Observer: NATO credibility collapses

Rob Schaap rws at comserver.canberra.edu.au
Sat May 8 23:41:12 PDT 1999


These bastards have been messing with the collective future security of six billion people for six weeks now.

Thankfully, the media's response suggests that some good may have come of the killing and maiming of Chinese innocents that would never come from all those dead Yugoslavian innocents (including those whose deaths went almost ignored because they died on hospital grounds just as others were dying on diplomatically sovereign ground), in that they help bring home to everybody - even Ted Turner - just what arrogant irresponsibility is going on here.

I bet some nervous polling is going on at the moment. Just mebbe the politics of all this has taken a turn, eh?

If the likes of Germany and Holland falter, the Italians and the Greeks might try to take the tiller back from those gung-ho uniforms.

But I guess it's not just the soldier boys who stand in their way. The fall-out for NATO leaders could be such that they might pay any price (in the cheap currency of Yugoslav lives) to avoid sharp reappraisals by the new NATO states, new power relations within the Security Council, the Russian 'peace-makers' and restrained Chinese kicking a diplomatic goal, the whole Muslem Middle-East losing all faith, and an attractively bloody searches for scapegoats.

And just mebbe Blair will suddenly be made aware just how large and disparate that enormous backbench is, and the last chapter in the Clinton saga would besmirch the whole book nicely (especially if it happens to coincide with the sort of 'correction' on Wall St that might expose the shifting sands upon which the 'fundamentals' have been constructed)- and, well, I wonder who'd cover Albright's arse? No-one, I hope.

Put like that, our collective future security is still not an attractive bet, eh?

Waddya reckon? Rob.



More information about the lbo-talk mailing list