[I hope this is short enough to qualify under A. Cockburn's strictures. It's under 10% of the whole]
[This is from a section Gowan calls "The Theory of American `Stupidity'". I'm not sure I finally back this idea that nothing happened by accident. But I do know it makes a lot more sense than the preposterous theory that that we bombed because we knew that Milosevic was about to start an ethnic cleansing.]
Michael
Counterpunch online (www.counterpunch.org)
Peter Gowan
The Twilight of the European Project
<snip>
5. The Launch of the War and the Need for Stupidity. With the 'failure'
of Rambouillet, the Clinton Administration took open charge of the
preparations for war. And it is at this point that the analysis of
those who support the NATO Air War faces absolutely irreconcilable
contradictions. For the way in which the war was launched is, on the
face of it, absolutely inexplicable.
The bombing campaign was launched in 24th March. But President Clinton
announced on the 19th of March that the bombing campaign would be
launched and nothing now could block it. The US administration thus
gave the Serbian government 5 days in which they could do as their
pleased in Kosovo. And when the bombing started, it was organised so
that the Serbian authorities could continue to have a free hand in
Kosovo for more than a week. The air war's first phase was directed
largely at targets outside the Kosovo theatre itself for a full week.
And this military side of the attack was combined with an absolutely
contradictory set of explanations for NATO's aggression. On one side,
the attack was justified as an attempt to prevent the genocidal threat
to the Kosovar Albanians from the Milosevic regime. But on the other
side, the attack was simultaneously justified by the claim that the
Milosevic regime had no such genocidal intentions and indeed wanted
the bombing campaign in order to use it to sell Rambouillet to the
Serbian people.
These contradictions cannot be explained away by haste, improvisation
and confusion on the part of the Clinton administration. We know that
the US National Security Council and the State Department had been
planning this war in detail for 14 months before it started. We know
also from the Washington Post that the experts in the US
administration spent those 14 months running over, day after day, all
the variants of the course of such a war, all the scenarios of
possible Yugoslav government responses to the air attack. We know that
they foresaw the possibilities of mass refugee exits from Kosovo. The
Pentagon foresaw a long air war: the notion that Milosevic wanted the
bombing attack was political spin put about by General Wesley Clark:
it was nonsense. So why did they plan the start of the war in this
particular way?
There is only one serious explanation: the Clinton administration was
giving the Serbian authorities the opportunity to provide the NATO
attack with an ex post facto legitimation. The US was hoping that the
five days before the launch of the bombing and the first week of the
war would give various forces in Serbia the opportunity for atrocities
that could then be used to legitimate the air war.
This was a rational calculation on the part of the US planners. They
knew that the main political opponents in Serbia of Milosevic's
Socialist Party -- the Radical Party of Seselj and various Serbian
fascist groups -- supported the ethnic cleansing of Kosovo, though the
Socialist Party did not. They knew also that Yugoslav military forces
would pour into positions in Kosovo as the OSCE personnel left,
clearing strategic villages, driving forward against KLA-US
supporters. They could predict also that there would be a refugee flow
across the borders into Macedonia and Albania.
And the US planners were proved right. Extremist Serbian groups did,
it seems, go on the rampage in Pristina for three days after the start
of the war. Refugees did start to flood across the borders. And the
resulting news pictures did indeed swing European public opinion
behind the war. As for the Serbian government organising a genocidal
mass slaughter, this did not happen: the Clinton administration
organised the launch of the war to invited the Serbian authorities to
launch a genocide, but the Milosevic government declined the
invitation.
It is simply impossible to argue that the US military campaign was
designed to stop the brutalities against the Kosovo Albanians. It
would be far easier to demonstrate that this thoroughly planned and
prepared war was designed to increase the chances of such brutalities
being escalated to qualitatively higher levels. The way that the war
was launched was designed to increase the sufferings of the Kosovar
Albanians in order to justify an open-ended US bombing campaign
against the Serbian state. The technique worked. But this success
cannot be acknowledged. Instead it must be hidden by the notion of
Clinton administration stupidity.
<end excerpt>