Chomsky Members:

Deception and Self-deception 

            The Mixed Motives behind NATO's War against Yugoslavia 
             
    
by Diana Johnstone (7-09-00)

Diana Johnstone writes on Balkans affairs.  

Ladies and Gentlemen, 

First my thanks to the Institute for kindly inviting me to take part in
this conference. My subject relates to lies and deception, and this very
morning when I turned on BBC television I heard another lie: the
description of people marking the anniversary of the start of the NATO
bombing by protests as "supporters of Miloševic". Personally, I am
certainly not here to support Miloševic -- Yugoslav politics are the
business of the Yugoslavs, not my business. I am here to express
solidarity with the people of Yugoslavia who have been unjustly subjected
to bombing, economic sanctions, political isolation and slander, and with
all the people in the world who want peace and the rule of international
law. My presence here is in protest against the cruelty of the self-styled
humanitarians who wield enormous economic and technological power without
a trace of wisdom or compassion, whose wealth and military might have
brought them to the state of mind which the ancient Greeks called hubris.

"Humanitarian Intervention"

Aggressive wars and imperial enterprises usually cloak themselves in noble
pretexts. Each pretext must seem plausible in its own historical period.
The notion of "humanitarian intervention" grew out of a combination of
contemporary factors: the drastuc decline of progressive political
thinking at the end of the Cold War, the decline of the protective role of
the weaker national governments, the rise of "non-governmental
organizations", the multiplication of internal armed conflicts often along
ethnic lines. In the early nineties, it was being theorized by one of the
most prestigious of United States "think tanks" the Carnegie Endowment for
International Peace. In 1992, the Carnegie Endowment published a book
entitled Self-Determination in the New World Order, which foreshadowed the
policy of the Clinton administration in Kosovo, since it was the product
of a team of policy-makers who went on the design that policy.

In the post-Cold War world, the Carnegie Endowment study noted, "groups
within states are staking claims to independence, greater autonomy, or the
overthrow of an existing government, all in the name of
self-determination". In regard to these conflicts, "American interests and
ideals compel a more active role".

So allow me to quote: "As of mid-1992, neither the United States nor the
world community has reached a point where humanitarian calamities
resulting from self-determination claims or internal repression
automatically trigger collective military intervention to accomplish
strictly humanitarian objectives. But humanitarian intervention will
become increasingly unavoidable."

What is noteworthy here is that the United States policy-makers proposed
"collective military intervention", and not any sort of diplomatic or
political solution, as the inevitable outcome of "self-determination
claims", which could be expected to meet with "internal repression". And
already in 1992, this military action was labeled "humanitarian
intervention".

The statement that "humanitarian intervention will become increasingly
unavoidable" was a self-fulfilling prophecy in the unusually literal sense
that those who made it helped it come true. The 1992 book,
Self-Determination in the New World Order, was the product of a group of
foreign policy specialists brought together by the Carnegie Endowment
President to work out new policy options for the post-Cold War period.
That president was Morton Abramowitz, a former U.S. ambassador to Thailand
who has specialized in intelligence matters, and who went on to be a
champion of the UÇK and an advisor to the Kosovo Albanian delegation at
Rambouillet; Abramowitz has since become president of the influential
Council on Foreign Relations. He is also on the board of the International
Crisis Group, the Brussels-based think-tank that formulates policy options
for the "international community" in Bosnia and Kosovo, and is financed by
both Western governments and private foundations, notably the Soros
foundation. The Abramowitz group of specialists that pondered the theory
of "humanitarian intervention" in the early 1990s included Madeleine
Albright, Richard Holbrooke and Leon Feurth, who is the foreign policy
advisor to Albert Gore, now vice president and leading candidate for the
presidency to succeed Clinton. The authors of the book I have cited on
Self-Determination in the New World Order were Morton Halperin, head of
State Department policy planning under Madeleine Albright, and David
Scheffer, who is Albright’s special envoy for war crimes issues.

So here we have a team that first evolved the theory of "humanitarian
intervention" and then put it into practice. From what I know of American
policy-makers I would not, however, leap to the conclusion that this is a
conspiracy. Rather, I think it is closer to hubris: the arrogance of a
small elite group of people who take it upon themselves to decide how to
use the immense military power of the United States, and who never
question their own right to do so or their own righteousness. Madeleine
Albright is widely quoted as having asked rhetorically what good it was to
have the world's greatest military power if one didn't use it. Having
found what they consider a theoretical excuse to use that power, they
eagerly seized what looked like a perfect occasion to put it into
practice. They probably convinced themselves. They imagined that they were
"present at the creation" of a new era of unchallenged U.S. power, that
they were constructing something grandiose... when in reality they were
embarked on a frightful course of destruction.

The Military-Industrial Complex

At the end of the Cold War, it was commonly said in Washington that "NATO
must either go out of area, or out of business". Such expenditure, and
such a massive U.S. military presence in Western Europe were no longer
credible in the defensive terms of the North Atlantic Treaty. To survive,
it was argued, NATO had to be expanded in two ways: it needed to take in
new members from the old Soviet bloc, and it needed to extend its mission
to the defense of vaguely defined "security interests" of its member
anywhere in the world.

What was the need of such expansion? Experts searching for new "strategic
threats" were unable to agree on anything convincing. But the think tanks
and futurologists continued to search for plausible reasons because they
were handsomely paid to do so. The institutes that finance such theorizing
in search of enemies are funded by the industries and financial
institutions that profit from Pentagon contracts and related sales to U.S.
military allies.

The U.S. economy needs NATO. In the past half century, the military
industrial complex has become a determining factor in U.S. public life,
subsidizing advanced research, financing political campaigns and
controlling major media. Expansion of NATO means new markets for U.S.
military contractors. To join NATO, Central Eastern European countries
will be required to strain their budgets in order to procure the latest
U.S. military equipment. Poland alone is expected to buy 100 to 150 new
fighter planes, meaning contracts worth some two to six billion dollars
for Lockheed or Boeing. Not surprisingly, then, the reluctance of many
U.S. Congressmen to endorse NATO expansion was overcome by a powerful
lobby, the "U.S. Committee to Expand NATO", presided by Lockheed’s chief
executive. It was U.S. private corporations and not Member State
governments that provided the $8 million to pay for NATO’s birthday party
last April.

This direct interest of the arms industry goes hand in hand with the more
general U.S. interest in strengthening NATO as the primary instrument for
maintaining U.S. supremacy over its main economic partner, the European
Union. In the race between the E.U. and NATO to take over the former
communist countries of Eastern Central Europe, NATO has been winning. The
militarization of the Yugoslav crisis has greatly contributed to this
militarization of European unification.

The New World Order 

One last citation from the Halperin-Scheffer book: "The vision of a `new
world order' since 1990 has been a world with one superpower -- the United
States -- in which the rule of law supplants the rule of the jungle,
disputes are settled peacefully, aggression is firmly met by collective
resistance, and all people are justly treated". This is a remarkable
statement since it refers to a "rule of law" that has not yet been written
and implicitly rejects existing international law as "the rule of the
jungle". To quote further: "International law -- as it always has done --
will respond and adjust to the behavior of nations and the actions of
multilateral institutions". The NATO war against Yugoslavia, in flagrant
violation of existing international law, was designed to force such
adjustment.

A major feature of this "new world order" is the demolition of national
sovereignty, an essential principle of existing international law. A world
with a single superpower is a world where only that superpower has a sure
claim to "national sovereignty" -- an outdated concept for the rest.
Lesser sovereign nations are to be broken down not only from the outside,
by the pressures of economic globalization, but also and more acceptably
from the inside. The reason is simple: weak governments of small states
cannot protect their resources or the welfare of their populations from
the demands of "the markets", that is, from the interests of transnational
investment capital.

The United States is a "free market democracy" with emphasis on the
"market", which includes a "free marketplace of ideas". Foreign policies
also need to sell themselves on a very special, bifurcated marketplace.
There is the "up market" of the professional geostrategists, the "foreign
policy community" with its think tanks, elite clubs and sober
publications. And there is the "down market" that goes all the way down to
the British tabloids. A successful policy will be one that can sell itself
both to the up market, as being in line with dominant interests, and to
the down market, as appealing to ready stereotypes and gratifying
emotions.

"Humanitarian intervention" is essentionally for the down market, even
though it may involve prominent intellectuals and famous show business
celebrities. For the "up market", there is Zbigniew Brzezinski and his
Realpolitik objective: "to perpetuate America's own dominant position for
at least a generation and preferably longer still". This involves creating
a "geopolitical framework" around NATO that will initially include Ukraine
and exclude Russia. This will establish the geostrategic basis for
controlling conflict in what Brzezinski calls "the Eurasian Balkans", the
huge area between the Eastern shore of the Black Sea to China, which
includes the Caspian Sea and its petroleum resources, a top priority for
U.S. foreign policy.

The Brzezinski geostrategy may recall the quip about NATO and Europe: "to
keep the Russians out, the Americans in, and the Germans down". Can this
be exactly what the Germans want, now that Germany is back to being what
its leaders call a "normal" power? Brzezinski openly wants to prevent a
juncture between Germany and Russia that would lead to a European
superpower out of U.S. control.

This and other considerations may suggest that the German-American
strategic partnership is not quite as solid as claimed. But for the moment
it is interesting to see how the divergent geopolitical aims and
approaches of Germany and the United States have combined to tear apart
Yugoslavia in what I would call a two-phase movement.

Destruction in Two Phases

Transforming Yugoslavia from a medium-sized independent state, with a
unique reputation in the region for resistance to foreign empires, into a
series of ethnic statelets whose economic assets can be easily
expropriated and whose territory can be used for NATO bases on the way to
Ukraine and the Caspian certainly fits in generally to the Brzezinski
scheme of things.

Still, the initial support to secessionist movements in Yugoslavia came
from Germany, not from the United States. And again in Kosovo, there are
strong indications that Germany was the first to provide support for the
Albanian secessionist movement, including the UÇK. In both cases, Germany
was the first to intervene, but the United States, with agile opportunism,
managed to take control of the game and play it to American advantage. The
game is not over.

In this two-phase movement, Germany and its traditional völkisch -- which
might be roughly translated as ethnic nationalist or separatist --
approach to Eastern Central Europe dominates the first phase of attack
against the targeted nation-state. In the second phase, the United States
takes over with a rhetorical "multiculturalism" justifying a takeover of
political and economic decision-making by the "international community".

In Germany, the völkisch approach was flagrant in the right-wing press
campaign of 1991 and 1992 championing the Croats as "real Europeans" in
contrast to the Serbs, stigmatized as Oriental barbarians with no place in
civilized Europe. This was a revival of the traditional German policy
toward the Balkans of divide and rule through emphasis on ethnic
identities, and manipulation of Croatian and Albanian nationalism in
particular to weaken Serbia. In addition, German policy toward Yugoslavia
reflected the influence and interests of the powerful associations of
Vertriebene, representing over twelve million Germans and their
descendants who were expelled from Eastern European countries after World
War II. Stigmatizing "ethnic cleansing" as a peculiarly Slavic practice,
equivalent to genocide, can strengthen the hand of ethnic Germans in their
efforts to regain their property and positions in Eastern European
countries eager to join the European Union.

In the United States, the origins of the policy toward Yugoslavia are much
more confused. The influence of certain lobbies has pushed U.S. policy in
the German direction, but the underlying ideology and interests are
somewhat different. In American politics, ethnic lobbies can decide
elections, and politicians pay a lot of attention to their demands. The
extraordinary influence of the Cuban exile lobby in Florida is the most
striking example. But lobbies of anti-communist exiles from Eastern Europe
-- often including Nazi collaborators -- have also had a very negative
influence. In the case of Yugoslavia, the nationalist Croatian lobby was
extremely active. Together, the Croatian and Albanian separatist lobbies
reinforced each other’s credibility by presenting themselves as victims
and stigmatizing Yugoslavia as a mistake of history, a prison of peoples
oppressed by Serbs.

These anti-Yugoslav, anti-Serb lobbies were able to extend their influence
without any serious contradiction. There were no comparable pro-Yugoslav
or pro-Serb lobbies, inasmuch as Serb émigré communities had no project
for getting U.S. support to change Yugoslavia. Political divisions between
Serbs persist in emigration. Even today, when Serbian-Americans are
suffering from the demonization of the Serbian people, there is still no
coherent, effective Serbian lobby in the United States.

Using professional public relations techniques, the Croatian and Albanian
lobbies prepared congressmen and editors to interpret the Yugoslav
conflicts as an attack by Serbs on everybody else. By supporting the
Albanians in particular, the United States adopted an ethnic policy
parallel to that of Germany. In Kosovo, the armed Albanian separatist
rebels provided the "self-determination claims" causing "humanitarian
calamities" needed to trigger "collective military intervention".

U.S. support for the Bosnian Muslims was of a different nature. United
States support for the Bosnian Muslims apparently had less to do with
Yugoslavia than with the opportunity it offered to pursue a strategic
alliance with such important allied Muslim states as Saudi Arabia, Turkey
and Pakistan, and to prove that despite its unswerving support to the
State of Israel, America really loved Muslims. And indeed, the United
States has repeatedly favored Islamic political currents as an effective
counter to nationalisms that risk endorsing protectionist economic
policies. As an added bonus, support for Muslim Bosnia could prove a thorn
in the side of Germany, which had moved so rapidly to assert its influence
in Croatia.

The U.S. sponsorship of the Bosnia Muslim was the first part of "phase
two": support for independent Bosnia-Herzegovina was definitely not
völkisch but was cast in terms of multiculturalism. In this respect, the
sporadic Serbian attempt to gain Western sympathy by recalling Serbia’s
historic role as bulwark of Christian civilization against encroaching
Islam misfired badly. It appealed only to a small and isolated fringe on
the far right. For the most part, contemporary public opinion in the West
is too ignorant about the Balkan past to understand the historical basis
for this argument and instead projects its own past -- the Crusades,
colonialism, exploitation of Muslim immigrant workers -- onto the Serbs.
Support for the Muslims was even a sort of atonement for past Christian
sins. Izetbegovic was celebrated as a champion and martyr of tolerance and
multiculturalism. The Serbs thus became the scapegoat for the bad
conscience of that part of the West -- including precisely the liberal
currents which traditionally were allied with the Serbs -- which is more
ashamed than proud of its "Christian heritage".

The New Crusade

Despite the role of right-wing nationalist movements in the dismantling of
the old Yugoslavia, the NATO crusade against Belgrade has been pursued
most vigorously by center left political formations in the NATO countries
in the name of "humanitarian intervention". This represents the second
phase, with its American ideology and harmony with the goals of
U.S.-sponsored globalization.

The political center left represented by this generation of American
liberal and European social democratic leaders, in the absence of
effective economic policies to promote the social justice they
traditionally claim to serve, have in the past decade found a successful
role for themselves as ideological apologists for globalization. These
politicians are the ideal salesmen for globalization with a human face, in
the name of human rights without borders as the virtuous cause they need
in order to distinguish themselves from "the right", presumed to be
indifferent to human suffering. Obliged to accept tax breaks for big
investors, mass dismissals of factory workers and cutbacks in social
programs, in terms of domestic policy the "third way" retains its position
on the left primarily by championing cultural diversity. The enemy can no
longer be capitalism. The enemy now is nationalism, portrayed as the
source of all modern evil. For the "third way" of the left, we are living
in a world where dominant economic forces, known euphemistically as "the
markets" are neutral and innocent arbiters of all things, whose influence
can only be healthy and even benevolent. Like theologians of other
religions, since their god -- the Market -- is almighty and good, they are
left with the problem of evil in the world. This must come exclusively
from bad people who adopt wrong ideas, and foremost among these wrong
ideas is " nationalism". The erstwhile champions of working class
internationalism thus transform themselves into champions of international
finance capital. This ensures them much more favorable media coverage than
their predecessors.

In the United States, an extremely nationalist country where
schoolchildren are required to pledge allegiance to the flag every
morning, anti-nationalism is today the dominant ideology -- for the rest
of the world. The U.S. Deputy Secretary of State, Nelson Strobridge
("Strobe") Talbott the Third, perfectly reflects current American ruling
class attitudes when he writes: "I’ll bet that within the next hundred
years [...] nationhood as we know it will be obsolete; all states will
recognize a single, global authority." The origin of that authority is
implicit in the title of this essay, "America Abroad; The Birth of the
Global Nation", published in the July 20, 1992 edition of Time magazine.
Making the matter quite clear, he adds the observation that such
multilateral financial institutions as the International Monetary Fund and
the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade "can be seen as the
protoministries of trade, finance and development for a united world".

The political editor of the New York Times, Thomas Friedman, celebrated
the start of the bombing of Yugoslavia with a notorious article announcing
frankly that "the hidden hand of the market will never work without a
hidden fist" and that "for globalism to work, America can’t be afraid to
act like the almighty superpower that it is". Friedman illustrated his
praise of globalization as the ultimate guarantor of world peace by a
detail that must be particularly appreciated here in Belgrade: "It's
true", he wrote, "that no two countries that both have a McDonald's have
ever fought a war since they each got their McDonald's." But as you know,
it is not true. To be sure, with all its McDonald’s, Serbia did not attack
the United States, but those McDonald’s did not prevent the United States
from attacking Serbia.

In Europe, anti-nationalism has been indispensable in the promotion of
European unification. The more the European Union has been reduced to an
instrument of transnational business and finance, the more it has been
necessary, in public rhetoric, to stress its noble mission of putting an
end to the national antagonisms that led to major European wars. The
nation-state has been stigmatized as the cause of war, oppression and
violation of human rights. This interpretation overlooks both the
persistence of war in the absence of strong states and the historic
function of the nation state as the most effective existing framework for
the social pact enabling citizens to build structures of social protection
and cultural development, as well as to develop legal systems able to
provide equality before the law and to defend citizens’ rights. Demonizing
as "nationalism" the only existing context for functioning
institutionalized democracy obviously facilitates the dictates of "the
markets", which are innocent of nationalist prejudice.

In this regard, we can see why, among the various "nationalisms" that have
accompanied the collapse of Yugoslavia, the only "bad" nationalism in the
NATOland perspective has been Serbian nationalism. Various factors may be
mentioned, such as the strength of the Croatian nationalist and Albanian
lobbies, the traditional German-Austrian policy, the belief -- whether
true or not -- that Serbia was more attached to socialism than the other
parts of Yugoslavia, and even, allow me to say, certain bad mistakes or
misdeeds by Serbian nationalists, who are human like everybody else.
However, the fundamental political fact is that Serbian nationalism is
inextricably linked to the Serbian view of their role as state-builders in
the Balkans. This was an asset to the Western allies at the start of the
twentieth century. But now is a time when the great powers are not trying
to build states, but to weaken them in favor of "the markets".

Germany and the United States

In the interplay of German and American propaganda against Yugoslavia, a
very particular role has been played by the German foreign minister,
Joschka Fischer. The traditional right-wing ethnic or völkisch German
policy was contrary to the anti-nationalist liberal ideological climate of
post-Cold War Europe. True, it was alarmingly successful in Germany in
gaining support for Croatian secession, but the "Serbien muss sterbien"
revival was not translatable in the rest of the European Union (except, of
course, Austria) and was totally unsuitable for winning consensus for
German military intervention in the Balkans. In order to reverse Germany’s
post-World War II policy of never sending military forces against another
country, it was necessary to come up with arguments that silence the peace
movement whose conspicuous blossoming in the 1980s had done so much to
create the image of a new, peaceful Germany the Russians could trust with
reunification. For this task, nobody could be better suited than the
German Greens’ chosen leader -- chosen, incidentally, above all by the
German media, who for well over a decade had "discovered" in Fischer a
"realist" to celebrate, thus strengthening his position within his own
party.

During the peace movement of the 1980s, Fischer defended NATO against
critics within his own movement by an anti-nationalist argument: the
"keeping Germany down" function. German nationalism, he argued, could best
be kept under control within the NATO framework. Much more original was
his argument, as it emerged in the mid-1990s, in favor of sending German
military forces into Yugoslavia. The argument was simplicity itself, and
went like this: "There are two `never again’ principles in the Green
identity. One is `never again war’, and the other is `never again
Auschwitz’... when they clash, as in Bosnia -- or later Kosovo -- one has
to be sacrificed to the other." Thus all that was needed was a massacre,
real or staged, labelled "Auschwitz" and the German Luftwaffe could take
to the skies and bomb Belgrade just as in 1941, this time alongside the
Americans.

Fischer's line of argumentation and his attachment to "multiculturalism"
produced a rationale for aggression against Serbia far more acceptable to
his NATO allies than that of his conservative predecessors.. Indeed, the
enthusiasm in Washington over the surprising rise of this self-educated,
one-time street-fighting "revolutionary" is so amazing as to suggest some
sort of prior meeting of minds. Before Fischer even took office, Richard
Holbrooke declared that he would make "a great foreign minister". Fischer
earned his place in the highest councils of power by his remarkable
success in changing the look and the official rationale of German policy
toward Yugoslavia from its original focus on ethnic identities to
something quite different but still peculiarly German -- a sort of penance
for Auschwitz. This was a properly German excuse for "humanitarian
intervention".

In this way, German and American elements have merged in the ideological
construction used to justify military aggression against the Federal
Republic of Yugoslavia and occupation of Kosovo. The pretext had to be
extreme to justify violation of virtually every relevant treaty or
international convention. The success of this "humanitarian" lie can be
illustrated by a paradox. The protests in Seattle last December against
the World Trade Organization showed that a huge new popular movement is
developing to oppose "globalization". The people who went into the streets
to denounce the WTO should have been demonstrating earlier against the
NATO war in Yugoslavia. The fact that most of them did not proves that
they did not understand that the NATO assault on Yugoslavia was precisely
an integral part of that forced globalization they oppose. The people who
should be opposing NATO's war policy have been temporarily confused and
demobilized by the "humanitarian" claims of the center left hypocrites in
office in most of the NATO countries.

This makes our task clear: we need to make our people understand that NATO
is the military arm of an unjust, undemocratic and destructive economic
globalization. The war against Yugoslavia was deliberately launched in
order to initiate a new phase of imperialist intervention, more dangerous
and destructive than the imperialism of the past. This is the truth that
must be recognized for justice to be done.

=========================================================================== 

This posting is provided to the individual members of this group without
permission from the copyright owner for purposes of criticism, comment,
scholarship and research under the "fair use" provisions of the Federal
copyright laws and it may not be distributed further without permission of
the copyright owner.

FLW
===========================================================================