A distressingly cogent analysis from the soi-disant Right...
--C. G. Estabrook
---------- Forwarded message ----------
> From: Jim_Jatras at rpc.senate.gov (Jim Jatras)
> Subject: Remarks at CATO (5/18/99)
>
> FYI: the following is the text of my remarks at CATO Institute on 5/18/99 at
> the conference:
>
> "NATO'S BALKAN WAR: FINDING AN HONORABLE EXIT."
>
> Let me state at the outset that my remarks here today do not represent any
> Senate office or member. Rather, I am giving my professional judgement as a
> policy analyst and my personal opinion, for both of which I am solely
> responsible.
>
> The rationale for U.S. intervention in Kosovo and for assistance to the
> Kosovo Liberation Army is easily stated. It goes something like this:
>
> " The current crisis in Kosovo is simply the latest episode in the aggressive
> drive by extreme Serbian nationalism, orchestrated by Yugoslav President
> Slobodan Milosevic, to create an ethnically pure Greater Serbian state. This
> aggression -- first in Slovenia, then in Croatia, and then in Bosnia, -- has
> now come to Kosovo, largely because the West, notably NATO, refused to stand
> up to him. "
>
> " Prior to 1989, Kosovo was at peace under an autonomy that allowed the
> Albanian people a large degree of self-rule. That status quo was disturbed by
> the Serbs by the revocation of Kosovo's autonomy and the initiation of an
> apartheid system of ethnic discrimination. Now, after a decade of oppression
> by the Serbs, the Albanians of Kosovo are faced with a pre-planned program of
> genocide, similar to that committed by the Serbs in Bosnia. The rise of the
> KLA is a response to this threat."
>
> "The United States and the international community first exhausted the
> possibilities for a diplomatic settlement to the crisis, repeatedly offering
> the Serbs the opportunity to accept the Rambouillet agreement, a peaceful
> solution that would be fair to all parties. But while the Albanians,
> including the KLA, chose the path of negotiation and peace, the Serbs
> rejected it. Accordingly, NATO had no choice but to move ahead with a
> military response, namely airstrikes, which in Bosnia forced the Serbs to the
> peace table. The campaign is directed against Milosevic and his security
> apparatus, not against the Serbian people."
>
> " Unfortunately, as the Serbs moved ahead with their pre-planned program of
> genocide the NATO air campaign could not stop the displacement of hundreds of
> thousands of Albanians. While air power may ultimately bring the Serbs to
> heel, a just and speedy solution requires a ground component. Some advocate a
> NATO ground offensive, but there are concerns about the potential costs.
> Others advocate a program of arming and training the KLA the victims of
> Serbian aggression and genocide to liberate their own country. In any case,
> to fail to achieve NATO's objectives is completely unacceptable.
> International stability would be threatened, and American and NATO
> credibility would be destroyed if genocide were allowed to succeed in the
> heart of Europe at the dawn of the 21st Century."
>
> That, in a nutshell, is the case. I have tried to paraphrase as closely as
> possible the arguments of supporters of the Clinton policy. The trouble is:
> hardly any part of the summary justification I just gave is true. Some parts
> of it are skewed or exaggerated interpretations of the facts, some are
> outright lies. However, as in Bosnia, the Clinton Administration's Kosovo
> policy cannot be justified without recasting a frightfully complex conflict,
> with plenty of blame to go around, as a caricature: a morality play in black
> and white where one side is completely innocent and the other entirely
> villainous.
>
> To start with, pre-1989 Kosovo was hardly the fantasyland of ethnic tolerance
> the pro-intervention caricature makes it out to be. Under the 1974 Tito
> constitution, which elevated Kosovo to effective equality with the federal
> republics, Kosovo's Albanians exercised virtually complete control over the
> provincial administration. Tens, perhaps hundreds, of thousands of Serbs left
> during this period in the face of pervasive discrimination and the
> authorities' refusal to protect Serbs from ethnic violence. The result of the
> shift in the ethnic balance that accelerated during this period is the main
> claim ethnic Albanians lay to exclusive ownership of Kosovo. At the same
> time, Albanian demands mounted that the province be detached from Serbia and
> given republic status within the Yugoslav federation; republic status, if
> granted, would, in theory, have allowed Kosovo the legal right to declare its
> independence from Yugoslavia. One of the ironies of the present Kosovo crisis
> is that Milosevic began his rise to power in Serbia in large part because of
> the oppressive character of pre-1989 Albanian rule in Kosovo, symbolized by
> the famous 1987 rally where he promised the local Serbs: "Nobody will beat
> you again." In short, rather than Milosevic being the cause of the Kosovo
> crisis, it would be as correct to say that intolerant Albanian nationalism in
> Kosovo is largely the cause of Milosevic's attainment of power.
>
> Second, in 1989 Kosovo's autonomy was not revoked but was downgraded -- at
> the federal level at Milosevic's initiative -- to what it had been before
> 1974.
>
> Many Albanians refused to accept Belgrade's reassertion of authority and
> large numbers were fired from their state jobs. The resulting standoff -- of
> boycott and the creation of alternative institutions on the Albanian side and
> of increasingly severe police repression on the Serbian side -- continued for
> most of the 1990s. Again, the political problem in Kosovo -- up until the
> bombing began -- has always been: how much autonomy will the Kosovo Albanians
> settle for? When I hear now that autonomy is not enough and that only
> independence will suffice, I can't help but think of Turkish Kurdistan where
> not only have the Kurds never been offered any kind of autonomy but even
> suggesting there ought to be autonomy will land you in jail. But of course we
> don't bomb Turkey over the Kurds; on the contrary, as a NATO member Turkey is
> one of the countries helping to bomb the Serbs.
>
> Third, while after 1989 there was a tense stand-off in Kosovo, what we did
> not have was open warfare. That was the result not of any pre-planned Serbian
> program of "ethnic cleansing" but of the KLA's deliberate and I would say
> classic strategy to turn a political confrontation into a military
> confrontation. Attacks directed against not only Serbian police and officials
> but Serbian civilians and insufficiently militant Albanians were undoubtedly,
> and accurately, calculated to trigger a massive and largely indiscriminate
> response by Serbian forces. The growing cycle of violence, in turn, further
> radicalized Kosovo's Albanians and led to the possibility of NATO military
> involvement, which, I submit, based on the Bosnia precedent, was the KLA's
> real goal rather than any realistic expectation of victory on the
> battlefield. In every respect, it has been a stunningly successful strategy.
>
> Fourth, the Clinton Administration's claim that NATO resorted to force only
> after diplomacy failed is a flat lie. As I pointed out in a paper issued by
> the Policy Committee in August of last year, the military planning for
> intervention was largely in place at that time, and all that was lacking was
> a suitable pretext. The Holbrooke-Milosevic agreement of October 1998 -- to
> which the KLA was not a party -- mandated a partial Serb withdrawal, during
> which the KLA occupied roughly half of Kosovo and cleansed! dozens of
> villages of their Serb inhabitants. Any reaction on the Serb side, however,
> risked NATO bombing.
>
> Finally, the Rambouillet process cannot be considered a negotiation under any
> normal definition of the word: A bunch of lawyers at the State Department
> write up a 90-page document and then push it in front of the parties and say:
> " Sign it. And if you (one of the parties) sign it and he (the other party)
> doesn't then we'll bomb him." And of course, when they said that, Secretary
> Albright and the State Department knew that one of the parties would not, and
> could not, sign the agreement. Why? Because -- as has received far too little
> attention from our supposedly inquisitive media -- it provided for NATO
> occupation of not just Kosovo but of all of Yugoslavia (Serbia and
> Montenegro) under Paragraph 8 of Appendix B: "8. NATO personnel shall enjoy,
> together with their vehicles, vessels, aircraft, and equipment, free and
> unrestricted passage and unimpeded access through out the FRY [i.e., the
> Federal Republic of Yugoslavia], including associated air space and
> territorial waters. This shall include, but not be limited to, the right of
> bivouac, maneuver, billet, and utilization of any areas or facilities as
> required for support, training, and operations."
>
> I have it on good authority that one senior Administration official told
> media at Rambouillet (under embargo) "We intentionally set the bar too high
> for the Serbs to comply. They need some bombing, and that's what they are
> going to get." In short, Rambouillet was just Albright's charade to get to
> where we are now: a bombing campaign. Their big mistake was, they thought
> their splendid little war would have been over long before now. It's all
> happened just as they planned, except the last part: Milosevic has refused to
> run up the white flag.
>
> Fifth, nobody can doubt there are serious atrocities being committed in
> Kosovo by Milosevic's forces -- though the extent and specifics of the
> reports that the media (as in Bosnia) treats as established fact are open to
> question and have been characterized by Agence France Presse (4/31) as on
> occasion being "confused, contradictory, and sometimes plain wrong." For the
> Administration and NATO, however, it does not appear to detract from their
> propaganda value that "reports coming from NATO and US officials appear often
> as little more than regurgitation of unconfirmed information from the" KLA.
>
> I have in mind, for example, the report for a time being peddled by Jamie
> Rubin, among others, that some 100,000 Albanian men had been herded into the
> Pristina sports stadium until a reporter actually went to the stadium and
> found it empty. At the same time, we should not doubt that a lot more
> civilians, both Serb and Albanian are being killed by NATO than we are
> willing to admit as the air strikes are increasingly directed against what
> are euphemistically called "infrastructure" -- i.e., civilian -- targets.
> Some Albanian refugees say they are fleeing the Serbs, others NATO's bombs.
> The Clinton Administration has vainly tried to claim that all the bloodshed
> since March 24 has been Milosevic's fault, insisting that the offensive would
> have taken place even if NATO had not bombed, but I find that argument
> unconvincing. After the failure of the Rambouillet talks and the breakdown of
> the October 1998 Milosevic-Holbrooke agreement, a Serb action against the KLA
> may have been unavoidable -- and no doubt it would have been conducted with
> the same light touch used by the Turks against the PKK or by the Sri Lankans
> against the Tamil Tigers, who, like the KLA, do not play by Marquis of
> Queensberry rules. But a full-scale drive to push out all or most ethnic
> Albanians and unleash a demographic bomb against NATO staging areas in
> Albania and Macedonia may not have been.
>
> Sixth, because of how the Administration's decision to bomb has turned Kosovo
> from a crisis into a disaster, we no longer have a Kosovo policy we have a
> KLA policy. As documented in a paper released by the Policy Committee on
> March 31, the Clinton Administration has elevated to virtually unchallenged
> status as the legitimate representative of the Kosovo Albanian people a
> terrorist group about which there are very serious questions as to its
> criminal activities particularly with regard to the drug trade and as to
> radical Islamic influences, including Osama bin Ladin and the Iranians.
> Advocates of U.S. assistance to the KLA, such as the Heritage Foundation,
> point out that based on the experience of aiding the mujahedin in
> Afghanistan, we can use our help as a leverage for "reforming" the KLA's
> behavior. However, I would ask which radical group of any description, either
> in Afghanistan (where we could at least claim the vicissitudes of the Cold
> War justified the risks), or the Izetbegovic regime in Bosnia, or, on the
> same principle, the Castro regime in Cuba or the Sandinistas in Nicaragua, or
> the PLO has ever genuinely abandoned its radical birthright for a mess of
> American pottage.
>
> Seventh, advocates of aid to the KLA suggest that it be contingent on
> guarantees that that organization not attack civilians and not pursue a
> greater Albania beyond Kosovo. Given the pre-1989 history of Kosovo and the
> KLA's behavior to date, the first suggestion is laughable. As for the second,
> I submit for your consideration a map from the webpage of the Albanian
> American Civic League (http://www.aacl.com/index.html), a pro-KLA group in
> the United States. It visually represents the areas claimed by the KLA,
> including not only Kosovo but other areas of southern Serbia, parts of
> Montenegro and Macedonia (including their capitals), and parts of Greece.
> When I first saw this map, which the webmaster has made considerably harder
> to print since I first referenced it in my paper, it struck a recollection of
> some thing I had seen before. It occurred to me that it is quite similar to
> one I have (printed by the State Department in 1947) of interim territorial
> arrangements during World War II. I can understand that there is an element
> of hyperbole in critics' calling NATO's air campaign "Nazi," but I fail to
> see what interest the United States has in helping to restore the
> Nazi-imposed borders of 1943 or how this helps preserve European stability.
>
> Eighth, the Clinton claim that we are hitting Milosevic and not the Serbian
> people is just cruel mockery. Politically, this bombing has solidified his
> position as he never could have done on his own. The Clinton Administration
> repeatedly rebuffed initiatives by the Serbian opposition for support against
> Milosevic, most recently by a direct meeting with Madeleine Albright by the
> Serbian Orthodox bishop of Kosovo, His Grace ARTEMIJE, in which he appealed
> for an initiative that would have strengthened moderate forces on both sides,
> begun genuine negotiations (in place of the Rambouillet farce), and weakened
> Milosevic. (I have copies of this proposal here today.) Predictably, that
> appeal fell on deaf ears. But this Administration cannot say it was not
> warned.
>
> Ninth, the Administration's "humanitarian" justification for this war the
> contention that this is about returning Albanian refugees to their homes is
> rank hypocrisy. Many commentators have noted that the Administration had
> turned a blind eye to the cleansing of hundreds of thousands of Serbs from
> the Krajina in 1995. This is not quite accurate. They did not turn a blind
> eye, they actively abetted the Croatian Army's "Operation Storm" with
> mercenary retired U.S. military consultants to provide training and
> operational planning under the guise of "democracy training." Indeed, there
> is evidence that U.S. assistance to the eradication of the Krajina Serbs may
> have included air strikes and psy-ops, but to my knowledge no member of our
> intrepid Fourth Estate has yet seen fit to look into it.
>
> Tenth, the notion that Milosevic is nationalist bent on creating a "Greater
> Serbia" is nonsense. Milosevic -- unlike the equally thuggish Franjo Tudjman
> and Alija Izetbegovic -- is an opportunist, who likely would have been more
> than willing to sell out Kosovo as he did the Serbs of Krajina and parts of
> Bosnia, if the Clinton /Albright policy had not been so completely
> incompetent as to paint him into corner where he had to stand and fight. As
> for Greater Serbia -- as opposed to Greater Croatia or Greater Albania --
> it's all in the definitions. The only consistent rule in the break-up of
> Titoist Yugoslavia is that the Serbs, the only constituent nationality that
> gave up their own national state to create Yugoslavia, have alone been
> regarded as having no legitimate interest in how it broke up. One the one
> hand, Serb minorities in other republics were expected to accept as
> authoritative Tito's borders or be regarded as "aggressors" for wishing to
> remain in the state in which they had up until them been living. On the other
> hand, Kosovo, a region that was part of Serbia even before Yugoslavia was
> created, is up for grabs. The double standard is breathtaking.
>
> So what are we left with? The Clinton Administration's blunder has done
> nothing but harm American interests and those of everybody else concerned. It
> has harmed the Albanian refugees, making an already bad situation much worse;
> harmed an unknown number of innocent civilians, both Serbian and Albanian,
> killed or injured by our bombing; harmed any prospects of political reform in
> Serbia that would remove Milosevic from power; harmed the U.S. security
> posture, as our forces around the world have been stripped down to devote
> resources to Kosovo; harmed the already fragile stability of neighboring
> states and the region as a whole; and harmed our relationship with Russia,
> which should be among our first priorities -- having vindicated every lie the
> Soviet Union ever told about NATO's aggressive intentions. And the harm grows
> worse every day.
>
> The question before us is finding an honorable exit. Some suggest turning the
> current disaster into complete catastrophe by sending in NATO ground troops
> under premises as faulty as those that led to the air war. Arming and
> training the KLA would be similarly ill-advised. That leaves pointlessly
> extending the air war -- or looking for a way out, a diplomatic solution. I
> will let Rep. Weldon describe his proposal as outlined in House Concurrent
> Resolution 99 which seems to me the best idea on the table. I would add only
> one thing: we need to stop the bombing as soon as possible. If what you are
> doing is making things worse, stop what you're doing. If you have mistakenly
> put gasoline on a fire instead of water don't pour on more.
>
> Some will suggest that quitting while we're behind would harm American and
> NATO's credibility and would be a victory for Milosevic. But to a large
> extent, that damage has already been done. As for NATO, what has been harmed
> so far is less NATO's commitment to its collective defense mission under
> Article 5 of the North Atlantic Treaty which has never been at stake in
> Kosovo than what President Clinton has called the "new NATO" and Prime
> Minister Blair a "new internationalism," which is nowhere provided for in the
> Treaty. What would, and should, collapse is the misguided effort to transform
> NATO from a defensive alliance into a regional peacekeeping organization, a
> mini-U.N. with "out-of-area" responsibilities, a certain road to more Bosnias
> and more Kosovos down the line. That mission would lose its credibility,
> fatally so, and so it should. The Clinton Administration's incompetent policy
> in Kosovo has had one small benefit: it has exposed fact that last year, when
> the Senate gave its advice and consent to expansion of NATO's membership, it
> also approved expansion of NATO's mission. If the Clinton Administration and
> NATO are successful in Kosovo, not only will the principle of state
> sovereignty in the face of an out-of-control international bureaucracy be
> fatally compromised, we can expect (and indeed some observers already have
> started to set out the case for) new and even more dangerous adventures of
> this sort elsewhere, notably in the Caucasus.
>
> Finally, I have no confidence that the Clinton Administration is ready to
> take the rational way out offered by Rep. Weldon and his colleagues. Indeed,
> rational people would not have committed the blunders to date nor would they
> have continued to compound them. All signs indicate that President Clinton,
> Secretary Albright, and their "Third Wave" European cronies of the Tony Blair
> stripe are treating this not as a policy problem but as a political problem.
>
> Their attitude, as it was during the impeachment crisis, is "we'll just have
> to win then, won't we" -- "winning" meaning not a successful policy or even
> winning the war, but winning the propaganda war: an exercise in media spin,
> polls, and focus groups. As Madeleine Albright suggested last year, the
> leader of some countries she mentioned, Serbia among them . . . try to grab
> the truth and leash it like a dog, ration it like bread, or mold it like
> clay. Their goal is to create their own myths, conceal their own blunders,
> direct resentments elsewhere and instill in their people a dread of change.
>
> However true that description is of Slobodan Milosevic, Madame Secretary
> should look in the mirror. No, this war is not about American interests but
> about vindicating the intelligence of Madeleine Albright and the good word of
> Bill Clinton.
>
> The door to an honorable exit is clearly marked. The question is how to
> induce this Administration to take it.