You never responded to my posts on your Marshall Plan for the Balkans stuff, and I do not speak for Dough. But, I have never criticized the idea of such a plan. What I criticized was your idea that it would be carried out through "issuing SDRs" which is just rank nonsense. The original Marshall Plan was financed by issuing dollars, and some equivalent, perhaps euros, would be behind any postwar Marshall Plan for the Balkans, not issuing SDRs. Barkley Rosser -----Original Message----- From: Chris Burford <cburford at gn.apc.org> To: lbo-talk at lists.panix.com <lbo-talk at lists.panix.com> Date: Monday, April 19, 1999 7:22 PM Subject: The Division of NATO
>NATO will have to win this war, for its own sake. Henry predicted the war
>would lead to the destruction of NATO.
>
>If the failure of Madeleine Albrights plan to impose Rambouillet on Serbia
>with a quick bombing campaign comes to be rejected more publically, the
>article below shows the shape of things to come.
>
>A Panorama programme tonight reports that Clinton, occupied by personal
>business, did not attend the crucial meeting on January 19th in which
>Albright's strategy prevailed despite intelligence reports of a build up of
>Serbian troops in Kosovo and signals of their decisive action. The Germans
>had evidence of Operation Horseshoe from last year.
>
>On March 13th Clinton met with senior advisers and backed the idea of a
>purely air-campaign although warned that in the short term it would make
>conditions worse for the Kosovo Albanians. Worried, he delayed for one more
>effort for a negotiated settlement, which failed. Instinctively he was
>against a ground war. He approved the air strikes without any fall back
>plan if it did not force Milosevic to sue for peace.
>
>In the first week there was no plan to attack Serb forces in Kosovo at all.
>It started with restrained attacks against communication centres and
>anti-aircraft placements. Only after 10 days when there was no sign of
>negotiations was it widened into attacks on the infrastructure.
>
>Clarke was quoted as saying the NATO campaign at its outset was "not
>designed to block Serb ethnic cleansing in anyway but to weaken Milosevic
>militarily and to force him to negotiate."
>
>On 24th March Albright went on record saying "I do not see this as a long
>term action". Blair however relatively early said the campaign would be a
>long one.
>
>Sidney Blumenthal was quoted stressing how very close is the relationship
>between Clinton and Blair. They are in telephone contact everyday about
>Kosovo. "To say their relationship is close is a euphemism."
>
>Blumenthal noted that in the early 90's Washington and London did not hold
>the same view on Bosnia and nothing could be done. Now they do on Kosovo.
>How it evolves will be critical.
>
>
>The continued tardiness in arrival of the small number of Apache gunships
>fits the limited strategy. There may, it seems to me, be no strategy to
>deal with a Serb attack on Albania. However Blair has just sent his liberal
>democrat friend, Paddy Ashdown, who is known to be an advocate of ground
>troops, to Albania for some photo-opportunities.
>
>If Europe comes to regret its reliance on overwhelming US air supremacy,
>it will do so by accentuating the tendencies described in the article below
>from the Guardian.
>
>Doug will be delighted to note that it describes a Marshall plan for the
>Balkans. Clearly Schroeder has not read Marx on Proudhon!
>
>BTW strange journalistic interest in prurient imagery.
>
>Chris Burford
>
>
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
>
>
>Hand in hand on the
>western front
>
>In the discreet Belgian suburbs, two
>powerful men are bonding
>
>By Martin Walker
>Monday April 19, 1999
>
>
>As if he were conducting a secret love
>affair, the calendar of the late and
>unlamented European Commission
>President, Jacques Santer, has for the past
>year listed regular, early morning meetings
>with someone identified only as "S''.
>
>This discreet monthly rendezvous was a
>breakfast with Javier Solana,
>secretary-general of Nato. The two men did
>not have far to travel. The Nato HQ is on
>the main road to Brussels airport, in the
>suburb of Evere, about seven minutes by
>car from the Commission building at the
>Schumann roundabout. But if Nato and the
>EU Commission have inhabited the same
>city for 33 years, they live officially on
>different planets.
>
>This has been deliberate. Nato only came
>to Brussels in 1966, when President de
>Gaulle evicted the HQ from France, and
>French animosity towards the
>US-dominated alliance ensured that it
>stayed at arm's length from the institutions
>of Europe. Hence the discretion of those
>monthly breakfasts.
>
>But the catalysing effect of the long Balkan
>wars of the 1990s has been making this as
>untenable as it is ridiculous. Nato and the
>EU have stumbled and drifted into a roughly
>rational form of division of labour for the
>Balkans.
>
>Nato does the hard political-military stuff
>and the EU does the soft foreign policy of
>humanitarian aid and reconstruction. At its
>most absurd, this means Nato airstrikes
>knock down Serbian telecommunications
>towers and the EU helps finance their
>reconstruction, so the warplanes can
>knock them down again.
>
>Kosovo means that the two institutions are
>now joined at the hip. Germany's latest
>proposal of a Marshall Plan to reconstruct
>the Balkans and bring them into the EU
>and Nato has now become simultaneously
>Nato's war aim and the EU's long-term
>peace plan.
>
>This cosy new relationship was to have
>been formalised later this week at a grand
>jamboree for Nato's 50th birthday at which
>Barbra Streisand was to sing and President
>Bill Clinton was to put his seal on
>America's gracious acceptance of a
>separate European defence identity within
>Nato.
>
>Previous US administrations had sent stiff
>diplomatic notes, warning that Nato's future
>was at risk, whenever Europeans hesitantly
>suggested such a heresy. The Clinton
>team, recognising the value of lending their
>intelligence and logistics assets while
>Europe provided cannon-fodder for
>operations of marginal US interest, has
>been more relaxed.
>
>It is a bit like the Indian Army of the British
>Raj. The Americans provide the staff
>officers, gunners and engineers; Europeans
>are the sepoys. The problem is that,
>except for our unusable nuclear weapons,
>we Europeans are barely up to sepoy
>status yet. We have 2 million men under
>arms (compared to 1.2 million for the US)
>but spend about two thirds of the US
>defence budget, and are thus an entire
>technological generation behind them.
>
>It was when Tony Blair and President
>Chirac were glumly informed by their
>general staffs last year that the combined
>French and British air forces could not
>seize command of the air over puny Serbia
>that the European revolution began. Britain
>gave up its long insistence that Europe's
>security depended on Nato and only Nato.
>The French finally accepted that Nato need
>not be merely a ploy to guarantee
>American hegemony. And at the St Malo
>summit last December, we jointly agreed to
>promote a European defence system.
>
>Last month at Reinhartshausen, the
>Germans came up with a plan for the
>bureaucracy to achieve this. It called for an
>EU military committee, of equivalent status
>to the EU's shadowy and powerful
>monetary committee, which was the crucial
>institution in the launch of the single
>currency. The Germans also proposed
>regular meetings of European general
>staffs, which should be fun for the
>Luxembourg colonel (commanding 800
>troops) when he sits alongside the French
>and British nuclear-armed grandees. "I felt I
>was at the birth of an event as historic as
>the launch of the euro,' commented Spain's
>foreign minister, Abel Matutes.
>
>He may well be right, because of yet
>another revolution which has taken place to
>join the American, French and British
>rethinks. The Germans are finally shaking
>off the long, post-war habits of deference,
>thanks to the peace and love and radical
>politics generation of 1969.
>
>Just as it took Richard Nixon to open US
>diplomatic relations with Red China, it took
>that former Young Socialist revolutionary
>Gerhard Schroeder and the erstwhile Green
>pacifist Joschka Fischer to get the
>Luftwaffe bombing Belgrade again.
>
>So America's great postwar genetic
>achievement, of transforming belligerent
>Germans and Japanese into plump
>bourgeois pussycats, is ending. And that
>agreeable feature of the EU, as an
>economic superpower which deliberately
>chose not to match its wealth with military
>ambition, is withering fast. Those discreet
>EU-Nato breakfasts are set to become
>formal planning sessions, towards a
>European military vocation which we have
>yet to define.
>
>
>
>
>
>
>