http://www.sbpost.ie/news/analysis/tom.html
America's ambitions bring chaos to Europe
By Tom McGurk
Last week Mary Robinson, the UN Commissioner for Human Rights enjoyed a vista of the effect of Nato bombing on Yugoslavia which is denied to those in the West who are directing it. She was able to see for herself the effects on the town of Nis and she was shocked: burning cars, wrecked apartment blocks with the residents still huddled inside and streets full of unexploded bombs.
Far from the television strategists, the official lies of Nato spokesman Jamie Shea and the banalities we hear from Bill Clinton and Tony Blair, here was an astute and compassionate observer seeing for herself the price that civilians are having to pay.
Her observation was inevitable: because it's a purely air bombing campaign it is almost inevitable that civilians will be put at risk. As some of us forecast at the outset of this campaign, sooner or later the definition of `military targets' would grow to encompass civilian targets, and so it has. Public transport, bridges, oil and electrical supplies, a hospital, a small market town, television stations and now all the Serbian bridges across the Danube are down, causing all sorts of problems across central Europe.
Perhaps Nato might this weekend, now more than 50 days into this campaign, take stock of what they have sown in Yugoslavia. Whatever their intentions, the inevitable consequence of their bombings has been to ethnically cleanse Kosova of its Albanian population to a degree that the Serbs could never have anticipated. Even the mad Milosevic could never have dreamed of a situation where almost three-quarters of a million Kosovar Albanians would have been driven across the borders.
If Nato's policy was driven by humanitarian reasons in the first instance -- to stop a localised ethnic cleansing operation in Yugoslavia -- they have now got on their hands the biggest humanitarian crisis seen in Europe since the last war. In eight weeks they have transformed a localised civil war into an international crisis. Far from bringing Milosevic to heel and provoking profound changes in the Balkans, the most profound change now being provoked is actually in the world order that has emerged in the decade since the end of the Cold War.
If anything, China's outraged reaction to the bombing of their embassy marked the fully frontal diplomatic emergence -- in all its growing economic and military power -- of the world's new and second super-power. That the Chinese leadership chose to turn the funerals of those who died into a state occasion and that a new generation of young Chinese were allowed to attack the US and British embassies in the way they did indicates that the brutal victors of Tienanmin Square have survived and are intent on reclaiming their place on the world stage. And while the US establishment may console itself that former super-power Russia is now so utterly dependent on Western capital that it is effectively neutralised in geo-political terms, they should not forget the increasing importance of China to US overseas investment.
US capitalism decided long ago that the 21st century would see the emergence of China as potentially the world's largest market and there will be fewer and fewer on Wall Street this weekend who will see any sense in the risks that the Yugoslav crisis is now posing to the world financial order.
Nor can anyone argue that the increasingly critical situation in Russia has been helped by Nato's action. For how much longer Russia can struggle from crisis to crisis is anyone's guess but the lessons of Russian history have always been that in the end they will eventually trust their own instincts to solve their own problems and the new capitalist experiment is being increasingly seen as something foreign.
The Russians enjoy the freedoms it has brought but where is the economic wellbeing that was promised? Nato's current performance is about the last sort of provocation or example that an unstable Russia, riddled by organised crime, endemic corruption and economic chaos, requires.
Closer to home, in the new European super-state we are supposed to be building, the long-term impact of the crisis is yet to be assessed. I number myself among those who suspect that American military intervention in Europe on this scale is actually more about American concerns over an emerging European economic independence than anything else.
Far fetched as it may seem, the bombs now raining down on the unfortunate citizens of Serbia may be less about Balkan concerns than about kicking into traditional shape those who have ambitions for the euro as a means of escaping the dollar albatross which has hung around our necks since 1945.
America's self-appointed role as world policeman is an obsession fuelled by deeply outdated notions of Europe. One has only to witness the degree of arrogance and banality with which this war is being conducted to recognise that. Nato, which was designed for a Cold War situation is now, in the absence of any Soviet threat to Europe, being carefully reshaped as an American-led world police force and being cleverly camouflaged as an American-led European army.
Since China and Russia's presence on the UN Security Council prevent international legal approval for this type of American action, Nato is being used to circumvent a UN-ordered role in world affairs. While Nato makes war, the UN is being left to pick up the pieces and the refugees. Indeed such is the scale of the UN's current financial indebtedness to the USA that the notion of Kofi Annan as an independent voice is risible.
In a mere four months, the Balkan winter will arrive for almost one million refugees sitting in makeshift camps. What then? Will the Kosovar Albanians be condemned, as the Palestinians were, to spend generations in camps because American foreign policy required it? Are we condemned to watch an old scenario unfold yet again when the impending US Presidential election demands the boys be brought home?
We know this story of old. Who'll bet that by Christmas we may well be reluctantly concluding that the people who said they wanted to save the Kosavars were actually a greater threat to them than those who wanted to harm them?