It was the Guardian from their website, by the admirable Martin Walker.
It has subsequently received confirmation, I suggest, by Blair stepping into the limelight with his trip to Brussels yesterday, with the Brits offering to help manage the spin doctoring, and with the preparation of public opinion for ground troops with which Blair is allowing his name to be associated.
It also receives corroboration from an unlikely source: Doug Henwood's favourite pest from earlier versions of marxism-space, US expatriate Bob Malecki. He has just posted on marxism-unmoderated an unusually articulate denunciation of Mandel's USEC group, who, through Krivine, have some slight leverage on the French political process. This USEC position appears to call for a continuation of the war in defence of the Kosovo Albanians but with the US out of it, and managed by the OSCE. Obiously impractical in the short term, but as a political stance that may influence others in the wider civil society, not without its European relevance, if European rumblings get worse about continued reliance on massive US air power.
What you citizens of the US do is of course your decision, but I continue to hope for a more inflected position than that it is a mark of marxist purity that you just oppose all and every action by your government.
After all in the American Civil War, Marx himself objectively and knowingly advocated alliance with the northern capitalists in the consolidation of the USA over the whole of the federation. This was in the interests of the abolition of slavery but more importantly the unity of the working people of the USA.
Kneejerk rejection of all compromises with capitalism and imperialism is not always anti-capitalist and anti-imperialist. As marxism goes, it is pretty sloppy.
Chris Burford
London
>
>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.
>
>