PORTRAITS OF
THE WAR PARTY: WILLIAM JEFFERSON CLINTON
The
disadvantages of having a sociopath in the White House come to the fore
in times of war. George Stephanopoulos reveals in his recent book, All
Too Human, that when the Rapist ordered the bombing of civilian targets
in Somalia, he went into a veritable frenzy of blood-lust: "'We're
not inflicting pain on these fuckers,' said Clinton, softly at first.
'When people kill us, they should be killed in greater numbers.' Then,
with his face reddening, his voice rising, and his fist pounding his thigh,
he leaned into Tony [Lake, then his naitonal security advisor], as if
it was his fault. 'I believe in killing people who try to hurt you. And
I can't believe we're being pushed around by these two-bit pricks."
When the
Yugos shot down the mighty Stealth, and captured two American soldiers,
Clinton's literally went ballistic. The nightly air attacks on Belgrade
and other major cities immediately increased in intensity, leaving little
doubt that Clinton really does believe in killing those "who
try to hurt you." A suspiciously large number of people on Clinton's
domestic enemies' list learned this lesson the hard way -- and now the
Serbian people are learning it, much to their sorrow.
LIBERATION THROUGH
DESTRUCTION
They
are bombing downtown Belgrade again: they hit a civilian target, a hospital
and a government building. Thousands stood on the last bridge left standing
over the Danube, daring NATO to bomb. We have the first pictures of Pristina
since the war began: it looks like Dresden after the Allied carpet-bombing:
a bank, a post office, scores of buildings with absolutely no conceivable
military function were all destroyed in the NATO bombardment. A residential
area was razed to the ground. The "liberation" of Kosovo has
begun.
PORTRAITS OF THE
WAR PARTY:
THE DO-GOODERS
In
the new era of "humanitarian" imperialism, Amnesty International
and a constellation of "human rights" activists have become
the psywar adjunct of NATO warplanes. Early in the war, a delegation of
do-gooders and international busy-bodies was summoned to Washington by
Harold Kohl, assistant secretary of state for "democracy, human rights,
and labor." The group, including Amnesty's chief honcho Dr. William
Schulz, was told that the administration fully expected them to be in
the vanguard of the war effort on the home front. Kohl held out the prospect
of a meeting with Madeleine Albright, and the assembled one-time peaceniks
fell quickly and even slavishly into line, calling for stepped up "military
intelligence operations" -- not aerial reconnaissance but on the
ground. This is but a very short half-step away from openly calling for
the invasion of Serbia, and the beginning of the ground war. Such groups
as "Human Rights Watch" are only watching the Serbians: no Albanian
or Muslim abuses or ethnic cleansings have ever been recorded in their
annals of war crimes committed in Bosnia and Kosovo. There is only one
villain, according to these "human rights" activists, and that
is the Serbians; the effect if not the intent of their propaganda is to
demonize the Serbs as inherently barbaric. This won't be the first time
Amnesty International's integrity has been compromised by its slavish
repetition of U.S. government propaganda during wartime. During the first
Gulf War, back in August 1990, representatives of Amnesty International
testified in congressional hearings that Iraqi soldiers had murdered over
300 Kuwaiti babies when Saddam Hussein's Republican Guards took Kuwait
City: they claimed that the soldiers had barged into a hospital and killed
the infants by ripping them out of their incubators and dashing their
heads on the floor. It wasn't until well after Gulf War I was over that
the completely phony story was exposed as a lie, and a crude one at that.
How long before we find out the same about the atrocity stories that are
fueling this war?
NO GOOD DEED
GOES UNPUNISHED
A
great deal of the humanitarian aid being provided by the U.S. government
and international relief organizations is disappearing into Albania without
a trace. Representatives of Italian charitable organizations say that
large shipments of blankets, tinned goods, and drinking water, and other
items failed to reach their destination. Last weekend, 12,000 mattresses,
18,000 tons of clothing, and 300 boxes of medicine were lost to criminal
gangs and the KLA -- a very fine distinction there -- who sell them to
buy arms. Shipments without the required paperwork are not opened, by
orders of the Albanian bureaucracy, and wind up stockpiled in government
storehouses.
COCKBURN ON TARGET
The
following item appeared in Counterpunch, the newsletter put out
by idiosyncratic leftist Alexander Cockburn and Jeffrey St. Clair: "A
quiz: Which US rep said: 'At this point I support the NATO sponsored air-strikes
that are currently taking place." And which US rep said: 'This is
not a proud moment for America . . . as bad as the violence is towards
the ethnic Albanians in Kosovo, our ability to police and stop all ethnic
fighting around the world is quite limited, and the efforts are quite
simply not permitted under constitutional law.' Yes, the first is from
the brass-lunged armchair bomber of Vermont, Bernard Sanders and the second
from Ron Paul, libertarian from Texas. How long will the long-suffering
progressives of Vermont tolerate their hypocritical rep without rebuke?"
The answer
is: a very long time. Whether Cockburn would like to acknowledge
it or not, the Left (particularly the middle-class "Green" eco-socialist
Naderite left which Sanders counts as his constituency) generally supports
Clinton's war. The German Greens are part of the German government that
is the continental anchor of the NATO alliance, and their American branch
retains even less of its original vaguely-articulated quasi-pacifism.
As liberals metamorphose into Curtis LeMay-style hawks, honest commies
like Cockburn are trampled in the Left's stampede to war. It happened
in the periods leading up to both world worlds, and it is happening again.
As conservatives come out, so to speak, as ardent advocates of peace,
an alliance of the Old Left and the Old Right is in the cards.
OUT BY MAYDAY!
"I
think we should tell our [NATO] partners, 'Look, we've expended, almost
exhausted our resources. Now on May 1st, we're going to be out of there
and then you take over from there," said Senator James M. Inhofe
(R-Okla.) on Sunday. This sentiment was widely reflected in the vote in
the House, where three-quarters of the Republicans voted against the bombing,
and in the Senate, where two-thirds turned thumbs down on Clinton's war.
But how many will stand up to the tremendous political pressures now being
brought to bear on every one of them by the well-organized and well-funded
interventionist lobby? The Junior Bush is ambivalent, his finger in the
wind, while Lizzie Dole is a confirmed but cautious interventionist, less
vocal than her husband (whose efforts on behalf of the KLA's cause is
surpassed only by his enthusiasm for Viagra). Aside from Senator John
McCain, the rest of the Republican presidential pack is reluctant to jump
into the Balkan quagmire, with Buchanan the most eloquent. Now if only
the Republican rank-and-file is as "pro-life" when it comes
to opposing the mass murder of this futile war as they are when it comes
to preserving the right to life of the unborn.
EMPIRE OF THE
GOOD
The
militant do-goodism that animates the new imperialism was touted by Clinton
in a speech promoting a new federal law outlawing so-called 'hate-crimes'
against favored victim groups. Citing a pattern of "primitive hatreds"
extending from Kosovo to Wyoming, the President urged Congress to add
sexual orientation to the growing list of groups protected by existing
laws against hate crimes. Aside from misconstruing and distorting the
history of the Serbian–Albanian dispute, characterizing the Yugos
as apostles of "hate" makes it okay to hate them. "America,"
says Clinton, "will not be able to be a force for good abroad unless
we are good at home." It is now considered a "hate crime"
for Christians to fight for their homeland against Iranian-backed Muslim
terrorists. This is a war for political correctness, and that is the key
to understanding the swiftness with which the Left has become the vanguard
of the War Party. Shifting from Marxian economics to the dead-end of identity
politics, the American Left quickly ditched its anti-imperialist heritage
and its activists are now what we used to call "State Department
socialists," like the sainted Bernie Sanders.
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Justin
Raimondo is the editorial director of Antiwar.com. He is also the author
of Reclaiming
the American Right: The Lost Legacy of the Conservative Movement
(with an Introduction by Patrick J. Buchanan), (1993), and Into the
Bosnian Quagmire: The Case Against U.S. Intervention in the Balkans (1996).
He writes frequently for Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture.
He is the author of An Enemy of the State: The Life of Murray N. Rothbard
(forthcoming from Prometheus Books).
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