Some six months ago I wrote a column for Antiwar.com about an essay Timothy Garton Ash had contributed to the New York Review of Books in which he smugly celebrated the outcome of NATO’s war on Yugoslavia. The past year has not been kind to the champions of NATO. Just about every claim the West’s propagandists made to justify NATO’s seizure of Kosovo has been shown to be a lie. There was no humanitarian crisis in Kosovo in March 1999; the Kosovo Albanian flight across the border began after the launch of the NATO bombing; the Serbs never resorted to "genocide"; NATO bombing inflicted a lot of civilian, but virtually no military, damage; NATO rule has resulted in the ethnic cleansing of Serbs. Confronted by such unpalatable facts, the humanitarian terrorists can respond in one of two ways. They can say, first, that they knew all along that the stories of Serb atrocities were made up. They were a necessary lie, they would argue, concocted for the purpose of justifying NATO’s attack to a public ignorant of geopolitical intricacies. The objective had never been to rescue "persecuted" Kosovo Albanians. It was always about securing the Balkans for NATO in preparation for the West’s drive into Central Asia. Since you cannot talk about such things in public you have to invent a "Hitler" committing dastardly deeds, testing our patience, and causing havoc and mayhem wherever he goes. However, this is a dangerous strategy. Admitting NATO was lying all along will make it hard to pull it off a second time. There is a second, safer option: Just go on brazenly repeating every single NATO lie and count on wearing your opponents down. A lie repeated often enough does indeed eventually become accepted as truth.

This is the strategy Garton Ash adopts in the current issue of the New York Review of Books. In an essay entitled "Kosovo: Was It Worth It?" he devotes thousands upon thousands of tedious words to reassuring us that the only thing wrong with "humanitarian intervention" is that it is…well, too humanitarian. Our rulers are simply too well intentioned for their own good. It is hard to come across a piece of writing as intellectually dishonest, as complacent, as ludicrously implausible, as obsequious towards the powerful as Garton Ash’s. To top it off his essay is filled with observations of staggering banality. We learn, for instance, that "Unless we were there, we will never know what it was like to be there." And that "The world-historical reflections of a Nobel Prize winner prove more ephemeral than the hurried news story of a nineteen-year-old reporter." It is heartening to learn also that "With the openness of modern democracies, there seems to be little of significance that does not get into the press, one way or another, and usually sooner rather than later." He writes about the "eerily silent images from video cameras mounted on the noses of NATO’s high-tech guided missiles show the very window or doorframe the missile is about to hit." Gosh! Garton Ash does not seem as fascinated with what it was like to stand in the doorframe "the missile is about to hit."

The essay is so ripe with absurdities that it is hard to select just one particularly egregious example of Garton Ashism. But it is hard to top his account of the infamous Appendix B episode. Appendix B was the bit in the Rambouillet Accords that was to give NATO the unconditional right to move freely all over Yugoslavia. The Serbs, not surprisingly, rejected this demand. The negotiations in France abruptly came to an end. And NATO launched its onslaught. Here is Garton Ash’s account: "Conspiracy theorists [argue] that the American Satan was, in Rambouillet, making Milosevic an offer that he had to refuse. Their prime evidence – Exhibit A, so to speak – is Appendix B. This is an extraordinary demand to make of any sovereign state….But as a matter of historical record, all the senior Western negotiators I have spoken to, including [Richard] Holbrooke, [Christopher] Hill, and Robin Cook, agree that the Serb side at Rambouillet, and Milosevic in the final showdown with Holbrooke and Hill, did not even raise Appendix B as an obstacle to an otherwise achievable agreement. In short: Appendix B may have been arrogant and foolish, but it was not a cause of the war." First of all, America’s leaders have openly boasted that at Rambouillet they were making demands so outrageous the Serbs were bound to reject them. The United States just wanted to get the bombing underway. It is hard to see any sovereign State accepting foreign military occupation. Second, it is a matter of historical record that Appendix B was slipped in by the United States at the last minute and the Serbs immediately said no. Garton Ash simply ignores this and, instead, invokes the self-serving lies of Holbrooke and Cook. Note, however, his weasly words: The Serbs "did not even raise Appendix B as an obstacle to an otherwise achievable agreement." What does this mean? That an agreement was achievable at Rambouillet? If so, who balked, and why? That NATO was making demands even more humiliating than Appendix B? If so, what were they? Moreover, if Garton Ash himself is ready to concede that Appendix B was "arrogant and foolish," then the Serbs were surely right to reject it. Yet their punishment was to be bombed. Garton Ash is tottering on the verge of undermining NATO’s case for bombing.

Realizing the peril towards which he is heading, he cuts off this line of thought very quickly. "It was not a cause of the war," he asserts. What was then? "We don’t know." It is never a good idea to reject a plausible theory in favor of no theory at all. Ignoring verifiable matters of fact, Garton Ash starts speculating about matters he has not the slightest ideas about: Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic’s mind. His speculations are particularly unwarranted, as he has proudly eschewed any attempt to talk to anyone in the Yugoslav Government, let alone anyone close to Milosevic. "NATO’s threat did not seem to him credible. He had called the West’s bluff so many times before. He reckoned the Americans might bomb for a few days and then give up, as they had with Iraq in December 1998. There was a good chance that the coalition of NATO member states, recently expanded to nineteen, would not stay the course. ‘I can stand death – lots of it – but you can’t," he told the German foreign minister, Joschka Fischer, shortly before the bombing began. Surely the Greeks – Orthodox sympathizers with the Serbs – would call a halt? Or the Hungarians. Or the French."

Here we are entering the bizarre world of the armchair warriors. The world is apparently filled with states, which though incapable of inflicting any damage on the United States, are, for some reason forever calling our bluff. Why they should assume that they can with impunity provoke a power that can wipe them off the face of the earth several hundred times over is anybody’s guess. Certainly the United States has in the past shown little reluctance about using considerable force against small states. To back up his theory, Garton Ash quotes something Milosevic is supposed to have said to Joschka Fischer. That Fischer may not exactly be the most be reliable source given his enthusiasm for the bombing is not a thought Garton Ash would dare entertain. Our rulers’ words must never be doubted.