[I missed this when it came out. But it's never too late to piss on his grave. She may bend the stick a bit the other way, but surely in this case the weight has all been on one side.]
http://www.counterpunch.org/johnstone12152010.html
December 15, 2010
Question of the Day
Holbrooke or Milosevic: Who is the Greater Murderer?
By DIANA JOHNSTONE
It is usually considered good form to avoid sharp criticism of someone
who has just died. But Richard Holbrooke himself set a striking example
of the breach of such etiquette. On learning of the death in prison of
Slobodan Milosevic, Holbrooke did not hesitate to describe him as a
"monster" comparable to Hitler and Stalin.
This was rank ingratitude, considering that Holbrooke owed his greatest
career success - the 1995 Dayton Accords that ended the civil war in
Bosnia-Herzegovina - almost entirely to Milosevic. This was made quite
clear in his memoir To End a War (Random House, 1998).
But Holbrooke's greatest skill, made possible by media complicity, was
to dress up reality in a costume favorable to himself.
The Dayton Peace Accords were presented as a heroic victory for peace
extracted by the brilliant Holbrooke from a reluctant Milosevic, who
had to be "bombed to the negotiating table" by the United States. In
reality, the U.S. government was fully aware that Milosevic was eager
for peace in Bosnia to free Serbia from crippling economic sanctions.
It was the Bosnian Muslim leader Alija Izetbegovic who wanted to keep
the war going, with U.S. military help.
In reality, the U.S. bombed the Serbs in order to get Izetbegovic to
the negotiating table. And the agreement reached in the autumn of 1995
was not very different from the agreement reached in March 1992 by the
three ethnic groups under European Community auspices, which could have
prevented the entire civil war, if it had not been sabotaged by
Izetbegovic, who withdrew his agreement with the encouragement of the
then U.S. ambassador Warren Zimmermann. In short, far from being the
great peacemaker in the Balkans, the United States first encouraged the
Muslim side to fight for its goal of a centralized Bosnia, and then
sponsored a weakened federated Bosnia - after nearly four years of
bloodshed which left the populations bereft and embittered.
The real purpose of all this, as Holbrooke made quite clear in To End a
War, was to demonstrate that Europeans could not manage their own vital
affairs and that the United States remained the "indispensable nation".
His book also made it clear that the Muslim leaders were irritatingly
reluctant to end war short of total victory, and that only the
readiness of Milosevic to make concessions saved the Dayton talks from
failure -- allowing Holbrooke to be proclaimed a hero.
The functional role of the Holbrooke's diplomacy was to prove that
diplomacy, as carried out by Europeans, was bound to fail. His victory
was a defeat for diplomacy. The spectacle of bombing plus Dayton was
designed to show that only the threat or application of U.S. military
might could end conflicts.
Milosevic had hoped that his concessions would lead to peace and
reconciliation with the United States. As it happened, his only reward
for handing Holbrooke the victory of his career was to have his country
bombed by NATO in 1999 in order to wrest from Serbia the province of
Kosovo and prepare Milosevic's own fall from office. Holbrooke played a
prominent role in this scenario, suddently posing shoeless in a tent in
the summer of 1998 for a photo op seated among armed Albanian
secessionists which up to then had been characterized by the State
Department as "terrorists", and shortly thereafter announcing to
Milosevic that Serbia would be bombed unless he withdrew security
forces from the province, in effect giving it to the ex-terrorists
transformed by the Holbrooke blessing into freedom fighters.
In his long career from Vietnam to Afghanistan, Holbrooke was active on
many fronts. In 1977, after Indonesia invaded East Timor and set about
massacring the people of that former Portuguese colony, Holbrooke was
dispatched by the United States supposedly to promote "human rights"
but in reality to help arm the Suharto dictatorship against the East
Timorese. Sometimes the government is armed against rebels, sometimes
rebels are armed against the government, but despite appearances of
contradiction, what is consistent throughout is the cynical
exploitation and exacerbation of tragic local conflicts to extend U.S.
imperial power throughout the world.
Holbrooke and Milosevic were born in the same year, 1941. When
Milosevic died in 2006, Holbrooke gave a long statement to the BBC
without a single syllable of human kindness. "This man wrecked the
Balkans," said Holbrooke.
"He was a war criminal who caused four wars, over 300,000 deaths,
2.5million homeless. Sometimes monsters make the biggest impacts on
history - Hitler and Stalin - and such is the case with this
gentleman."
Holbrooke presented himself as goodness dealing with evil for a worthy
cause. When negotiating with Milosevic, "you're conscious of the fact
that you're sitting across the table from a monster whose role in
history will be terrible and who has caused so many deaths."
Who was the monster? Nobody, including at the Hague tribunal where he
died for lack of medical treatment, has ever actually proved that
Milosevic was responsible for the tragic deaths in the wars of Yugoslav
disintegration. But Holbrooke was never put on trial for all the deaths
in Vietnam, East Timor, Afghanistan, Iraq and, yes, former Yugoslavia,
which resulted at least in part from the U.S. policies he carried out.
From his self-proclaimed moral heights, Holbrooke judged the Serbian
leader as an opportunist without political convictions, neither
communist nor nationalist, but simply "an opportunist who sought power
and wealth for himself."
In reality, there has never been any proof that Milosevic sought or
obtained wealth for himself, whereas Holbrooke was, among many other
things, a vice chairman of Credit Suisse First Boston, managing
director of Lehman Brothers, vice chairman of the private equity firm
Perseus LLC, and a member of the board of directors of AIG, the
American International Group, at a time when, according to Wikipedia,
"the firm engaged in wildly speculative credit default insurance
schemes that may cost the taxpayer hundreds of billions to prevent AIG
from bringing down the entire financial system."
Milosevic was on trial for years without ever being to present his
defense before he died under troubling circumstances. Holbrooke found
that outcome perfectly satisfying: "I knew as soon as he reached The
Hague that he'd never see daylight again and I think that justice was
served in a weird way because he died in his cell, and that was the
right thing to do."
There are many other instances of lies and deceptions in Holbrooke's
manipulation of Balkan woes, as well as his totally cynical
exploitation of the tragedies of Vietnam, East Timor, Iraq and
Afghanistan. But still, his importance should not be overstated. Moral
monsters do not always make a great impact on history, when they are
merely the vain instruments of a bureaucratic military machine running
amok.
Diana Johnstone is the author of Fools Crusade: Yugoslavia, NATO and
Western Delusions.She can be reached at diana.josto at yahoo.fr