Strange are the ways of men! It feels like only yesterday that the New York Times was denouncing President Bill as a moral midget, deserving of the harshest reprobation for fondling Monica Lewinsky's breasts. And today here's the New York Times doling out measured praise to the same president for blowing little children in pieces. The Times last Thursday had pictures of those dead refugees on its cover, bombed by one of NATO's aviators. Editorial page editor Howell Raines staked out the Times official view that "For now, NATO must sustain and intensify the bombing." What a weird guy Raines must be. Kiss Monica's tits and he goes crazy. Bomb peasants and he shouts for more.
Maybe some corner of Clinton's brain reckons that bombs on Serbia
will extinguish Monica Lewinksy from popular memory. But what
man of mature judgment and compassion would not prefer to be remembered
by the Starr report than by bomb craters and dead bodies? Many
people thought Clinton would be the first president who would
somehow prefer Starr's volume as his epitaph, however embarrassing.
But no. Like all the others he wants craters and corpses as his
requiem.
Being a peacenik is definitely passe'. Liberals
are learning once again--did they every truly forget--that it's
fun to be a warmonger and cheer the high explosive as it falls.
After suffering indigestion towards the end of the Vietnam affair,
they got the taste for war again in the mid-1990s, with Bosnia.
They became the "laptop bombardiers," an apt phrase
coined by Simon Jenkins in The Spectator in 1995.
Back then, there wasn't a week, for months
on end, that Anthony Lewis didn't call for the bombardment of
Serbia. The Serbs became demons, monsters, and Milosevic the most
demonic monster of all. Last week I ran across an interesting
piece by an Indian, Lt General Satish Nambiar who had been First
Force Commissioner and Head of Mission of the United Nations force
deployed in the former Yugoslavia from March 1992 to March 1993.
He was writing in an Indian journal. "Portraying the Serbs
as evil and everybody else as good was not only counterproductive
but dishonest," the general writes. "According to my
experience all sides were guilty but only the Serbs would admit
that they were no angels while the others would insist that they
were."
Nambiar says accurately that there were plenty
of chances of agreement on a Bosnian settlement in the mid-1990s
but the Americans always nixed them. There was the Lisbon plan
and then the Vance-Owen plan, both not so different from the final
Dayton plan. But the trouble was that the US, amid the furious
screams of the liberals, refused to admit the Serbs had legitimate
grievances and rights.
In Britain there was a coalition running from
Margaret Thatcher to the Laborite New Statesman in favor
of bombing the Serbs. Ken Livingston, the pinko firebrand of London,
bellowed for bombs. So did the Thinking Woman's Crumpet (my sister-in-law's
wry description of him), Michael Ignatieff. In this country the
laptop bombardiers crossed from the Wall Street Journal
editorial page, which likes to bomb anything, (though most of
all, Little Rock) to William Safire, to Anthony Lewis, to the
Democratic Socialists of America.
The worst offender was the press, which carefully
ignored detailed accounts of how the Bosnian Muslims were manipulating
western opinion most notoriously by almost certainly lobbing a
missile in to a marketplace filled with their own people. When
the Croats ethnically cleansed the Krajina of hundreds of thousands
of Serbs--the biggest such cleansing in the Balkans since World
War II--with direction from US military and CIA officer, reporters
and commentators mostly looked the other way or actually cheered.
"The Serbs Asked For It," exulted the headline on a
piece in the Los Angeles Times by pundit William Pfaff.
Monitors for the European Union prepared a report on the Croat
atrocities, and though it was confidential, Robert Fisk of the
London Independent was able to get a copy. "Evidence
of atrocities; an average of six corpses a day, continue to emerge...the
corpses--some fresh, some decomposed--are mainly of old men. Many
have been shot in the back of the head or had throats slit, others
have been mutilated...Serbian homes and lands continue to be looted.
The crimes have been perpetrated by the HV (Croatian Army) the
CR (Croatian Police) and CR civilians. There have been no observed
attempts to stop it and the indications point to a scorched earth
policy."
If American journalists had bothered to report
this, then perhaps public opinion would have been prepared for
the notion that there are no innocent political players in the
Balkans. The better informed the people are the harder it is to
demagogue them with the idea that the best way forward now is--to
get back to Howell Raines and that New York Times editorial
to "sustain and intensify the bombing."
But Bosnia, back in the middle 1990s, rode
on a hysteria that was never properly confronted and now the price
is being paid, with contemptible opportunists like Senator John
McCain
shouting for "lights out in Belgrade" (why doesn't McCain
have the guts to emulate John Glen, get assigned to a bombing
crew and go strafe refugees in Kosovo.) But McCain is more than
matched by Democrats like Senator Carl Levin, or by that brass-lunged
fraud from Vermont, Bernard Sanders, "socialist progressive,"
who has endorsed Clinton's bombs.
Well over two-thirds of the Democrats in the
House are cheering the bombs, and senatorial liberals like Barbara
Boxer are discovering the joys of war. "I never believed
I'd go back and vote on air strikes." she marveled in an
article in the Boston Globe for March 31.
These days, to get a dose of common sense,
you have to go over the Republican side of the aisle and listen
to people like Rep Curt Weldon of Pennsylvania who made a terrific
speech in Congress on April 12, reporting on his contacts with
members of the Russian Duma (where Weldon has many friends), endorsing
their idea that Russia should pledge that Milosevic will abide
by the Rambouillet accords on condition that an international
peace-keeping force moves into Kosovo, devoid of any personnel
from nations now bombing Serbia.
Follow this carefully, because the exact nature
of such a force is what's causing bombs to fall on civilians in
Belgrade and Kosovo. Remember that Milosevic agreed to virtually
everything on the table at the Rambouillet meeting, with two exceptions.
For him the status of Kosovo as part of Serbia was non-negotiable,
and he wouldn't agree to the stationing of NATO forces on Yugoslav
soil, which does after all include Kosovo. But it's clear enough
that a solution could have been found. As Stephen Erlanger reported
in the New York Times on April 8, the Serbian Parliament,
before the bombing started, accepted the idea of a UN force to
monitor a political settlement there. And it's clear that the
notion of an Albanian autonomous region within Serbian Kosovo
was negotiable. After all, Montenegro, Macedonia, Greece--to name
only three--and also the US have pronounced themselves opposed
to the idea of a greater Albania, which is what an independent
Kosovo would presage.
It's plain enough that the US and its NATO
subordinates wanted a confrontation and ultimately forced it.
It's also clear that increasingly vocal and explicit charges by
the Russians that the KLA was supplied by the Germans and the
CIA have merit. The KLA itself was roundly denounced--before the
bombings--in the London Times, as a Maoist gang fueled
by heroin trafficking. (This is standard operating procedure for
a CIA operation, as any scrutiny of recent histories of Afghanistan,
or south-east Asia will attest.)
So the NATO bombs began to fall and, exactly
as could have been predicted, the Serbian brutalities in Kosovo
escalated and the tidal wave of refugees began. Everything has
gone according the script. NATO bombs destroying Serbian civilian
infrastructure: power plants, sewage treatment, electricity and
gas and oil supplies. Everything that's hit is hastily described
by NATO spokesmen as "dual purpose," (i.e., possibly
also for Serb military use) unless it's obvious to all that only
peasants, with no conceivable "dual purposes" have been
blasted to bits. Wednesday last saw the mad NATO supreme commander,
Wesley Clark, utter his most deliberate and obvious lie to date,
when he said that "There was a military convoy and a refugee
convoy. We struck the Serb convoy and we have very strong evidence
that the Serbs then retaliated by attacking the column of refugees."
By the next day it became clear that there was no "Serb convoy,"
no "very strong evidence" and that an Albanian column
of refugees on tractors had been killed by NATO bombers.
By the end of last week the Germans were surfacing
a plan for international peacekeepers to move in, after a cease-fire
gained by the ending of aggressive Serbian operations in Kosovo.
The transition from this to a negotiated agreement guaranteed
by non-belligerent forces under UN auspices is not too hard, unless
the US refuses to relinquish its overall goal of making NATO the
arbiter of Europe's future. This is what the war and the bombing
are about. On this strategy which presumes a continued refusal
to let Russia have any role in securing a ceasefire or peace settlement,
there can be no truce or suspension of hostilities. Indeed there
can only be a ground war, with NATO troops, following Hitler's
old invasion plans, which Adolf called "operation Punishment,"
because the Serbs overthrew those who sided with him and refused
to knuckle under. Serbia was then invaded by Germany, with Italian
and Hungarian support. Now US generals are poring over those old
Nazi war plans, even while they carefully deny it's an option.
To date it's been a lovely war from the American point of view. Only three captives, and one Stealth shot down. (There's a wonderful Serb sign, "Sorry, we didn't know it was invisible.") A ground war? Those who keep talk about the need to "see this through" have probably forgotten what a ground war is really like. People have talked so long about "a new Vietnam" that they don't recognize it when it finally slouches round the corner. Not just 70 dead refugees: thousands and thousands of dead civilians. Thousands of dead soldiers. Serbian villages being flattened. Our boys being debauched and corrupted by fighting against a people defending their homeland.
This really does take us back to somewhere round 1962 or so, when all the Kennedy liberals and all the Eisenhower "internationalists" thought war in Vietnam was a great and necessary idea. The Republican isolationists had been put out of business by then, ever since the Republican senator Vandenberg signed on to the cold war in the 1940s. But these days there is no communist threat. The Chinese premier just took America by storm, without so much as a weapon in his hand, except for the magic words, "cheap labor" and "big markets." Maybe our only hope now is that Republican isolationist tradition. Right now my only confusion is whether to vote for Pat Buchanan or Dan Quayle, the only presidential candidates to oppose the war. We've always loved Marilyn Quayle, with those wonderful great teeth, big enough to chomp an apple through a picket fence. A Vote for Quayle is a Vote for Peace! The essence of a properly functioning corporate democracy is that there are no agreeable choices. CP
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