The true history of this war will be the arena for a very important struggle.
This is a bitter piece, and may be valid on a number of counts. The fact that the US pulled virtually all the strings, (except when Blair tried a bit of nibble handwork) is clear. The other countries had a sort of negative veto over details of the war, particularly unfortunately on a ground initiative rather than on the bombing.
>They are destroying the country,
>bombing it with new weapons, toxic nerve gases, surface mines dropped by
>parachute, bombs containing uranium, napalm, sterilization chemicals,
>sprayings to poison the crops and weapons of which even we still do not
>know anything.
We will soon see how much of the country was destroyed and what proportion of the crops were poisoned. I think it was much less than the claim of barbarism implies. Whereas the destruction of Albanian villages by means of less sophisticated technology, appears in many cases to have been total and very effective.
But where I think this report may seriously be correct is that one of the ways the US core of NATO and its immediate allies, managed the war by some initiatives and deliberate accidents that tested the water of what the public would accept. For example the graphite bombs got us used to the idea of the electricity grid being blacked out, for a week before more conventional bombs were used. It also seems likely they were judging the mood of the Yugoslav population closely and wanted to instill despair in them. So a cluster of humanitarian accidents that they even stopped apologising for, may have been all part of the psychological warfare.
It may be hard to prove, because there would have been an element of randomness in it.
Chris Burford
London