise any objections to this process of incorporating the separatist entity into the empire, even when the ‘liberated’ people object. In most cases the degree of ‘local governance’ and freedom of action of the ‘independent’ regime is less than it was when it was an autonomous or federal region in the previous unified nationalist state.

Not infrequently ‘separatist’ regimes are part of irredentist movements linked to counterparts in other states. When cross national irredentist movements challenge neighboring states which are also targets of the US empire builders, they serve as launching pads for US low intensity military assaults and Special Forces terrorist activities.

For example, almost all of the Kurdish separatist organizations draw a map of ‘Greater Kurdistan’ which covers a third of Southeastern Turkey, Northern Iraq, a quarter of Iran, parts of Syria and wherever else they can find a Kurdish enclave. US commandos operate alongside Kurdish separatists terrorizing Iranian villages (in the name of self-determination; Kurds with powerful US military backing have seized and govern Northern Iraq and provide mercenary Peshmerga troops to massacre Iraqi Arab civilian in cities and towns resisting the US occupation in Central, Western and Southern regions. They have engaged in the forced displacement of non-Kurds (including Arabs, Chaldean Christians, Turkman and others) from so-called Iraqi Kurdistan and the confiscation of their homes, businesses and farms. US-backed Kurdish separatists have created conflicts with the neighboring Turkish government, as Washington tries to retain its Kurdish clients for their utility in Iraq, Iran and Syria without alienating its strategic NATO client, Turkey. Nevertheless Turkish-Kurdish separatist activists in the PKK have lauded the US for, what they term, ‘progressive colonialism’ in effectively dismembering Iraq and forming the basis for a Kurdish state.

The US decision to collaborate with the Turkish military, or at least tolerate its military attacks on certain sectors of the Iraq-based Kurdish separatists, the PKK, is part of its global policy of prioritizing strategic imperial alliances and allies over and against any separatist movement which threatens them. Hence, while the US supports the Kosova separatists against Serbia, it opposes the separatists in Abkhazia fighting against its client in the Republic of Georgia. While the US supported Chechen separatist against the Moscow government, it opposes Basque and Catalan separatists in their struggle against Washington’s NATO ally, Spain. While Washington has been bankrolling the Bolivian separatists headed by the oligarchs of Santa Cruz against the central government in La Paz, it supports the Chilean government’s repression of the Mapuche Indian claims to land and resources in south-central Chile.

Clearly ‘self-determination’ and ‘independence’ are not the universal defining principle in US foreign policy, nor has it ever been, as witness the US wars against Indian nations, secessionist southern slaveholders and yearly invasions of independent Latin American, Asian and African states. What guides US policy is the question of whether a separatist movement, its leaders and program furthers empire building or not? The inverse question however is infrequently raised by so-called progressives, leftists or self-described anti-imperialists: Does the separatist or independence movement weaken the empire and strengthen anti-imperialist forces or not? If we accept that the over-riding issue is defeating the multi-million killing machine called US imperialism, then it is legitimate to evaluate and support, as well as reject, some independence movements and not others. There is nothing ‘hypocritical’ or ‘inconvenient’ in raising higher principles in making these political choices. Clearly Hitler justified the invasion of Czechoslovakia in the name of defending Sudetenland separatists, just like a series of US presidents have justified the partition of Iraq in the name of defending the Kurds, or Sunnis or Shia or whatever tribal leaders lend themselves to US empire building.

What defines anti-imperialist politics is not abstract principles about ‘self-determination’ but defining exactly who is the ‘self’; in other words, what political forces linked to what international power configuration are making what political claim for what political purpose. If, as in Bolivia today, a rightwing racist, agro-business oligarchy seizes control of the most fertile and energy rich region, containing 75% of the country’s natural resources, in the name of ‘self-determination’ and autonomy, expelling and brutalizing impoverished Indians in the process — on what basis can the left or anti-imperialist movement oppose it, if not because the class, race and national content of that claim is antithetical to an even more important principle — popular sovereignty based on the democratic principles of majority rule and equal access to public wealth?

Separatism in Latin America: Bolivia, Venezuela and Ecuador

In recent years the US backed candidates have won and lost national election in Latin America. Clearly the US has retained hegemony over the governing elites in Mexico, Colombia, Central America, Peru, Chile, Uruguay and some of the Caribbean island states. In states where the electorate has backed opponents of US dominance, such as Venezuela, Ecuador, Bolivia and Nicaragua, Washington’s influence is dependent on regional, provincial and locally elected officials. It is premature to state, as the Council for Foreign Relations claims, that ‘US hegemony in Latin America is a thing of the past.’ One only has to read the economic and political record of the close and growing military and economic ties between Washington and the Calderon regime in Mexico, the Garcia regime in Peru, Bachelet in Chile and Uribe in Colombia to register the fact that US hegemony still prevails in important regions of Latin America. If we look beyond the national governmental level, even in the non-hegemonized states, US influence still is a potent factor shaping the political behavior of powerful right-wing business, financial and regional political elites in Venezuela, Ecuador, Bolivia and Argentina. By the end of May 2008, US backed regionalist movements were on the offensive, establishing a de facto secessionist regime in Santa Cruz in Bolivia. In Argentina, the agro-business elite has organized a successful nationwide production and distribution lockout, backed by the big industrial, financial and commercial confederations, against an export tax promoted by the ‘center-left’ Kirchner government. In Colombia, the US is negotiating with the paramilitary President Uribe over the site of a military base on the frontier with Venezuela’s oil rich state of Zulia, which happens to be ruled by the only anti-Chavez governor in power, a strong promoter of ‘autonomy’ or secession. In Ecuador, the Mayor of Guayaquil, backed by the right wing mass media and the discredited traditional political parties have proposed ‘autonomy’ from the central government of President Rafael Correa. The process of imperial driven nation dismemberment is very uneven because of the different degrees of political power relations between the central government and the regional secessionists. The right wing secessionists in Bolivia have advanced the furthest — actually organizing and winning a referendum and declaring themselves an independent governing unit with the power to collect taxes, formulate foreign economic policy and create its own police force.

The success of the Santa Cruz secessionist is due to the political incapacity and total incompetence of the Evo Morales-Garcia Linera regime which promoted ‘autonomy’ for the scores of impoverished Indian ‘nations’ (or indianismo) and ended up laying the groundwork for the white racist oligarchs to seize the opportunity to establish their own ‘separatist’ power base. As the separatist gained control over the local population, they intimidated the ‘indians’ and trade union supporters of the Morales regime, violently sabotaged the constitutional assembly, rejected the constitution, while constantly extracting concession for the flaccid and conciliatory central government of the Evo Morales. While the separatists trashed the constitution and used their control over the major means of production and exports to recruit five other provinces, forming a geographic arc of six provinces, and influence in two others in their drive to degrade the national government. The Morales-Garcia Linera ‘indianista’ regime, largely made up of mestizos formerly employed in NGOs funded from abroad, never used its formal constitutional power and monopoly of legitimate force to enforce constitutional order and outlaw and prosecute the secessionists’ violation of national integrity and rejection of the democratic order.

Morales never mobilized the country, the majority of popular organizations in civil society, or even called on the military to put down the secessionists. Instead he continued to make impotent appeals for ‘dialog’, for compromises in which his concessions to oligarch self-rule only confirmed their drive for regional power. As a case study of failed governance, in the face of a reactionary separatist threat to the nation, the Morales-Garcia Linera regime represents an abject failure to defend popular sovereignty and the integrity of the nation.

The lessons of failed governance in Bolivia stand as a grim reminder to Chavez in Venezuela and Correa in Ecuador: Unless they act with full force of the constitution to crush the embryonic separatist movements before they gain a power base, they will also face the break-up of their countries. The biggest threat is in Venezuela, where the US and Colombian militaries have built bases on the frontier bordering the Venezuelan state of Zulia, infiltrated commandos and paramilitary forces into the province, and see the takeover of the oil-rich province as a beach-head to deprive the central government of its vital oil revenues and destabilize the central government.

Several years into a Washington-backed and financed separatist movement in Bolivia, a few progressive academics and pundits have taken notice and published critical commentaries. Unfortunately these articles lack any explanatory context, and offer little understanding of how Latin American ‘separatism’ fits into long-term, large-scale US empire building strategy over the past quarter of a century.

Today the US-promoted separatist movements in Latin American are actively being pursued in at least three Latin American counties. In Bolivia, the ‘media luna’ or ‘half-moon’ provinces of Santa Cruz, Beni, Pando and Tarija have successfully convoked provincial ‘referendums’ for ‘autonomy’ — code word for secession. On May 4, 2008 the separatists in Santa Cruz succeeded, securing a voter turnout of nearly 50% and winning 80% of the vote. On May 15, the right-wing big business political elite announced the formation of ministries of foreign trade and internal security, assuming the effective powers of a secession state. The US government led by Ambassador Goldberg, provided financial and political support for the right-wing secessionist ‘civic’ organizations through its $125 million dollar aid programs via AID, its tens of millions of dollar ‘anti-drug’ program, and through the NED (National Endowment for Democracy) funded pro-separatist NGOs. At meetings of the Organization of American States and other regional meetings the US refused to condemn the separatist movements.

Because of the total incompetence and lack of national political leadership of President Evo Morales and his Vice President Garcia Linera, the Bolivian State is splintering into a series of ‘autonomous’ cantons, as several other provincial governments seek to usurp political power and take over economic resources. From the very beginning, the Morales-Garcia regime signed off on a number of political pacts, adopted a whole series of policies and approved a number of concessions to the oligarchic elites in Santa Cruz, which enabled them to effectively re-build their natural political power base, sabotage an elected Constitutional Assembly and effectively undermine the authority of the central government. Right-wing success took less than 2 ½ years, which is especially amazing considering that in 2005, the country witnessed a major popular uprising which ousted a right-wing president, when millions of workers, miners, peasants and Indians dominated the streets. It is a tribute to the absolute misgovernment of the Morales-Garcia regime, that the country could move so quickly and decisively from a state of insurrectionary popular power to a fragmented and divided country in which a separatist agro-financial elite seizes control of 80% of the productive resources of the country… while the elected central government meekly protests.

The success of the secessionist regional ruling class in Bolivia has encouraged similar ‘autonomy movements’ in Ecuador and Venezuela, led by the mayor of Guayaquil (Ecuador) and Governor of Zulia (Venezuela). In other words, the US-engineered political debacle of the Morales-Garcia regime in Bolivia has led it to team up with oligarchs in Ecuador and Venezuela to repeat the Santa Cruz experience… in a process of “permanent counter-revolutionary separatism.”

Separatism and the Ex-USSR

The defeat of Communism in the USSR had little to do with the ‘arms race bankrupting the system’, as former US National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski has claimed. Up to the end, living standards were relatively stable and welfare programs continued to operate at near optimal levels and scientific and cultural programs retained substantial state expenditures. The ruling elites who replaced the communist system did not respond to US propaganda about the virtues of ‘free markets and democracy’, as Presidents Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton claimed: The proof is evident in the political and economic systems, which they imposed upon taking power and which were neither democratic nor based on competitive markets. These new ethnic-based regimes resembled despotic, predatory, nepotistic monarchies handing over (‘privatizing’) the public wealth accumulated over the previous 70 years of collective labor and public investment to a handful of oligarchs and foreign monopolies.

The principle ideological driving force for the current policy of ‘separatism’ is ethnic identity politics, which is fostered and financed by US intelligence and propaganda agencies. Ethnic identity politics, which replaced communism, is based on vertical links between the elite and the masses. The new elites rule through clan-family-religious-gang based nepotism, funded and driven through pillage and privatization of public wealth created under Communism. Once in power, the new political elites ‘privatized’ public wealth into family riches and converted themselves and their cronies into an oligarchic ruling class. In most cases the ethnic ties between elites and subjects dissolved in the face of the decline of living standards, the deep class inequalities, the crooked vote counts and state repression.

In all of the ex-USSR states, the new ruling classes only claim to mass legitimacy was based on appeals to sharing a common ethnic identity. They trotted out medieval and royalist symbols from the remote past, dredging up absolutist monarchs, parasitical religious hierarchies, pre-capitalist war lords, bloody emperors and ‘national’ flags from the days of feudal landlords to forge a common history and identity with the ‘newly liberated’ masses. The repeated appeal to past reactionary symbols was entirely appropriate: the contemporary policies of despotism, pillage and personality cults resonated with past ‘historic’ warriors, feudal lords and practices.

As the new post-USSR despots lost their ethnic luster as a consequence of public disillusion with local and foreign predatory pillage of the national wealth, the leaders resorted to systematic force.

The principle success of the US strategy of promoting separatism was in destroying the USSR — not in promoting viable independent capitalist democracies. Washington succeeded in exacerbating ethnic conflicts between Russians and other nationalities, by encouraging local communist bosses to split from the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics and to form ‘independent states’ where the new rulers could share the booty of the local treasury with new Western partners. The US de-stabilization efforts in the Communist countries, especially after the 1970’s did not compete over living standards, greater industrial growth or over more generous welfare programs. Rather, Western propaganda focused on ethnic solidarity, the one issue that undercut class solidarity and loyalty to the communist state and ideology and strengthened pro-Western elites, especially among ‘public intellectuals’ and recycled Communist bosses-turned ‘nationalist saviors.’

The key point of Western strategy was to first and foremost break-up the USSR via separatist movements no matter if they were fanatical religious fundamentalists, gangster-politicians, Western-trained liberal economists or ambitious upwardly mobile warlords. All that mattered was that they carried the Western separatist banner of ‘self-determination’. Subsequently, in the ‘post Soviet period’, the new pro-capitalist ruling elites were recruited to NATO and client state status.

Washington’s post-separatism politics followed a two-step process: In the first phase there was an undifferentiated support for anyone advocating the break-up of the USSR. In the second phase, the US sought to push the most pliable pro-NATO, free market liberals among the lot — the so-called ‘color revolutionaries’, in Georgia and the Ukraine. Separatism was seen as a preliminary step toward an ‘advanced’ stage of re-subordination to the US Empire. The notion of ‘independent states’ is virtually non-existent for US empire builders. At best it exists as a transitional stage from one power constellation to a new US-centered empire.

In the period following the break-up of the USSR, Washington’s subsequent attempts to recruit the new ruling elites to pro-capitalist, client-status was relatively successful. Some countries opened their economies to unregulated exploitation especially of energy resources. Others offered sites for military bases. In many cases local rulers sought to bargain among world powers while enhancing their own private fortune-through-pillage.

None of the ex-Soviet Republics evolved into secular independent democratic republics capable of recovering the living standards, which their people possessed during the Soviet times. Some rulers became theocratic despots where religious notables and dictators mutually supported each other. Others evolved into ugly family-based dictatorships. None of them retained the Soviet era social safety net or high quality educational systems. All the post-Soviet regimes magnified the social inequalities and multiplied the number of criminal-run enterprises. Violent crime grew geometrically increasing citizen insecurity.

The success of US-induced ‘separatism’ did create, in most cases, enormous opportunities for Western and Asian pillage of raw materials, especially petroleum resources. The experience of ‘newly independent states’ was, at best, a transitory illusion, as the ruling elite either passed directly into the orbit of Western sphere of influence or became a ‘fig leaf’ for deep structural subordination to Western-dominated circuits of commodity exports and finance.

Out of the break-up of the USSR, Western states allied with those republics where it suited their interests. In some cases they signed agreements with rulers to establish military base lining the pockets of a dictator through loans. In other cases they secured privileged access to economic resources by forming joint ventures. In others they simply ignored a poorly endowed regime and let it wallow in misery and despotism.

Separatism: Eastern Europe, Balkans and the Baltic Countries

The most striking aspect of the break-up of the Soviet bloc was the rapidity and thoroughness with which the countries passed from the Warsaw Pact to NATO, from Soviet political rule to US/EU economic control over almost all of their major economic sectors. The conversion from one form of political economic and military subordination to another highlights the transitory nature of political independence, the superficiality of its operational meaning and the spectacular hypocrisy of the new ruling elite who blithely denounced ‘Soviet domination’ while turning over most economic sectors to Western capital, large tracts of territory for NATO bases and providing mercenary military battalions to fight in US imperial wars to a far greater degree than was ever the case during Soviet times.

Separatism in these areas was an ideology to weaken an adversarial hegemonic coalition, all the better to reincorporate its members in a more virulent and aggressive empire building coalition.

Yugoslavia and Kosova: Forced Separatism

The successful breakup of the USSR and the Warsaw Pact alliance encouraged the US and EU to destroy Yugoslavia, the last remaining independent country outside of US-EU control in West Europe. The break-up of Yugoslavia was initiated by Germany following its annexation and demolition of East Germany’s economy. Subsequently it expanded into the Slovenian and Croatian republics. The US, a relative latecomer in the carving up of the Balkans, targeted Bosnia, Macedonia and Kosova. While Germany expanded via economic conquest, the US, true to its militarist mission, resorted to war in alliance with recognized terrorist Kosova Albanian gangsters organized in the paramilitary KLA. Under the leadership of French Zionist Bernard Kouchner, the NATO forces facilitated the ethnic purging, assassination and disappearances of tens of thousands of Serbs, Roma and dissident non-separatist Kosova Albanians.

The destruction of Yugoslavia is complete: the remaining fractured and battered Serb Republic was now at the mercy of US and its European allies. By 2008 a EU-US backed pro-NATO coalition was elected and the last remnants of ‘Yugoslavia’ and its historical legacy of self-managed socialism was obliterated.

Consequences of ‘Separatism’ in USSR. East Europe and the Balkans

In every region where US sponsored and financed separatism succeeded, living standards plunged, massive pillage of public resources in the name of privatization took place, political corruption reached unprecedented levels. Anywhere between a quarter to a third of the population fled to Western Europe and North America because of hunger, personal insecurity (crime), unemployment and a dubious future.

Politically, gangsterism and extraordinary murder rates drove legitimate businesses to pay exorbitant extortion payments, as a ‘new class’ of gangsters-turned-businessmen took over the economy and signed dubious investment agreements and joint ventures with EU, US and Asian MNCs.

Energy-rich ex-Soviet countries in south central Asia were ruled by opulent dictators who accumulated billion dollar fortunes in the course of demolishing egalitarian norms, extensive health, and scientific and cultural institutions. Religious institutions gained power over and against scientific and professional associations, reversing educational progress of the previous seventy years. The logic of separatism spread from the republics to the sub-national level as rival local war lords and ethnic chiefs attempted to carve out their ‘autonomous’ entity, leading to bloody wars, new rounds of ethnic purges and new refugees fleeing the contested areas.

The US promises of benefits via ‘separatism’ made to the diverse populations were not in the least fulfilled. At best a small ruling elite and their cronies reaped enormous wealth, power and privilege at the expense of the great majority. Whatever the initial symbolic gratifications, which the underlying population may have experienced from their short-lived independence, new flag and restored religious power was eroded by the grinding poverty and violent internal power struggles that disrupted their lives. The truth of the matter is that millions of people fled from ‘their’ newly ‘independent’ states, preferring to become refugees and second-class citizens in foreign states.

Conclusion

The major fallacy of seemingly progressive liberals and NGOs in their advocacy of ‘autonomy’, ‘decentralization’ and ‘self-determination’ is that these abstract concepts beg the fundamental concrete historical and substantive political question — to what classes, race, political blocs is power being transferred? For over a century in the US the banner of the racist right-wing Southern plantation owners ruling by force and terror over the majority of poor blacks was ‘States Rights’ — the supremacy of local law and order over the authority of the federal government and the national constitution. The fight between federal versus states rights was between a reactionary Southern oligarchy and a broader based progressive Northern urban coalition of workers and the middle class.

There is a fundamental need to demystify the notion of ‘autonomy’ by examining the classes which demand it, the consequences of devolving power in terms of the distribution of power, wealth and popular power and the external benefactors of a shift from the national state to regional local power elites.

Likewise, the mindless embrace by some libertarians of each and every claim for ‘self-determination’ has led to some of the most heinous crimes of the 20-21st centuries — in many cases separatist movements have encouraged or been products of bloody imperialist wars, as was the case in the lead up to and following Nazi annexations, the US invasion of Iraq and Afghanistan and the savage Israeli invasion of Lebanon and breakup of Palestine.

To make sense of ‘autonomy’, ‘decentralization’ and ‘self-determination’ and to ensure that these devolutions of power move in progressive historic direction, it is essential to pose the prior questions: Do these political changes advance the power and control of the majority of workers and peasants over the means of production? Does it lead to greater popular power in the state and electoral process or does it strengthen demagogic clients advancing the interests of the empire, in which the breakup of an established state leads to the incorporation of the ethnic fragments into a vicious and destructive empire?

Reading this I couldn’t help thinking about the ultimatum delivered to the Belgrade government in July 23, 1914 by representatives of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Yes, I know it’s a stretch and we’re not in a similar crisis (yet), but I can’t help noticing even distant historical parallels.

Recall from high school history class that Austria-Hungary blamed Serbia for the assassination of Austrian Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo, Bosnia on June 28 by Gavrilo Princep, a member of the Serbian minority in Bosnia. Bosnia’s mixed population of Orthodox Serbs, Catholic Croats, and Muslims had been under Austro-Hungarian administration since 1878.

In the Herzegovinian Rebellion of 1875 peasants — Serbian and Croatian serfs of Muslim beys or overlords — in what was then Ottoman Turkish territory rose up in protest of unbearable tax burdens. Serbia, technically still part of the Ottoman Empire but independent de facto since 1868, and the tiny Princedom of Montenegro intervened on the side of the rebels, and were soon joined by Russia, Romania and Bulgaria. At the Congress of Berlin in 1878 Bosnia-Herzegovina was ceded to Vienna. The Ottoman Empire retained formal overlordship, but in 1908 Austria-Hungary (over considerable protest by Serbia and Russia) annexed the state outright.

Gavrilo Princep was a Pan-Slavist, a member of the secret Black Hand society committed to the ideal of a Yugoslavia or “state of southern Slavs:” Serbs, Croats, Bosnians, Montenegrans, Slovenians. Perhaps he thought that killing Franz Ferdinand and his wife Sophia would abet that cause. If so, maybe he was right: just 18 million deaths and four years later, as one of the many outcomes of the “Great War,” the “Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes,” was proclaimed, renamed in “Kingdom of Yugoslavia” in 1929.

We need to remind ourselves that World War I started as a confrontation between Serbian nationalists, and imperialists delivering ultimatums while meddling in the Balkans.

The message from the Austro-Hungarians to Belgrade in July 1914 held the Serbia government responsible for the attack on their archduke:

“The Royal Serbian Government . . . has [since the annexation of 1908] tolerated the criminal machinations of various societies and associations directed against the [Austro-Hungarian] Monarchy, unrestrained language on the part of the press, glorification of the perpetrators of outrages, participation of officers and officials in subversive agitation, unwholesome propaganda in public education, in short tolerated all the manifestations of a nature to inculcate in the Serbian population hatred of the Monarchy and contempt for its institutions …”

Accusing the Serbian government of complicity in the assassination, hatched (it alleged) in Belgrade, the message then presents 10 demands. Most pertain to curbing “propaganda against the Monarchy” by Serbian journalists and officials, and demanding cooperation in prosecuting those responsible for hostile actions against Austria-Hungary. But the fifth (and most important) requires Serbia “[t]o accept the collaboration in Serbia of organs of [the Austro-Hungarian government] in the suppression of the subversive movement directed against the territorial integrity of the Monarchy.”

Serbia then, in a generally reconciliatory message, denying any responsibility for the assassinations (“the crime”), offered to “hand over for trial any Serbian subject” that Vienna could prove was involved. To the fifth demand it responded:

“[The Serbian government does] not clearly grasp the meaning or the scope of the demand . . that Serbia shall undertake to accept the collaboration of the representatives of [Austria-Hungary], but they declare that they will admit such collaboration as agrees with the principle of international law, with criminal procedure, and with good neighborly relations.”

In other words, the Serbs rejected occupation. This rejection offered Austria-Hungary an excuse to invade.

Flash forward to March 1999, when Condoleezza Rice’s predecessor, U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, offered Serbia another ultimatum. She ordered the Yugoslav army out of the Yugoslav “breakaway” province of Kosovo. The “Rambouillet Agreement” signed by U.S., British, and Kosovar Albanian separatists that month further demanded that NATO forces receive “free and unrestricted access throughout [Yugoslavia] including . . . the right of bivouac, maneuver, billet, and utilization of any areas or facilities as required for support, training and operations.”

Agree to that, Belgrade was told, or we will bomb you.

Yugoslavia, born out of World War I, had been falling apart for eight years. The dream of southern pan-Slavism had given way to long-dormant nationalisms and the nightmare of ethnic cleansing. The Serbs, with the largest member-state in the Yugoslav federation, had watched Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia-Herzegovina, and Macedonia secede. Now the U.S. and its allies were demanding that Belgrade give up Kosovo, the Serbian Jerusalem, the Serbian heartland.

Belgrade was willing to restore the autonomy, the de facto republic status Kosovo had enjoyed until 1989. It was willing to accept UN peacekeeping forces in Kosovo. It had the year before accepted unarmed Organization of Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) forces. But it was not willing to give NATO unbridled access to the roads and airspace of all that remained of Yugoslavia. The “scope of the demand” (to again cite the 1914 Serbian reply to Vienna) was such that no sovereign state could accept.

But the spin in the U.S. corporate press was well expressed by CNN’s Christiane Amanpour: “Milosevic continues to thump his nose at the international community.” The U.S.-dictated “agreement,” rejected by Russia and Yugoslavia, was depicted as a reasonable international consensus. Belgrade, which had maintained neutrality between NATO and the Warsaw Pact for decades, naturally resisted an unlimited alliance presence in its territory. But the logic of this stance was obscured by the anti-Serbian propaganda relentlessly unleashed by the U.S. press and the statements of U.S. officials charging the Serbian state with responsibility for mass murder in Kosovo. It later became clear that the charges were wildly overblown, while attacks upon Serbs, their property and holy places were generally ignored by those demanding U.S. military action.

That action killed about 500 civilians, according to Human Rights Watch. Since the bombing ended and NATO occupied Kosovo, thousands more have died in anti-Serbian pogroms. Between June 1999 and March 2004, by one estimate, over 3,000 perished in ethnic-based violence in Kosovo. Over 200,000 Serb have fled their Kosovo homeland since 1999.

It’s taken all that infliction of suffering to finalize the humiliation of Yugoslavia, born in 1918. It’s taken all that to cut out its heart, the site of the Battle of Kosovo Polje against the Ottoman Turks in 1389. (Kosovo Polje by the way was also the site of a pogrom against Serbs that killed 28 people in March 2004. “Kristallnacht is under way in Kosovo,” declared a UN official at the time.) It’s hardly surprising that angry Serbian youth would attack the U.S. embassy in Belgrade, enraged at the speedy U.S. recognition of Kosovo independence.

In the wake of that expression of outrage the U.S. secretary of state issued a veiled threat to Belgrade. “They had an obligation to protect diplomatic missions,” fumes Rice (who has no problem raiding an Iranian consulate in Iraq), “and, from what we can tell, the police presence was either inadequate or unresponsive at the time. We do hold the Serb government responsible. We’ve made that very clear. We don’t expect that to happen again.”

But it probably will happen again. And anyway, if Rice can hold the Serbian government responsible for the attack on the U.S. embassy, the Serbs can surely hold the U.S. represented by that embassy responsible for multiple attacks on their country. Serbian security forces will demand to remain in the north of their Kosovo province. Albania, which hopes to join NATO this year, threatens to take action if Serbia attempts to partition Kosovo. There will probably be more violence, more blowback from the 1999 war, more fingers pointing blame, more imperialist ultimatums.

While Condi talks tough to Serbia, what does Serbia’s powerful ally, President Vladimir Putin of Russia, say (as it were) in reply?

“The precedent of Kosovo is a terrible precedent, which will de facto blow apart the whole system of international relations, developed not over decades, but over centuries. [The Americans] have not thought through the results of what they are doing. At the end of the day it is a two-ended stick and the second end will come back and hit them in the face.”

This from a man who understands something of the history of the Slavs, the Balkans, the horrific wars twentieth-century wars in Europe, and the infinitely cruel potentialities of U.S. imperialism. I’m no Putin fan, but I think he’s assigned blame appropriately. He’s holding Washington responsible for what happens next. He might state (like Rice) that he doesn’t “expect it” — another provocation of NATO at his doorsteps — “ to happen again.” But how can there not be follow-up since the Kosovar Serbs are going to refuse inclusion into what they see as a bastard state; the new government in Pristina is likely to challenge Serbian “secessionists” with force; and Albania threatens to de-recognize existing borders between itself, Serbia and Macedonia with its large Albanian minority? There will be hell to pay for this “dangerous precedent.”

* * * *

(February 24.) Reuters now reports that Serbia’s minister for Kosovo, Slobodan Samardzic, in what is perhaps a response to Rice, assigns responsibility for the embassy attack rather differently than the U.S. secretary of state. Paraphrased by Reuters, he suggests the “United States was to blame for this week’s attacks on foreign embassies in Belgrade . . .”

Samardzic declares: “The U.S. is the major culprit for all troubles since Feb 17. The root of violence is the violation of international law. The Serbian government will continue to call on the U.S. to take responsibility for violating international law and taking away a piece of territory from Serbia.” Serbian Prime Minister Vojislav Kostunica adds, according to AP: “If the United States sticks to its position that the fake state of Kosovo exists…all responsibility in the future will be on the United States.”

Take responsibility, Rice demands of Serbia. Take responsibility, Serbia backed by Russia demands of the U.S. There’s a fundamental disconnect here between historical perceptions. The official American one is deeply distorted by the Clinton-era disinformation campaign used to justify the Kosovo War, and by the cultivated depiction of the U.S. as the virtuous victim of embassy attacks (most nobaly the Iranian “embassy hostage crisis” episode in 1979-81) and terrorist actions undertaken by people who supposedly “hate our freedoms.” No U.S. presidential candidate is going to challenge this misrepresentation of the origins of the current crisis. U.S. policy will be to stabilize Kosovo, draw it into the NATO fold alongside Albania, and maintain the massive Bondsteel military base it has established in Kosovo. But Serbian and Russian policy will try to thwart these objectives. History does not really repeat itself, and this is not 1914. But it’s a good time to revisit that history, consider the near-term possibilities, and organize opposition to further U.S. aggression in the Balkans.

First, Kosovo is not gaining independence or even minimal self-government. It will be run by an appointed High Representative and bodies appointed by the U.S., European Union and NATO. An old-style colonial viceroy and imperialist administrators will have control over foreign and domestic policy. U.S. imperialism has merely consolidated its direct control of a totally dependent colony in the heart of the Balkans.

Second, Washington’s immediate recognition of Kosovo confirms once again that U.S. imperialism will break any and every treaty or international agreement it has ever signed, including agreements it drafted and imposed by force and violence on others.

The recognition of Kosovo is in direct violation of such law—specifically U.N. Security Council Resolution 1244, which the leaders of Yugoslavia were forced to sign to end the 78 days of NATO bombing of their country in 1999. Even this imposed agreement affirmed the “commitment of all Member States to the sovereignty and territorial integrity” of Serbia, a republic of Yugoslavia.

This week’s illegal recognition of Kosovo was condemned by Serbia, Russia, China and Spain.

Thirdly, U.S. imperialist domination does not benefit the occupied people. Kosovo after nine years of direct NATO military occupation has a staggering 60 percent unemployment rate. It has become a center of the international drug trade and of prostitution rings in Europe.

The once humming mines, mills, smelters, refining centers and railroads of this small resource-rich industrial area all sit silent. The resources of Kosovo under NATO occupation were forcibly privatized and sold to giant Western multinational corporations. Now almost the only employment is working for the U.S./NATO army of occupation or U.N. agencies.

The only major construction in Kosovo is of Camp Bondsteel, the largest U.S. base built in Europe in a generation.Halliburton, of course, got the contract. Camp Bondsteel guards the strategic oil and transportation lines of the entire region.

Over 250,000 Serbian, Romani and other nationalities have been driven out of this Serbian province since it came under U.S./NATO control. Almost a quarter of the Albanian population has been forced to leave in order to find work.

Establishing a colonial administration

Consider the plan under which Kosovo’s “independence” is to happen. Not only does it violate U.N. resolutions but it is also a total colonial structure. It is similar to the absolute power held by L. Paul Bremer in the first two years of the U.S. occupation of Iraq.

How did this colonial plan come about? It was proposed by the same forces responsible for the breakup of Yugoslavia and the NATO bombing and occupation of Kosovo.

In June of 2005, U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan appointed former Finnish President Marti Ahtisaari as his special envoy to lead the negotiations on Kosovo’s final status. Ahtisaari is hardly a neutral arbitrator when it comes to U.S. intervention in Kosovo. He is chairman emeritus of the International Crisis Group (ICG), an organization funded by multibillionaire George Soros that promotes NATO expansion and intervention along with open markets for U.S. and E.U. investment.

The board of the ICG includes two key U.S. officials responsible for the bombing of Kosovo: Gen. Wesley Clark and Zbigniew Brzezinski. In March 2007, Ahtisaari gave his Comprehensive Proposal for Kosovo Status Settlement to the new U.N. Secretary General, Ban Ki-moon.

The documents setting out the new government for Kosovo are available here. A summary is available on the U.S. State Department’s web site.

An International Civilian Representative (ICR) will be appointed by U.S. and E.U. officials to oversee Kosovo. This appointed official can overrule any measures, annul any laws and remove anyone from office in Kosovo. The ICR will have full and final control over the departments of Customs, Taxation, Treasury and Banking.

The E.U. will establish a European Security and Defense Policy Mission (ESDP) and NATO will establish an International Military Presence. Both these appointed bodies will have control over foreign policy, security, police, judiciary, all courts and prisons. They are guaranteed immediate and complete access to any activity, proceeding or document in Kosovo.

These bodies and the ICR will have final say over what crimes can be prosecuted and against whom; they can reverse or annul any decision made. The largest prison in Kosovo is at the U.S. base, Camp Bondsteel, where prisoners are held without charges, judicial overview or representation.

The recognition of Kosovo’s “independence” is just the latest step in a U.S. war of reconquest that has been relentlessly pursued for decades.

Divide and rule

The Balkans has been a vibrant patchwork of many oppressed nationalities, cultures and religions. The Socialist Federation of Yugoslavia, formed after World War II, contained six republics, none of which had a majority. Yugoslavia was born with a heritage of antagonisms that had been endlessly exploited by the Ottoman Turks, the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and interference by British and French imperialism, followed by Nazi German and Italian Fascist occupation in World War II.

The Jewish and Serbian peoples suffered the greatest losses in that war. A powerful communist-led resistance movement made up of all the nationalities, which had suffered in different ways, was forged against Nazi occupation and all outside intervention. After the liberation, all the nationalities cooperated and compromised in building the new socialist federation.

In 45 years the Socialist Federation of Yugoslavia developed from an impoverished, underdeveloped, feuding region into a stable country with an industrial base, full literacy and health care for the whole population.

With the collapse of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s, the Pentagon immediately laid plans for the aggressive expansion of NATO into the East. Divide and rule became U.S. policy throughout the entire region. Everywhere right-wing, pro-capitalist forces were financed and encouraged. As the Soviet Union was broken up into separate, weakened, unstable and feuding republics, the Socialist Federation of Yugoslavia tried to resist this reactionary wave.

In 1991, while world attention was focused on the devastating U.S. bombing of Iraq, Washington encouraged, financed and armed right-wing separatist movements in the Croatian, Slovenian and Bosnian republics of the Yugoslav Federation. In violation of international agreements Germany and the U.S. gave quick recognition to these secessionist movements and approved the creation of several capitalist ministates.

At the same time U.S. finance capital imposed severe economic sanctions on Yugoslavia to bankrupt its economy. Washington then promoted NATO as the only force able to bring stability to the region.

The arming and financing of the right-wing UCK movement in the Serbian province of Kosovo began in this same period. Kosovo was not a distinct republic within the Yugoslav Federation but a province in the Serbian Republic. Historically, it had been a center of Serbian national identity, but with a growing Albanian population.

Washington initiated a wild propaganda campaign claiming that Serbia was carrying out a campaign of massive genocide against the Albanian majority in Kosovo. The Western media was full of stories of mass graves and brutal rapes. U.S. officials claimed that from 100,000 up to 500,000 Albanians had been massacred.

U.S./NATO officials under the Clinton administration issued an outrageous ultimatum that Serbia immediately accept military occupation and surrender all sovereignty or face NATO bombardment of its cities, towns and infrastructure. When, at a negotiation session in Rambouillet, France, the Serbian Parliament voted to refuse NATO’s demands, the bombing began.

In 78 days the Pentagon dropped 35,000 cluster bombs, used thousands of rounds of radioactive depleted-uranium rounds, along with bunker busters and cruise missiles. The bombing destroyed more than 480 schools, 33 hospitals, numerous health clinics, 60 bridges, along with industrial, chemical and heating plants, and the electrical grid. Kosovo, the region that Washington was supposedly determined to liberate, received the greatest destruction.

Finally on June 3, 1999, Yugoslavia was forced to agree to a ceasefire and the occupation of Kosovo.

Expecting to find bodies everywhere, forensic teams from 17 NATO countries organized by the Hague Tribunal on War Crimes searched occupied Kosovo all summer of 1999 but found a total of only 2,108 bodies, of all nationalities. Some had been killed by NATO bombing and some in the war between the UCK and the Serbian police and military. They found not one mass grave and could produce no evidence of massacres or of “genocide.”

This stunning rebuttal of the imperialist propaganda comes from a report released by the chief prosecutor for the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, Carla Del Ponte. It was covered, but without fanfare, in the New York Times of Nov. 11, 1999.

The wild propaganda of genocide and tales of mass graves were as false as the later claims that Iraq had and was preparing to use “weapons of mass destruction.”

Through war, assassinations, coups and economic strangulation, Washington has succeeded for now in imposing neoliberal economic policies on all of the six former Yugoslav republics and breaking them into unstable and impoverished ministates.

The very instability and wrenching poverty that imperialism has brought to the region will in the long run be the seeds of its undoing. The history of the achievements made when Yugoslavia enjoyed real independence and sovereignty through unity and socialist development will assert itself in the future.

Recall how World War I broke out after a Serbian nationalist assassinated the Austro-Hungarian archduke in 1914 in Sarajevo, Bosnia. When the Austro-Hungarian Empire declared war on Serbia, Russia came to the defense of its ally. The alliance system kicked in; Germany and the Ottoman Empire joined the Austro-Hungarian, while France and Britain joined Russia. That system is long gone, but the relationship between Russia and Serbia, deeply rooted in ethnic and religious ties, should not be taken lightly.

Recall how Bill Clinton’s big war was “Operation Allied Force,” conducted by a somewhat reluctant NATO at U.S. insistence in 1999. Building upon NATO’s “Operation Deliberate Force” targeting Serbian fighters in Bosnia four years earlier, it resulted in the aerial bombing of a European capital (Belgrade) for the first time since 1945. Human Rights Watch concluded in 2000 that between 488 and 527 Yugoslav civilians were killed as a result of the bombing, which forced Belgrade to obey Washington and withdraw its troops from the heart of the Serbian homeland.

That heart, of course, is Kosovo. Since the seventh century, when the Serbs pressing eastward from Dalmatia established themselves in the old Roman province of Upper Moesia, Kosovo has been the spiritual core of the Serbian nation. The Serbs have shared it with others, notably Albanians, and the Serbian gene pool is itself complex and changing over time. But Serbian identity was shaped by the Battle of Kosovo Polje (The Field of Blackbirds) against the Ottoman Turks in 1389, in which both Serbian King Lazar and the Ottoman sultan Murad were killed. Modern historians differ about whether this was a draw or heroic defeat of the Serbs; nationalist mythology depicts it as the latter.

During over four centuries of Muslim Turkish rule the Serbs preserved their Orthodox religious identity, maintaining the Gracanica Monastery and at least half a dozen other religious centers which have survived from the fourteenth century to the present day — threatened though they have been in recent years by desecration, vandalization and destruction.

On Sept. 13, 1999, the Church of Saints Cosma and Damian, built in 1327, was obliterated by a bomb blast. The initials of the Kosovo Liberation Army were painted at the site. By that time some 20 Serbian religious sites had been blown up, including the Dormition of Mother of God parish church, built in 1315. Another 40 others had been attacked or looted. All of this took place after Serbia’s capitulation to Washington in June 1999, and the arrival of the NATO-led “peacekeeping force” (Kosovo Force; KFOR) presiding over NATO’s new protectorate. KFOR, currently 16,000 strong in a province of two million, has provided some protection for Serbian holy sites; in June 1999 French troops prevented the rape and murder of nuns and a priest at Devic Monastery after the fifteenth century structure had been desecrated and looted by KLA militants. But NATO basically empowered and legitimated forces that proceeded to destroy or desecrate over 70 churches or monasteries by October 1999 (21 in the U.S. zone of responsibility). Meanwhile more than 200,000 Serbs fled the province. During the summer of 1999, 40,000 Serbs fled Pristina.

The destruction continued; 35 sites were attacked in 2004. Last March Decani Monastery (founded in 1327) came under mortar attack. Such incidents are seen by Serbs as not only as assaults on their culture and history but efforts to erase that history.

Some Albanians claim that they were the original inhabitants of Kosovo, a land four-fifths the size of Connecticut. They claim descent from the ancient Illyrians who inhabited the area from about the fourteenth century BCE. It appears as likely they migrated from what is now Albania during the Ottoman period, coming to outnumber the Serbs. One hundred years ago, however, migration into the region brought the Serb population up to the level of the ethnic Albanian: 50/50. Thereafter the greater Albanian birthrate reduced the Serb population to a mere 10% of the total. Following the ethnic cleansing of the last decade, the figure’s down to maybe 4%.

Kosovo was the poorest region in Tito’s Yugoslavia, but it enjoyed the status of an autonomous province and was treated as a de facto republic in accordance with Tito’s philosophy that “Weak Serbia equals strong Yugoslavia.” Following Tito’s death in 1980, there were large demonstrations demanding full republic status. When ethnic Serbs were targeted, the little-known politician Slobodan Milosevic postured as defender of Kosovo’s Serbs. As president of Serbia, he (foolishly) withdrew Kosovo’s autonomy in 1989, provoking Albanian protests and the formation of the KLA in 1995. The KLA targeted police, army and civil officials, taking control of about one-quarter of the province.

Belgrade hesitated for several years before taking firm action against the KLA. After the rebels failed to seize the town of Orahovac in the summer of 1998, it launched an offensive, regaining control of almost all the province. At this point Washington became actively involved. President Clinton had sent a special envoy, Robert Gelbard, to the region in February 1998. At that time he stated that the KLA was, “without any questions, a terrorist group” in Washington’s view. Indeed the State Department had concluded it was a heroin-financed terrorist group with some ties to al-Qaeda (Washington Times, May 4, 1999). A few months later, however, Gelbard was meeting with KLA leaders; the organization was soon removed from Washington’s terror list. Later that year another U.S. special envoy to Kosovo, Richard Holbrooke, was photographed with KLA leaders, further encouraging their violent secessionist movement.

Yugoslavia (“land of the southern Slavs) had been a peaceful, nonaligned nation with cordial relations with both the Soviet bloc and the West for decades. But from 1991 the federation began to fall apart. First Slovenia declared independence. The U.S. Secretary of State, James Baker, was unhappy with the move thinking (correctly) that it would lead to regional destabilization. But reunited, powerful Germany encouraged the breakup. Croatia and Macedonia followed suite, then Bosnia-Herzegovina descended into civil war. Washington recognized Bosnian independence in 1994. Accusing Serbian forces of atrocities, NATO bombed Bosnia in August and September 1995, paving the way for the Dayton Agreement in November and the deployment of NATO forces in Bosnia. Now Bill Clinton and his Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, accustomed to making demands and being obeyed, demanded that Milosevic cease his offensive against the KLA. He did.

Following a ceasefire in October 1998, by agreement with Milosevic, peace monitors from the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) arrived in Kosovo. But the ceasefire broke down with a few months. Washington then demanded that Milosevic withdraw his troops from Kosovo. That is to say, it demanded that a sovereign state remove its troops from one of its provinces where a group the U.S. had earlier termed “terrorist” was waging a war for secession.

Washington summoned the “Contact Group” (including the UK, France, Germany, Italy and Russia) as well as Belgrade and Albanian secessionist representatives to Rambouillet, France in February and March 1999. The “Rambouillet Accords” were signed by all parties — except for Yugoslavia and Russia. The agreement specified that Kosovo would obtain autonomy but remain part of Serbia. That was the one concession to Belgrade, and an initial cause for the KLA representatives to balk. But the separatists were won over, no doubt realizing that they would gain independence in time. (They just declared that, with Washington’s approval, February 17.)

The Accords dictated that Belgrade accept a NATO force with liberty to act throughout the territory of Yugoslavia. It was a demand no sovereign state could accept. A top French official accused the U.S. of behaving like a hyper-puissance (“hyper-power”); NATO itself was divided and disturbed by U.S. demands. (The Spaniards, Italians and Greeks in particular were troubled about the NATO bombing of Belgrade.) Washington was calling for an organization founded to defend Western Europe from Soviet attack to intervene in a friendly, non-threatening country, to force it to accept further dismemberment. From March 24 to June 10 NATO air forces, including the German Luftwaffe deployed for the first time since 1945, bombed Yugoslavia.

I didn’t think at the time that Clinton’s actions resulted from some geo-strategic designs on Kosovo. (There’s not that much there, other than lots of coal.) But had he done nothing, and the violence continued, he would have been criticized for failing to use American power (“to prevent genocide”) and left the door open for other interested parties (Germany) to take unilateral action. He had to rally NATO to send a message to the world that the U.S. remained the leader and policeman of the western camp. Ongoing chaos in the Balkans would have suggested that the U.S. was sloughing off the responsibilities of power. Strong action would signal allies, as well as the Russian Federation, that the U.S. facing an increasingly united and competitive Europe could continue to deploy NATO in pursuit of its own aims. (Similarly the use of NATO in Afghanistan after 9-11 has served to bind the alliance around a U.S.-dictated agenda, while the public in member states increasingly questions the value and logic of the mission.)

We associate the Bush administration and its neocons with the systematic dissemination of disinformation designed to justify war. But the Clinton administration used the same tactic as it prepared to bomb Yugoslavia. There were horror stories about “ethnic cleansing,” and Yugoslav government forces’ attacks on innocent Kosovar Albanians. Defense Secretary William Cohen, echoed Sen. Joseph Biden (D-Del.), Sen. Chuck Hagel (R-Neb.), and former Sen. Bob Dole accused Belgrade of “genocide.” “We’ve now seen about 100,000 military-aged men missing… They may have been murdered,” warned Cohen. “There are indications genocide is unfolding in Kosovo,” declared State Department spokesman Jamie Rubin.

But German reports told a different story. Four German court opinions from October 1998 to March 1999; two Foreign Office intelligence reports in January 1999; and one report from the Foreign Office to the Administrative Court in Mainz in March 1999 all challenged such accusations. According to the Opinion of the Upper Administrative Court at Munster (March 11, 1999), “Ethnic Albanians in Kosovo have neither been nor are now exposed to regional or countrywide group persecution in the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia.”

After the glorious victory of NATO over Yugoslavia, it was discovered that as few as 2,108 people were actually killed in the province during 1998-9 before the bombardment began. Quite likely more Serbs have been killed by Albanians than vice versa since 1998. The “genocide” charge (reminiscent of the rhetoric of those urging U.S. intervention in Darfur) had been exaggerated, if not contrived; the depiction of Milosevic as a “new Hitler” (reminiscent of the hysterical characterization of Saddam Hussein) equally overblown.

Washington got what it wanted, almost. It destroyed the Yugoslav state, hauled Milosevic to a kangaroo court at the Hague (where after enhancing his reputation among Serbs by a spirited defense, he died of a heart attack), and planted NATO in what had once been proudly nonaligned European territory. But in the closing days of NATO’s war on Yugoslavia in June 1999 Russia dispatched troops based in Bosnia to Kosovo’s capital of Pristina, where they took control of the airport. It was a clear statement that Russia would not concede total control of the former Yugoslavia to NATO. It shocked Madeleine Albright, and disturbed Gen. Wesley Clark enough to order an airborne assault on the Russians. But the British general heading the NATO force at the time, Michael Jackson, told Clark: “Sir, I’m not starting World War Three for you.”

Thus the Russians were included in the post-bombing “peace-keeping” mission in Kosovo and have since been regarded as the protectors of the remaining Serbs in the Serbian province. Their opposition to Kosovo’s independence might be perceived as a slight irritation in Washington among those eager to establish a new client state and drag it into NATO. But this move comes on the heels of U.S. meddling in Georgia, Belarus, and the Ukraine, the relentless eastward expansion of NATO, and moves to locate missile defense systems in Poland and the Czech Republic. The Russian government is in effect saying: “Look, you intervene at will in Latin America, forming and toppling governments as you will, arguing it’s necessary for your ‘national security.’ We who have been invaded many times from the west have legitimate reasons to support our friends in the Balkans, including the Serbs whom you’ve maligned and mistreated disgracefully. Do you really think you can just wrench away a province from a Slavic country friendly to us, through brutal military force, and expect us to take it lying down?”

I have the feeling that Washington blew it here — and that there will be some blowback. It is all very nice for a people comprising 90% of the inhabitants of a land to form their own state after decades of aspiration and (under Milosevic) undeniable national oppression. But look at this video on Youtube. Watch the young Albanian try to rip down the cross from a burning Serbian church in March 2004. Look at this one of the gutted interior of the Manastir Devic monastery, built up in 1434 and torched in March 2004. Or this, showing an ancient Serbian cemetery desecrated in April 2005. One can find equally ugly images of Serbian actions no doubt, and both Kosovar-Albanian nationalism and Serbian nationalism retain the potential for further destruction. But the leadership in Pristina hoisted into power by U.S. action looks especially unsavory and apt to produce disaster.

The leadership of the newly declared nation of Kosovo is rooted in the KLA; Hashim Thaçi, the new Prime Minister, was a member of its inner circle. The Government of Serbia alleges that he met with Osama bin Laden in Tirana in 1995. He has been accused of connections with the Albanian, Czech and Macedonian mafia, and of membership in the Drenica Group, controlling 10-15% per cent of criminal activities in Kosovo including arms smuggling, car theft, prostitution and illegal trafficking in oil and cigarettes.

Yugoslav courts in 1997 and 1998 found him guilty of terrorism charges, including attacks on Serbian policemen, but he was a Kosovar Albanian representative at the Rambouillet talks. With the disbanding of the KLA in 1999 he became head of largest party in Kosovo, the Democratic Party. Meanwhile former KLA members have become involved in ethnic Albanian insurgencies elsewhere in the Presevo Valley in Serbia and in Macedonia. (The Albanian population in Macedonia is now about 25% of the total.) An “Albanian National Liberation Army of Macedonia” waged war on Macedonian security forces until the Ohrid Agreement was signed in August 2001, meeting some of its demands. Another armed group headed by Avdil Jakupi (“Commander Cakalla”) was formed in 2003, while another, led by Agim Krasniqi, held a village outside Skopje for six months in 2004.

Those dreaming of a “Greater Albania” (optimally to include Albania, Kosovo and other parts of Serbia, and parts of Macedonia, Montenegro and Greece), taking heart at Kosovar independence, may redouble their efforts throughout the region. There are potential religious dimensions to Albanian nationalism; while the Albanians (like Bosnians) are overwhelmingly secular Muslims, the product of generations of atheistic education in Albania and Yugoslavia, they are indeed Muslims. So there are now, aside from Turkey, two Muslim European countries: Albania and Kosovo. (Bosnia-Hezegovina’s Muslim population is under 50%). The Saudis, Kuwaitis and others have been pouring money into mosque construction in Albania and Kosovo, encouraging fundamentalist forms of Islam. The Saudi Joint Committee for the Relief of Kosovo has repaired 190 damaged mosques in Kosovo and the Saudis have built mosques there. (One, for a time, was actually named the Bin Laden Mosque.)

Whether intended to do so or not, these efforts to spread Salafi-style Islam dovetail with al-Qaeda’s efforts to exploit instability in the Balkans. The organization was active in Bosnia during the war in the early ’90s, and surely endorses the idea of “Greater Albania” and a jihad to realize it. What better vehicle for the propagation of its ideology than an ethnic-based web of insurgencies coordinated from Kosovo?

That’s one blowback possibility traceable to NATO’s 1999 war and events in Kosovo in its aftermath. Another is the emboldening of the Albanian regime in Tirana. Serbia has indicated that it will now beef up security in the Serb-majority areas of what it continues to consider its province. Some might see this as an effort to divide Kosovo. Albanian Foreign Minister Besnik Mustafaj declared in March 2006, “If Kosovo is divided, we can no longer guarantee its borders with Albania, or the border of the Albanian part of Macedonia.” In other words, Albania might take military action to do some regional re-dividing itself, backed up, perhaps, by Turkey.
Meanwhile Vladimir Putin, shrewd and careful, considers how to use this blow to pan-Slavic pride to revive Russian influence in the Balkans. His Foreign Ministry declares that Kosovo’s claim to independence threatens “the foundations of a world order that has developed over decades.” That is true of course. Even before Bush and his neocons came to power Washington was playing with those foundations, gleefully undermining them, flushed with post-Cold War triumphantalism. Time and again there has been blowback.

NATO, as military historian Andrew J. Bacevich has recently written, is in its twilight. Secretary of Defense Gates complains about European lack of zeal in pursuing the enemy in Afghanistan. This of course reflects European public opinion that now sees Afghanistan as a fruitless counterinsurgency mission imposed on Europe by Washington on the heels of other questionable missions resulting from U.S. policy.

The U.S., deeply bogged down in Southwest Asia, has left the Europeans holding the ball in Bosnia; Germany contributes 800 of the 3000 European Union Force (EUFOR) peacekeeping troops. The 16,000-strong KFOR in Kosovo includes 2,567 Italians, 2,374 Germans and 2,269 French troops (but only 1,456 U.S.) Having invaded Iraq, the U.S. urged NATO countries to send troops, and Britain continues to oblige with some 4,500. Others with sizeable commitments (such as Spain, with 1,300; the Netherlands, with 1345; and Italy, with 3,300), have all withdrawn from Iraq.

In Afghanistan, the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) consists of 28,600 troops trying to stabilize a country the size of Texas with a population of 30 million. The U.S. supplies 15,000 troops; the UK, 7,800; Germany, 3,210; Italy, 2,880; Canada, 2,500; the Netherlands, 1,650; France, 1,515; Poland, 1,100. ISAF military fatalities have increased every year since 2003 (57) to 2007 (232) as the Taliban has revived.

Public opinion in Canada and Germany has turned decisively against the Afghan deployments. Last year a poll conducted by the German magazine Focus found that 63% of Germans believe the current deployment in northern Afghanistan does not serve German interests and 84 percent of Germans oppose sending combat troops to the south as requested by the U.S. In a Canadian poll last May, 55% of respondents favored a pullout from Afghanistan, while 67% agreed that the presence of Canadian troops there makes Canada more vulnerable to a terrorist attack.

U.S. allies weary of efforts to drag them into U.S. wars. U.S. imperialism confronts something of a crisis as its partners rethink where their real interests lie. The GDP of the EU now exceeds the U.S. figure. The euro is much stronger than the dollar. People everywhere hate the U.S. government, which they associate with war-promoting lies and general savagery. Bush is out of political capital, domestically and internationally, as Kosovo announces its independence, made possible by U.S. lies and bloody intervention, “threatening,” as the Russians put it, “the foundations of a world order.”

Everything dies eventually. Hitler’s “New Order in Europe,” Japan’s “New Order in East Asia,” George H. W. Bush’s “New World Order” proclaimed as he launched the first Gulf War in 1990. The present world order is profoundly unfair and deserves to be threatened, by the right people, with a better alternative. But the assault on Yugoslavia in 1999 brought nothing positive; rather, more intolerance and suffering, more ethnic cleansing. A new regime emerges, applauded by its American sponsors and most of the EU (but rejected by Greece, Cyprus, Romania, Slovakia, Spain and Bulgaria). It is wrapped in smoke, in a legacy of smoldering churches. Smells like the cremation of a world order.