Why was it wrong to urge the Security Council and the U.S. government to lift the 'arms embargo'? Because the 'arms embargo' was merely a convenient *fiction* that was never practiced! Even the New York Times reported that this embargo business was a sham to begin with:
***** November 5, 1994, Saturday, Late Edition - Final SECTION: Section 1; Page 1; Column 3; Foreign Desk LENGTH: 1139 words HEADLINE: ARMS TRAFFICKING TO BOSNIA GOES ON DESPITE EMBARGO BYLINE: By ROGER COHEN, Special to The New York Times DATELINE: ZAGREB, Croatia, Nov. 4
Even as the United Nations discusses lifting the arms embargo on Bosnia and Herzegovina, the embargo appears to have become largely a fiction, openly flouted.
Helped by the ready availability of arms and military components in the former Soviet bloc countries and by an apparent American readiness to turn a blind eye, Croatia is now building or assembling everything from battle tanks to MIG-21 fighter aircraft and acting as the main conduit for the flood of weapons reaching Bosnia.
"What I need, I get," the Croatian Defense Minister, Gojko Susak, said in an interview. "The arms market is saturated, so saturated you would pay three times the price if you got things legally."
Mr. Susak described buying arms in countries including Poland, Bulgaria and Russia as "an open market" and said Croatia was now providing the army of the Muslim-dominated Bosnian Government with antitank weapons and ammunition for mortars, cannons and machine guns.
The effect of this increase in the arms available to the Bosnian Muslim and allied Bosnian Croat forces has been evident in the last week in two successful offensives against the long-dominant Bosnian Serbs. The first offensive burst through Serbian lines east of Bihac in the northwest; the second resulted in the capture of the town of Kupres in the west central part of the country.... *****
According to Jasminka Udovicki and Ejub Stitkovac, the Izetbegovic regime was able to buy, via Slovenia, weapons obtained on "the black market from the former Warsaw Pact countries" even before Washington brokered the Bosnian-Croat federation ("Bosnia and Hercegovina: The Second War," _Burn This House: The Making and Unmaking of Yugoslavia_).
The New York Times also reported on the shipment of arms from Iran (mostly by air) of which the U.S. government had ample evidence (to say the least). See Douglas Jehl, "U.S. Looks Away as Iran Arms Bosnia," New York Times, 15 April 1995, p. A3; and Chris Hedges, "A Secret Arms Deal between Iran and Croatia Comes to Light," New York Times, 24 April 1996, p. A1.
Also, keep in mind that the covert military aids and actions have been often conducted through nominally 'private' channels.
***** "Privatizing War: How affairs of state are outsourced to corporations beyond public control" (_The Nation_ 07/28-08/04/97)
By Ken Silverstein
The history of American foreign and military policy abounds with deception and scandal, with shadowy actors, monied interests and efforts to keep the public out of what are properly public decisions. Now those efforts have taken an unprecedented turn in scale and degree. Privatization, the process by which the responsibilities of government are transferred to unaccountable corporate hands, now occupies the halls of warmaking.
With little public knowledge or debate, the government has been dispatching private companies -- most of them with tight links to the Pentagon and staffed by retired armed forces personnel -- to provide military and police training to America's foreign allies. The government has also vastly expanded the use of private firms to support its own overseas military operations, including top-secret antidrug actions in Latin America, intelligence gathering and military assistance programs for U.S. clients.
The firms themselves are not eager to discuss their activities. Nor is the State Department's Office of Defense Trade Controls, which oversees much of the emerging field and which rejected my request for an on-the-record interview. A State Department official told me he could provide very little information even on background because of the need to protect the "proprietary information" of the companies involved (a loophole that makes the Freedom of Information Act in effect useless in this area). As a result, much information remains hidden behind government claims of secrecy or locked in the companies' accounting books.
But based on the testimony of those who will speak -- and most agreed to talk only on background or not for attribution -- it is clear that dozens of companies, ranging from a $1 billion high-tech giant like SAIC to small-scale operations run by retired Green Berets, are offering military training and related assistance to foreign governments at the bidding of the United States. "The [private training] programs are designed to further our foreign policy objectives," says a former high-level official at the Defense Intelligence Agency (D.I.A.). "If the government doesn't sanction it, the companies don't do it."
Among the big-league players are Military Professional Resources Inc. (M.P.R.I.), which is training two Balkan armies and seeks to expand into Africa; Vinnell, which trains the Saudi Arabian National Guard; and Betac, which works closely with the Pentagon's secretive Special Operations Command, which engages in covert activities in the Third World.
The corporate-government connection in such activities was given fine illustration on June 24, when the D.I.A. sponsored a closed-door symposium, "The Privatization of National Security Functions in Sub-Saharan Africa." On hand were M.P.R.I. and other U.S. private contractors, as well as Eeben Barlow, head of South Africa's notorious Executive Outcomes, which in the past few years has provided mercenaries to the governments of Angola and Sierra Leone, and Timothy Spicer of Sandline International, a British company whose hiring in January by the government of Papua New Guinea angered its army and sparked a coup. Spicer was accompanied by Sandline's U.S. representative, Bernie McCabe, a former Army Special Forces officer. The D.I.A. slapped a nonattribution policy on the event, but one participant told me, "There was a consensus among government officials and the companies that this sort of activity is going to greatly increase during the next few years."...
..."It's foreign policy by proxy," says Dan Nelson, formerly a top foreign policy adviser to Representative Richard Gephardt and now a professor at Old Dominion University. "Corporate entities are used to perform tasks that the government, for budgetary reasons or political sensitivities, cannot carry out."...
...As one Pentagon staffer told me, "Privatization is another way to reward the alumni." It's the revolving door all over again:
§ At M.P.R.I., twenty-two corporate officers are former high-ranking military figures. These include Gen. Carl Vuono, U.S. Army Chief of Staff during the invasion of Panama and the Gulf War; Gen. Ed Soyster, former head of the D.I.A.; and Gen. Frederick Kroesen, former commander of the U.S. Army in Europe.
§ Vinnell is owned by B.D.M., a Beltway megacompany controlled by the Carlyle Group, an investment firm headed by former Secretary of State James Baker, former White House budget chief Richard Darman and former Secretary of Defense Frank Carlucci. B.D.M.'s president, Philip Odeen, headed the Pentagon task force on reshaping the military for the twenty-first century.
§ Board members at SAIC have included two former defense secretaries, William Perry and Melvin Laird, and two former C.I.A. chiefs, John Deutch and Robert Gates.
For the government, privatization offers a number of advantages. In addition to providing plausible deniability about overseas entanglements, it allows Washington to shed military personnel while simultaneously retaining the capacity to influence and direct huge missions. Firms on contract can train an entire foreign army. By contrast, the Pentagon's International Military and Education Training Program (IMET) generally provides instruction to no more than a few dozen soldiers. The largest current IMET effort is in Honduras, where 266 soldiers and officers are being trained. "Private companies augment our ability to provide foreign training," says retired Lieut. Gen. Larry Skibbie, now at the American Defense Preparedness Association. "We'll see more and more of this as we continue to cut back on our uniformed forces."
When it comes to military training, the biggest player is M.P.R.I. Based in Alexandria, Virginia, the company was founded in 1987 by retired Army Gen. Vernon Lewis. A brochure boasts that M.P.R.I. -- which maintains a computer database with the names of 2,000 retired armed forces personnel -- houses "The World's Greatest Corporate Military Expertise" and has "business cells and/or field representatives at military installations across the U.S. and in overseas locations."
Last year the Bosnian government picked M.P.R.I. -- over competing bids from SAIC and B.D.M. -- to train its armed forces. The $400 million program is being paid for largely by Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Brunei and Malaysia. The stated aim of the training effort, which is being supplemented with large-scale shipments of U.S. weapons to the Bosnian Army, is to deter Serbia's better-armed military. But with Serbia's army in disarray, many observers of the region increasingly worry that a newly trained and equipped Bosnian Army will be emboldened to attack Serbian forces after international forces withdraw, as they are scheduled to do next year.
M.P.R.I. also offers advice and training to the Croatian military, a relationship that began in April 1995 at one of the most intense periods of fighting in the Balkan war. M.P.R.I. dispatched a team to Croatia, headed by a number of retired officers, including General Vuono, Gen. Richard Griffitts and Gen. Crosbie Saint, who from 1988 to 1992 commanded the U.S. Army in Europe. A State Department spokesman, John Dinger, has said that M.P.R.I. helped the Croatians "avoid excesses or atrocities in military operations." M.P.R.I.'s spokesman, the retired D.I.A. chief Ed Soyster, told me that the company merely "offered advice about the role of the army in a democratic society."
"The Croatians hope to join NATO," he added, "and if you want to join the club you have to look like the members."
Just months after M.P.R.I. went into Croatia, that nation's army -- until then bumbling and inept -- launched a series of bloody offensives against Serbian forces. Most important was Operation Lightning Storm, the assault on the Krajina region during which Serbian villages were sacked and burned, hundreds of civilians were killed and some 170,000 people were driven from their homes.
Roger Charles, a retired Marine lieutenant colonel and military researcher who has been honored for his work by the Investigative Reporters and Editors Association, is convinced that M.P.R.I. played an important role in the Krajina campaign. "No country moves from having a ragtag militia to carrying out a professional military offensive without some help," says Charles, who has closely monitored M.P.R.I.'s activities. "The Croatians did a good job of coordinating armor, artillery and infantry. That's not something you learn while being instructed about democratic values."
A Croatian liaison officer told the local press that just weeks before the offensive General Vuono held a secret top-level meeting at Brioni Island, off the coast of Croatia, with Gen. Varimar Cervenko, the architect of the Krajina campaign. In the five days preceding the attack, at least ten meetings were held between General Vuono and officers involved in the campaign.
In a sense, whether M.P.R.I. directed the Krajina campaign is secondary. "Once you provide training there's no way to control the way that the skills you've taught are used," says Loren Thompson, a military specialist at the conservative Alexis de Tocqueville Institution. Given Croatia's record in the twentieth century, he says -- chiefly its collaboration with the Nazis -- "I'm not sure you want that country to have a professional army."
M.P.R.I. denies that it has helped arm the Croatians, but it was positioned to play at least an indirect role here as well. According to a retired government official who brokers military equipment deals, Zagreb was buying weapons from a German arms dealer, Ernst Werner Glatt, until at least late last year. In the 1980s, Glatt was the favorite arms merchant of the C.I.A., which chose him to move arms to the contras in Nicaragua and the mujahedeen in Afghanistan, among others. At one point Glatt was shipping $200 million worth of weapons per year, money that allowed him to purchase a country estate in Virginia, which he named the Black Eagle, a symbol of Nazi Germany.
During this same period Soyster, now of M.P.R.I., was working at the D.I.A., which was also doling out contracts to Glatt. The latter was paid lavish sums by the D.I.A. in the 1980s to procure Soviet weapons and have them shipped to the United States, from whence they would be sent to America's proxy troops in Latin America, Asia and Africa. After Soyster retired, he and Glatt became business partners on at least one weapons deal.
M.P.R.I.'s involvement in the Balkans is a telling case of "rewarding the alumni." Lieut. Gen. James Chambers served for thirty-six years in the Air Force, including a stint as director of contingency operations in Bosnia. Following his retirement, he took a vice presidency at M.P.R.I. Gen. John Sewall, now with the company in Croatia, before his retirement had served as the Pentagon's special adviser to the Muslim-Croat federation, created in 1994 with U.S. backing. The following year, Sewall and another officer made several trips to Bosnia and Croatia. European observers believed that their mission was to offer military advice, an activity then banned under a United Nations embargo. "If they are not involved in military planning, then what are they doing there?" a French commander complained at the time. "Are we supposed to believe Sewall and his people are tourists?"...
...Congress reviews and can restrict the dispatch of Pentagon military trainers abroad. It has no authority over private trainers, who need only get a license from the State Department, a process that happens far from public view. The Pentagon is obliged to respond to inquiries, if not always forthrightly, when U.S. troops are deployed abroad. Retired generals and private companies have far more leeway in evading questions from the press or Congress. A former Congressional staffer who is familiar with the use of private military contractors described the system as a "nonsexy but far bigger Oliver North-style enterprise."
"If the D.O.D. was directly involved you'd have a whole network of Congressional offices providing oversight, even if it's not always sufficient," he says. "When you turn these tasks over to a contractor, the only oversight comes from an overworked civil servant in the federal bureaucracy."
"Privatization" is the name for this trend in foreign and military policy, but it is a rather bland word for what it signifies. Loren Thompson of the de Tocqueville Institution put the case more vividly: "The only difference between what these firms do and what mercenaries do is that the companies have gained the imprimatur of government for their actions."
Ken Silverstein is co-editor of "CounterPunch," an investigative newsletter published in Washington, D.C. Research support for this article was provided by the Investigative Fund of The Nation Institute. *****
To sum up, what's wrong about Edward Said and others urging the Security Council and Clinton to lift the 'embargo'? Their petition had the effect of *covering up* the fact that Washington had been already involved in aiding the Bosnian government and doing so covertly. The petition said something that's *completely untrue* when it asserted that the Izetbegovic regime and the Bosnian Muslims who supported it were the victims who were denied the 'right to self-defense' in the face of unilateral Serbian offensives. Thus, liberal hawks helped to project the image of "a contest between well-armed bad guys (Serbs) and badly armed or unarmed victims (Muslims), sadly ignored by the West." They manufactured the "guilt of appeasement," which was used as an argument for the NATO bombings and expansion.
Yoshie