Lessons of the Yugoslav War
by Alexander Cockburn
Remarks at public forum sponsored by the
Ad Hoc Coalition to Stop the U.S./NATO War in the Balkans
6/26/99

A Note from the Editor:

During the Kosovo war, I was personally involved in the San Francisco Ad Hoc Coalition to Stop the US/NATO War in the Balkans. The Coalition was dominated by leftists, of one sort or another, and especially the International Socialist Organization (ISO), a rad-lib pseudo-Trotskyist grouplet: the few independents (and me, the lone right-winger) were generally shut out of the decision-making process. However, compared to the other local coalition, (the "International Action Center") dominated by the robotic cadres of the Workers World Party (WWP), the Coalition was a sanctuary of free thought. At any rate, since so many leftists supported Clinton's criminal war against the Serbian people, the commies in the Coalition wanted to organize a debate pitting pro-intervention lefties such as Michael Lerner (editor of the unreadable Tikkun magazine) against representatives of the antiwar left. I fought for including a conservative opponent of the war as one of the debaters, and garnered support for this idea from the independents in the Coalition, but the commies packed the meeting (as always) and quashed that idea flat. So much for building a broad-based coalition and reaching out to the Great American Middle. As it turned out, Lerner cancelled at the last minute – having decided that he wasn't really for sending in the ground troops, after all – and we couldn't get anybody to defend the war on the public record. And so the leftists wound up talking to themselves, that night, as I suspect they had planned on doing all along.

On June 26, 1999, the forum took place at James Lick Middle School, with the panel consisting of Carole Seligman, of Socialist Action, Paul George, from some outfit billing itself as the Peace and Justice Center, and Alexander Cockburn, a columnist for the Nation and the author of several books – who also happens to be the witty and erudite scion of Claud Cockburn, an Irish journalist of the left in the 1930s who enjoyed the singular distinction of having been branded a British spy in the last of the Moscow show trials. His presence alone made this an event, and the auditorium was filled to capacity, with people standing in the back. Antiwar.com had a literature table, along with every leftist groupuscule under the sun. There were so many competing leftist factions selling their little newspapers, holding them aloft like little banners and calling out "get your Socialist Worker!" and "get your Bolshevik Weekly!" that they wound up selling them to each other. The ISO was all over the place, and their leaders were ebullient, smugly complacent in their belief that this would be another self-congratulatory leftist gabfest. But it didn't work out that way.

In their zeal to get a "name" speaker – nobody ever heard of the other two – and attract some kind of audience, the Coalition had settled on Cockburn without taking into account what seems to be a family trait – the refusal to bow to any sort of leftist orthodoxy. Cockburn is one of the few leftists who raised his voice against the cover-up of the Waco massacre, and he has praised the anti-statist spirit of the militia movement. Such unorthodox opinions have gotten him into plenty of trouble with his more doctrinaire comrades on the left, and he was true to form that night. Just as his father incurred the wrath of the Stalinists of yesteryear, Alexander Cockburn carried on the tradition when he spoke out in favor of a single-issue strategy and including the right in the antiwar movement. So what if he called us "beasts"! Our little claque of Antiwar.commers clapped loudly as Cockburn praised the anti-globalist instincts of American right-wingers who have led the way in opposing such institutions as the "International War Crimes Tribunal" set up by the United Nations.

The ISOers nearly split a gut: they were furious. All their manipulations of the Coalition, all the packed meetings and attempts to control the discussion, had come to nought. Livid with rage, one of their leaders got up at the end of the evening, grabbed the microphone, and starting ranting about the heresy of uniting with the right against an imperialist and immoral war. How could we even think of uniting with "reactionaries," he cried, why these are the very people who are "rolling back Social Security." So, I thought, this is how the "socialists" of today organize to stop an imperialist war of aggression launched by the government of their own country: by turning the antiwar movement into Socialists for Social Security! How Lenin must be rolling over in his grave!

Thank god for good old-fashioned Marxists like Cockburn, and I am sure conservative opponents of American imperialism will agree after they read what follows. Of course, those of you who are attending the Antiwar.com Annual Conference, March 24-26, will get to hear Cockburn in person, at which time he will elaborate on the subject of how and why much of the left sold out to imperialism during the Kosovo war. He will be the luncheon speaker, on March 25, at noon, at the Villa Hotel in San Mateo, and we are selling separate tickets to this event. For $40 you get lunch, and Cockburn: if you want to just hear the speaker, $20 at the door will get you in. To make reservations, just call Sybil, at: 1-800-325-7257. Commie newspaper-sellers welcome.

~ Justin Raimondo

I think the two previous speakers have given a pretty good account of the diplomatic lead up to the war, the way it was forced by the U.S. leading the other NATO powers, and I think an excellent portrait of the economic policies that induced chaos and division inside the former Yugoslavia.

So I'll be a bit more scattered in my observations – and not too long because I think there are a lot of questions.

I mean, as always in left gatherings, a pessimistic tinge enters the air, so I thought we might look at the good side a little bit. What did the war demonstrate? It proved that everything we ever said about liberals and social democrats is true.

It's gratifying, let face it. When I was reading Lenin in my teens, when you got to the bit where Lenin is confidently expecting all the social democratic parties in Europe to oppose the beginning of the First World War, and of course then, first the German social democrats all voted to fight the war, and then all the British social democrats voted, and then all the other social democrats – and Lenin just couldn't believe it and filled several notebooks with curses and cries of surprise and rage.

So we're kind of, at this point in the century, 1999, a little bit hardened. But here we did have a spectacle where Europe – every single government there, except for my own dear motherland of Ireland, which you can scarcely describe as social democratic in elected government – were all social democrats: Spain, Italy – social democrats and former communists-and, there they were, hollering for war!

And of course, the second gratifying thing was to see Democrats here behaving exactly as one might expect. After all, when we were talking in the years of Vietnam we'd point out, you know, that the national security state, the intellectuals who really argued for the war in Vietnam, who devised many of its vilest policies, who engineered killing which finished off maybe two million people in Southeast Asia, many of them were or could be described as liberals.

You know, whether they were the Council on Foreign Relations liberals or New Republic liberals, I mean there are many stripes of liberals in the zoo. But, then of course, after the debacle and horror of Vietnam, liberals weren't quite so feisty for war for a while; they, you know – well, some of them were.

The New Republic, I don't think a week has passed without shouting for a war somewhere; they have long-distance war lust.

But, I think what we've found with this war is that at last a lot of liberals who had previously been a little decorous in their blood lust, really came out from under cover.

And you saw an amazing stretch of opinion. And, I'll tell you what, it is a pity, I'm sad that Lerner wasn't here. I mean he signed the letter, I think, urging Albright forward.

You had other people, like Susan Sontag, joining with people like Brezinski. And I think what you see there is the real continuance of the old Cold War; the Democratic Party – I wouldn't call it a wing-it's most of the body, most of both wings.

In fact, among the Democrats, we should note that there was some quite heroic resistance to the war by 26 Democrats in the House led by Denis Kusinich, who is by origin – I mean talk about long distance – I met Denis when he was the mayor of Cleveland in the late 1970s, fighting a battle against the businessmen of Cleveland who were trying to nab the municipally owned utility, successfully.

And here was Denis, who is an Irish Croat by origin, fighting successfully, actually – and we should note this again-Congress never assented to the war.

Well, you could say, "so what," and you'd have a certain point. But, it was important and had that war gone on I think you would have seen the possibility of the suit brought by Tom Campbell in federal court, saying that Clinton had abused the Constitution, Article I – on war-making powers stolen from Congress-which might have gone somewhere.

You had the fact that the War Powers Act of 1973, which was brought through after revelations of the bombing in Cambodia – they always called it the "secret" bombing of Cambodia. Secret bombings are bombings the U.S. press doesn't write about a lot-everybody else knows.

The Cambodians knew. They absolutely knew on day one that they were being bombed by B52s – they're very smart people! And they went on the radio – you can actually dig out the transcript which was made available through the CIA. The Cambodians said, "We're being bombed, we're being bombed by the United States, this is wrong." That was a secret war!

You'll remember that when a New York Times correspondent mentioned this secret war in The New York Times in passing, like paragraph nine, Kissinger was so outraged that he began the wiretapping that led, ultimately, to the whole Watergate scandal.

So the U.S. government never liked secret wars to be discussed. But that did produce the War Powers Act, which said that the president really had to provide a pretty good account of himself after 60 days, otherwise Congress could say no.

Well, he didn't, and so there was enough resistance, which brings me to the third interesting piece of news, which is we discovered, at least I did, a lot of good friends on the right in this war. The right wing are mostly against it, and I wrote somewhere, and I think it's true, that the best light on the horizon was the old Republican isolationist tradition. They don't want the wars.

Now, most of you may feel that you just can't ever feel any relish for anything Pat Buchanan says, but some of the most spirited, articulate, nicely phrased, and well researched denunciations of this war came from people who normally speak in the language of beasts.

There's a monster columnist on the Boston Herald who's an absolute animal normally; he wrote terrific stuff against the war. Robert Novak, the Prince of Darkness – we used to call him that – wrote magnificent denunciations of the war.

And the fact is that I think that Clinton and the others felt a real serious possibility that they could lose the Congress. This was a war fought by them against time. I'll come back to that because I think until quite near the end, in terms of organizing, in terms of possible rebuffs to this whole mighty war machine, the prospects didn't look too bad until the Serbs were sold out by poor, pathetic, powerless Russia.

What other things were good news? Well, all our suspicions of the War Crimes Tribunal were soundly confirmed. Not to be confused of course with the World Court, the Special Tribunal on War Crimes in the former Yugoslavia was put together by the UN Security Council; the judges appointed by the UN Security Council; the prosecutor is Louise Arbour, a Canadian judge.

And some people said, from the word go, this is a totally partial tribunal; the game is rigged. It was interesting, on March 16 of this year (1999) The New York Times published actually a very interesting story by, of all people, Ray Barnard, who many of you will remember for his work in Central America, for which he nearly got fired by The New York Times.

Barnard actually has written some pretty awful stuff in recent years, but this was a good story. He said that the tribunal had been considering evidence of war crimes in the single biggest ethnic cleansing of the '90s before this war – well, of the single biggest flight-which was what? Of Serbs! Serbs from the Krajina, where – numbers vary – you see estimates ranging from about 250,000 to 500,000.

Serbs were driven out of the Krajina by the Croats with the active help and participation of the U.S. ambassador, Galbraith, and a team of recently retired high Pentagon officials forming a private company to advise the Croats on how to do a really sound bit of ethnic cleansing. Although the Croats are pretty good at this, I must say, if you look at the historical record.

It said in this New York Times story that Arbour was considering evidence and testimony that war crimes had been perpetrated by these Croat officers, bombing civilians, driving all before them.

Now, if the Tribunal is to be seen or was to be seen as anything other than a star chamber, they would have said okay, let's indict a few Croats for balance, but they didn't, and the story disappeared. It was the only time I've seen actually on the front page of the New York Times a reference to the ethnic cleansing of Krajina.

And what happened next? Right exactly at the moment that NATO powers wanted to give a little goose-up to public support for the war, which was flagging, the polls were heading down, no one liked it particularly.

And, of course most people here weren't particularly involved except on CNN – you watch a bunch of idiots saying that stuff and that's it. Your children aren't going to go and be sent to fight in it; I mean a few are from the height of 35,000 feet dropping high explosives on people, but it's not exactly seriously dangerous work.

At that moment what happens? The tribunal indicts Milosevic.

Now, simultaneously, another good bit of news, there was some good work done by lawyers in three different countries to indict Clinton. They sent papers to the tribunal, to Louise Arbour.

Of course, she's not going to blot her copybook for a minute. She's hoping to get a seat on the Canadian Supreme Court, and you don't get that way by indicting the NATO leaders. It's not a sort of wise career option, really.

But really, I think we can see that is the end, to me, totally, of any credibility. Not that I particularly thought there was any for most people credibility to the Tribunal, which I think is a thoroughly sinister enterprise-these growing demands for world courts of justice are a very bad thing in my view, a very bad thing.

If you were a right-wing audience you'd be on your feet at that one, I'll tell you, because if there's one thing that sends right wingers and isolationists to their feet it's talk about the world court. And I sort of sympathize.

You know, what goes out the window? Jury trials go out the window and it's just another piece of international arbitration by judges picked by the NATO leaders. Is that a venue?

More good news. I think, basically, that the level of knowledge among – I'll say our side, since I think it is pretty much now that the one guy who was going to speak against it isn't here – unless there's someone now so intimidated that they are hiding under their seat.

Okay, I know, we're all disappointed, but there it is. We tried for debate. We can have an internal dialectical process in our heads. But I think that the level of knowledge here was pretty good.

I've never been an enormous fan of the internet owing to my enormous technical incompetence, but my trusty co-editor, Jeffrey Sinclair there, co-editor of CounterPunch, we've pulled down an enormous amount of stuff.

In our newsletter we were able to print all the targets hit by NATO, we were able to evaluate all the civilian casualties caused by the bombing inside Serbia-around 2000 as people say. People were well educated on the war and I think in many ways the incredible campaign in some of the media, not all.

One of the most vitriolic and long-ranging propaganda campaigns in my memory was circumvented to a large extent. And what an incredible propaganda campaign it's been. It's gone on for about 10 years now, displaying utter lack of knowledge of the Balkans, absolutely no knowledge of Balkan history.

Time and again you see this mad comparison of the Serbs to – of Milosevic to Hitler and the Serbs to Hitler's willing executioners. You would have never have known that the Serbs were on the receiving end of terrible German purges. You know, a million of them lost their lives in Jasenovac concentration camp.

None of this was known, you know, but I think that most people were able to obtain a good deal of knowledge. I spoke a few times and was always agreeably surprised of how up people were on the facts and how in a way they didn't seem to be mind-sotted by hours of CNN and Wolf Blitzer.

Anyway, so those are some items of uplifting news. What's the bad news? The bad news is, of course, NATO did win. I don't think that they won....

[inaudible]

The whole point about bombing-bombing doesn't achieve much militarily, but it just kills a bunch of civilians. And, of course, what the bombings have done and will do is exactly what happened in Iraq-and they've discovered this – it's absolutely lethal.

You can destroy infrastructure, you bomb hospitals, water purification plants, sewage facilities and, you know, the death toll will start picking up. Life expectancy of kids will go down, infant mortality will increase, and you'll in the end get those absolutely horrifying figures of the mortality rate in Iraq. It will happen in Serbia.

What have we got now? We've got Kosovo, which is going to be the scene of rivalries, and death squads, and shootings, and revenge slayings at a horrible level for years to come.

We've got Serbia, which is now an economic basket case; we've got Bulgaria, which is losing $2 million a month in lost trade down the Danube; we've got ever rapacious firms in the West trying to get a bit of the reconstruction action.

What have we got to figure out? Small countries have to figure out how to shoot down bombers, that's for sure-they really have to. In our latest issue of CounterPunch we have a good issue on that.

And finally, we have to go on fighting back against this tendency to substitute NATO for the UN, undeclared wars by the executive branch from properly discussed foreign policy. We've got to continue informing people. I think the peace movement put on a good show.

I think, you know, the structural reality is that we do live in a uni-polar world. Russia is a pygmy now and they could not stand up for Serb interests against NATO powers. Those are the equations, and those are my thoughts, so let's get on with your questions and talk. Thank you.

Alexander Cockburn is co-editor of CounterPunch Magazine; columnist, The Nation, San Francisco Examiner, & Los Angeles Times; Co-author, Whiteout: The CIA, Drugs & the Press.