The Independent is running a story in which former Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic is claiming that he had a “secret deal” with the CIA whereby if he stayed out of politics that he would be under “informal protection.”
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,
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.
Holbrooke’s reasoning that accuses Karadzic of lying does not stand him in good stead.