Charles Brown
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Today's NY Times has an ad sponsored by a group calling itself the Balkans Action Committee calling for Nato ground forces in Yugoslavia. It is signed by an odd mixture of neoconservatives and "leftists" including Bianca Jagger and "Rabbi" Michael Lerner, the portly editor of Tikkun and erstwhile 1960s radical. Lerner was "spiritual adviser" to the Clintons for a brief time about 5 years ago, urging "communitarian" values upon the thuggish Arkansas president and his wife.
They are window-dressing, however. The real forces behind Balkans Action are the hardline anticommunists who emerged during the Reagan era. This is the executive committee, as announced on their website (www.balkanaction.org).
Morton Abramowitz Saul Bellow Zbigniew Brzezinski Richard Burt Frank Carlucci Dennis DeConcini Paula Dobriansky Geraldine Ferraro Robert Hunter Philip Kaiser Max M. Kampelman Lane Kirkland Jeane Kirkpatrick Peter Kovler Ron Lehman John O'Sullivan Richard Perle Eugene Rostow Donald Rumsfeld Stephen Solarz Helmut Sonnenfeldt William Howard Taft Elie Wiesel Paul Wolfowitz Elmo Zumwalt
Except for Geraldine Ferraro, this is basically the same group that made up the Committee on the Present Danger, which was chaired by the atrocious Jeane Kirkpatrick and flourished under Reagan. It promoted Star Wars, intervention in Central America, Afghanistan and Angola and all sorts of other militantly counterrevolutionary adventures. The point of this is to remind us that the war in the Balkans is not a "progressive's" war. The most important sector of reactionary opinion in the United States is represented by this executive committee and should remind us that the war is a continuation of the anticommunist crusade launched by Reagan 20 years ago.
Louis Proyect
(http://www.panix.com/~lnp3/marxism.html)