Allied Farce:
A Wartime Diary

Past Diaries

by Justin Raimondo

4/8/99

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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