-----Original Message----- From: owner-lbo-talk at lists.panix.com [mailto:owner-lbo-talk at lists.panix.com]On Behalf Of W. Kiernan Sent: Saturday, June 05, 1999 8:51 AM To: lbo-talk at lists.panix.com Subject: Re: Kosovo compromise
Max Sawicky wrote:
>
> ...the key factor in Milo's surrender...
My nerves are on edge.
<rant>
Gee, Max, what "surrender" is it you're talking about? Let's see. In March, before the start of bombing, that thug Albright thrust that deliberately unacceptable ultimatum at Milosevic, demanding, among its other clauses, that all of Yugoslavia, top to bottom, should be occupied by NATO; compare this ultimatum with Austria's ultimatum to Sarajevo in 1914. Milosevic's counter-offer accepted the bulk of the terms of Rambouillet, but he rejected occupation of Serbia. Again, this is analogous to the extremely conciliatory Serbian counter-offer in 1914, which prompted Kaiser Wilhelm II to say, "This is more than one could have expected! A great moral success for Vienna; but with it every reason for war drops away, and Giesl might have remained quietly in Belgrade! On the strength of this I should never have ordered mobilization." However it wasn't some soft pacifist like Wilhelm II in command this time but Madeleine Albright instead, and she preferred to throw bombs around for a few weeks first, because, what's the use of having this swell fun toy, the U.S. Army, if I can't ever play with it?
"Surrender"? NATO is now ready to buy essentially the same deal they could have gotten in March before the aerial blitzkrieg. But there is an enormous difference between then and now. If NATO had conceded those items - to leave Serbia proper unoccupied, and to send peacekeeping forces in U.N. uniforms rather than NATO ones into Kosovo alone - back in March, then there would have been riflemen onn the ground in Kosovo to preempt Milosevic's massive "ethnic-cleansing" campaign against the Kosovo Albanian civilians. U.N. riflemen on the ground would have actually done the Kosovar Albanians some good, as opposed to filling the sky with bomber pilots who, at three miles vertical range, protected those civilians from nothing.
Had NATO accepted to Milosevic's counter-offer in March rather than today, all those Kosovo Albanians who were murdered by Raznatovic's death squads in the last ten weeks would still be alive, and nearly a million Kosovars would be safe in their homes today rather than sleeping under Visqueen in refugee camps. This is the equation: ostensibly the U.S. is in this affair to protect ethnic Albanians in Kosovo; yet in practice it's worth sacrificing thousands of those Kosovars dead and nearly a million in exile to enjoy the macho/sado thrill of a few weeks of unrestrained, irresitible military domination.
It's obvious, Max, that you are utterly unsympathetic toward any young man unlucky enough to be born a Serb:
> ...I can't say this fate wasn't richly deserved...
Maybe you never had a draft number for the Vietnam "this is not a war" like I did. So I won't ask you to find it at all regrettable that several thousand Serbian draftees have lately been butchered by NATO bombs. Other readers, however, might note that even if the high government officials of Yugoslavia "richly deserved" to be blown up, it wasn't them who got to be the "sitting ducks for US air power," but draftees who had, in their truncated lives, as little control over the decisions of the Belgrade government as I do over those lunatics in the White House, the State Department, and the Pentagon.
NATO slaughtered not just uniformed soldiers en masse, but also Albanian Kosovo refugees on tractor-drawn carts, old people in hospital beds, civilians riding in buses and railroad trains, children in apartment buildings and so on; innocent victims by the hundreds. And the civilian deaths have only just begun; NATO has systematically destroyed the infrastructure of Serbia, by anti-civilian tactics such as blowing up electric, water and sewer plants, so now we can expect child mortality rates to soar soon just as they have in Iraq. This is called "sending a message," this message: if little 18-month-old Andrej or Ilsa doesn't get off the stick, toddle or crawl to Belgrade, and overthrow Milosevic pretty damn soon, then they and only they can be responsible for the "consequences" (sadistic parents love the word "consequences" as a euphemism for "punishment" as it disclaims the punishers's responsibility) and in their case, the "consequence" is death by typhus or dysentery.
Domestically, we have thrown away of blown up billions of dollars worth of military hardware to acheive what we could have done with a twitch of a diplomat's pen in March. This is great news if you own a lot of shares of Raytheon, which I don't. The cost of replacing all that Tom Clancy-fetish junk comes out of the Social Security trust fund. They've mulcted me since I was fifteen years old, and now the chances are even less than before that I'll ever get one red cent back, but at least Madeleine'll get a whole bunch of fresh new cruise missiles and cluster bombs to play with, yay!
Speaking of cluster bombs, wanna guess how many of the U.S. troops assigned to this peacekeeping force are going to get de-limbed by all those bomblets lying in the high grass? Man, no shit, it's no fucking good to step on a bomb. My next-door neighbor did that in VN way back in 1970, and he's been on his back in bed, paralyzed, ever since. Yeah, true, he had been drafted into the very same Army which perpetrated My Lai, strategic hamlets and Operation Ranchhand, but despite that connection you still can't convince me his personal fate was "richly deserved."
In world politics, we have reignited the Cold War. Great news! - I really missed the Cold War, it was lots of fun. Russia is test-firing a new model ICBM, the Ukraine intends to re-arm itself with atomic weapons, we've unraveled twenty-five years of progress in U.S.-Chinese relations by deliberately bombing their Embassy (don't tell me it was any kind of an accident, I am a surveyor and I know better), and every country in the third world is staring aghast with fear and horror at NATO's bully tactics and is planning on building a nuclear or CBW arsenal of its own as soon as possible to keep it from happening to them next.
Finally, you say:
> All this supports the premise that projections of the conflict
> as a plan for Nato dominion over Serbia in the interests of some
> plan of greater conquest-cum-economic absorption were Marxoid
> hogwash...
"God" only knows what Albright & Co.'s motivations were in March. But you can't be unaware that the West intends, sooner or later, to lend Serbia the money at interest in order to rebuild the stuff the West's bombers destroyed. Be glad Detroit doesn't adopt this tactic, and send Apache gunships to blast your already-paid-for car right off of your driveway in order to get you back into the showroom.
I firmly believe that we're compromising today only because that shitheel Clinton had a look or two at some U.S. opinion polls, his functional substitute for his nonexistent sense of right-and-wrong, and concluded that the air war wasn't selling in Peoria, and that the ground war those U.K. savages were so hot to fight would go over even worse in the polls. If another seven percent of the voters had told the Gallup Organization that they were behind the bombing, we'd probably still be at it at Christmas time. But they didn't, so it's "Sorry, Madeleine, fun time's over! We're pulling the plug."
> ...the apparent outcome is clearly half a loaf.
Half a loaf of what, I wonder, but I've got a guess... Given the preconditions, you could imagine fucking up worse than we've done, but it's a real strain to do so.
</rant>, WDK - WKiernan at concentric.net