ALARMING
PORTENTS
Where
are we going from here? Surely the Clintonians
will give us a break, at least for a few months, before
they concoct another "humanitarian" crusade,
another pretext for military intervention on some far-flung
shore? Wrong. The day negotiations with the Serbs were
concluded, reports that Mad Madeleine and her fellow "humanitarians"
in the US State Department had turned their sights on
South America were made public. The US proposal to the
Organization of American States for a multinational force
to police the Western Hemisphere was met with catcalls
from Bolivia, Chile, Colombia, Ecuador, Peru, and Venezuela,
but the concept is being pushed hard: according to Victor
Marrero, the US representative to the OAS, "We never
hoped that the proposal would be approved at this session,
we just wanted to put the matter on the table for discussion.
But this topic is not dead." The June
9 edition of Colombia's El Tiempo newspaper
described the proposal as a cooperative venture by a "group
of friendly countries" linked economically and politically
to intervene in the internal affairs of Latin American
countries in order to "preserve democracy."
FARC
YOU
The
first target of this South American version of NATO is
likely to be Colombia, the seat of the powerful drug lords
as well as the site of no less than two guerrilla insurrections.
Colombia's El Espectador reports that the US State
Department has devised a plan to contain the Colombian
guerrillas by putting forces into neighboring countries,
and beefing up military aid to local satraps. A key aspect
of the plan is to smear the Fuerzas Armadas Revolutionarias
de Colombia (FARC) and the Ejercito de Liberacion Nacional
(ELN), the two Marxist factions, as "narco-guerrillas."
What nerve! Here is the great patron and protector of
the Kosovo Liberation Army, the biggest heroin dealer
in Europe, plotting to label a pathetic ragtag "army"
in the jungles of Colombia "drug lords" as a
pretext for annihilating them. The linchpin of this strategy
of stigmatizing the guerrillas as "narco-terrorists"
is to seek extradition of alleged drug-dealing Marxists
to the US for trial. But what about those other
drug-dealing Marxists to whose tender mercies we have
delivered Kosovo?
REPUBLICANS
CAVE
The
Republican
attempt to defund the Kosovo operation failed only
because the leadership sold out at the last minute. They
believed Clinton when he said he would come to Congress
for authorization of the expenditures, and so the
House voted – 270-155 – to remove a provision
from the military appropriations bill that would have
barred any tax dollars from being spent on the Kosovo
adventure after September 30. Yet despite Clinton's letter
to Congress conceding this point, and pledging that this
new responsibility would be funded through "emergency"
spending bills, and not come out of the defense budget,
144 Republicans still voted "nay" in a gesture
of emphatic dissent. Whether the mission hurt military
readiness in other areas was not their chief concern:
anti-interventionist Republicans like Rep. Mark Souder
(R-Indiana) challenged the "victory" guff of
the administration's spinmeisters. "This is certainly
no victory," he said in a speech on the House floor.
"After eleven weeks of bombing, we have less
world stability than when we started. After eleven weeks
of bombing, we have a settlement that we probably could
have achieved at the beginning. If this is a victory,
what would a defeat look like?" The heroic Rep. Tillie
Fowler, who has been consistently good and obviously well-informed
on this issue, pointedly observed that "NATO forces
will be defending Belgrade's sovereignty over Kosovo –
a position which is directly at odds with the KLA's paramount
goal of independence." This war, far from being over,
is just beginning – and if the GOP puts its imprimatur
on it, the party will share in Clinton's ignominy.
DRINKING
IT IN
An
Associated Press story about the reaction in Washington
to the war's end [Sandra
Sobrieraj, "Gloat for Clinton, sour grapes for Republicans,"
June 10] describes "the beginnings of a grin"
on Clinton's face as he exulted in the news, and goes
on to say: "Blocks away, at the Ronald Reagan International
Trade Center, Defense Secretary William Cohen drank in
the applause of conventioneering defense contractors and
called it 'all in all, a fine morning.'" Yes, a fine
morning for the war profiteers, who will do a bang-up
business as a result of Operation Allied Force: feeding,
clothing, outfitting, supplying, and keeping the "KFOR"
(Kosovo Force) army of occupation from going mad will
take the full-time efforts of an entire industry, not
to mention replacing all the ordnance lost in thousands
of air sorties. Certainly the "drinking" metaphor
is appropriate here, conjuring as it does an image of
pigs with their snouts buried deep in the public trough,
sucking up tax dollars at a fantastic and ever-increasing
rate.
MAD
COW DISEASE
A
more unsightly couple has yet to be seen than Joschka
Fischer, the ex-Commie Foreign Minister of Germany, now
a leading light of the German Greens – a Teutonic
albeit toned-down version of Tony Blair – and Madeleine
Albright. In Germany for a meeting of the G-8 foreign
ministers, Albright celebrated with her fellow "humanitarians"
at a restaurant that specialized in German chocolate.
Fischer turned to his dinner companion and remarked: "Well,
they called this 'Madeleine's War," he said, "and
you won it!" That this mad cow is being lionized
as the greatest strategic mind since Metternich is more
dangerous than anyone knows; for an unstable personality
is bound to believe it. Most people with Napoleonic complexes
are locked safely away behind the doors of America's asylums,
getting the treatment they need to keep their illness
in check: but when the patient is the Secretary of State
of the world's only superpower, then all of us are in
very big trouble.
VALEDICTORY
Since
March 26, at least five days a week, this War Diary has
exposed the lies, mocked the pretensions, and unmasked
the program and methods of the War Party. Writing it has
not been an altogether unpleasant task, and I face the
end of it with mixed feelings. On the one hand, I am glad
that the bombing has stopped, and the suffering of the
Serbian people has been lightened if not entirely lifted.
On the other hand, I will miss the regularity of it, the
discipline required for a five-day (and all too often
six-day) weekly schedule that shaped my days and the overriding
theme that formed my thoughts and my work. But the war
is ended, for now – and so is the Wartime Diary.
This, I am sad – and also quite glad – to say
will be the last entry.
A
FINAL QUESTION
What
started out as a kind of therapy, a means for me to express
my anger and revulsion at the brazen hypocrisy and insufferable
arrogance of the NATO-crats, ends in contemplation of
the meaning of it all. What, exactly, was the point
of this war?
THE
WRONG ANSWER
This is a question that seemed
to baffle many, not only the average American but also
the antiwar movement, or at least the remnants of that
movement which did not capitulate to the siren song of
"humanitarian" interventionism. There was much
discussion of this in the interminable antiwar coalition
meetings, and I had many long conversations with some
of my new friends about the causes and ultimate consequences
of this war. Naturally, the Marxists point to the profit
motive, and the desire to "exploit" Yugoslavia
economically: for them, this war is an indictment of what
they imagine to be the capitalist system. Imperialism,
in their view, is monopoly capitalism at the end of its
tether. There are many grave problems with this simplistic
analysis, the most obvious (if not the most important)
one being that the strict embargo imposed by the Allies
forbids all investment in that country, and this is likely
to remain the case at least as long as Slobodan Milosevic
remains in power. If the evil top-hatted capitalists wanted
to seize control of the Yugoslav economy, that would have
been easy enough: all they had to do was invest in it.
Instead, they bombed it out of existence, and now there
is nothing left to "exploit." So much for the
"exploitation" theory.
FINALE
The
clear lesson of the first European war in the post-Cold
War era is that the push is on for a world government
dominated by an Anglo-American alliance. Against the multi-polar
model of world politics, which seemed to spring back into
existence when the Berlin Wall fell, these "Atlanticists"
are fighting for a mono-polar world – in effect,
a world government. Americans are marching into Kosovo
under the command of a British general, and in the name
of a transnational agency whose authority is far removed
from any elected body. An army of acronyms – NATO,
OSCE, EU, UN, – has declared war on all the nations
of the world, on the idea of national sovereignty itself.
We have heard talk of a "New World Order" before,
notably in the first Gulf War against Iraq, but in Yugoslavia
and especially Kosovo and Bosnia, we are witnessing the
first unveiling of the globalist project, not in theory
but in practice. If you want to grasp the true significance
of this war, and the world order it claims to inaugurate,
recall the smoking ruins of the Serbian television station,
with the bloody limbs of slaughtered journalists sticking
out of the steaming rubble. Remember the pious rationalizations
of the NATO-crats who exulted in the destruction of these
centers of "hate speech." In the world they
are preparing for us, only speech approved by the NATO-crats
will be allowed on the airwaves: disrupters of the ideological
peace will be bombed into submission, and force-fed CNN
and MTV twenty-four hours a day. Narcotized by the international
monoculture, and tyrannized by the mono-polar politics
of the emerging world state, the peoples of the earth
will be held in the ever-tightening grip of a global elite,
centered in the West. This was the real motive behind
Madeleine's War, which is why so many leftists suddenly
found themselves transformed into what the Trotskyists
used to call "State Department socialists."
The age-old collectivist dream of a World State, of central
planning on a global scale, was about to come true –
and so what if the warplanes had the insignia of the NATO
countries rather than the hammer-and-sickle? Symbols aren't
important: what matters is power. Communism may
be dead and gone, but the threat of Social Democracy has
now taken its place. The Bolshevik experiment did not
pan out, but the Mensheviks – Tony Blair and the
Labor Party, the Clintonians, the German Social Democrats
and their "Green" accomplices, the Italian Party
of Democratic Socialism – have won the day in the
developed countries. Now, they want to win the world.
And who will stop them?
PORTRAITS
OF THE WAR PARTY: THE HAWK
The
scope of the globalists' ambitions is not limited to any
particular geographical area: they are likely to strike
anywhere, at any time, just to show that they can do it.
This was a major reason for the Balkan war: it was, in
an important sense, a demonstration of pure power, apart
from any strategic, economic, or geopolitical considerations.
What is happening to our world was foreseen with preternatural
clarity by the poet Robinson Jeffers, whose bitter and
slashing verses skewered the warmonger FDR and earned
the disdain of the Popular Front cultural commissars of
the war years. In "Shiva," one of his last published
poems, Jeffers conjures the spirit of pure evil that animates
the NATO-crats and the powers behind them:
There
is a hawk that is picking the birds out of our sky.
She killed the pigeons of peace and security,
She has taken honesty and confidence from nations and
men,
She is hunting the lonely heron of liberty.
She loads the arts with nonsense, she is very cunning,
Science with dreams and the state with powers to catch
them at last.
Nothing will escape her at last, flying nor running.
This is the hawk that picks out the stars' eyes.
This is the only hunter that will ever catch the wild
swan;
The prey she will take last is the wild white swan of
the beauty of things.
Then she will be alone, pure destruction, achieved and
supreme,
Empty darkness under the death-tent wings.
She will build a nest of the swan's bones and hatch
a new brood,
Hang new heavens with new birds, all be renewed.
ANNOUNCING
"BEHIND THE HEADLINES"
As
of Monday, this corner of cyberspace will be devoted to
my new column, "Behind the Headlines." Posted
at least three times a week, and more often when
necessary, the column will deal with world affairs from
a noninterventionist perspective; naturally, I will cover
events in Kosovo and the Balkans, but my purview will
be necessarily much wider. Along with the new column,
you will see some changes on this site as we make the
transition from concentrating almost exclusively on the
crisis in the Balkans to monitoring the machinations of
the New World Order crowd globally. Antiwar.com will remain
your best source of information on the policy of global
intervention that animates the foreign policy elites in
government, academia, and the media. We will keep you
informed, and up-to-date, presenting the most timely news
and the best analysis from a noninterventionist perspective.
No other website, or printed periodical, provides this
service with any degree of regularity or reliability:
as far as a central locus of anti-interventionist thought,
Antiwar.com is it. The Balkan war may – may
– be over, but given the mindset of our rulers, what
this means is that a new war is right around the corner.
We at Antiwar.com will continue to provide you with the
one weapon that can defeat the War Party, and expose the
real war criminals who need to be brought to justice:
information. While we hardly have the reach of CNN and
the warmongering press, we did manage to provide an alternative
news source to a great number of people all over the world.
We will continue to do so – and hope that you, our
readers and supporters, will stay with us. The crisis
is abated – but the specter of war haunts us as never
before. Will Jeffers' dark vision of the warhawk triumphant
become an even darker reality, or will the heron of liberty
escape her talons? In the end, it is up to us.
'Til
Monday, then, when I'll take you "Behind the Headlines"
. . .
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