Commentary: not a just war, just a war - NATO's humanitarian bombing mission.

Shank, Gregory

Introduction

Over the last year, nightly news reports filled our TV screens with cruise missiles surgically targeted on the Sudan, Afghanistan, Iraq, and Yugoslavia. Zero casualties, "war lite," "immaculate coercion," punish and get out. But NATO's "humanitarian bombing" of Kosovo, a province of Serbia (the dominant republic in Yugoslavia), introduced a new geometry of terror, complete with a resurrected Hitler, Holocaust-like images of a people uprooted, papers stripped and sent to camps, charges of genocide and atrocities - in short, a world Europeans and all people of conscience had hoped to consign to the past. Human rights organizations called for immediate action to prevent ethnic cleansing. And the U.S.-NATO alliance outlined the moral imperative to intervene militarily in a civil war taking place in a sovereign state outside the territory of the alliance to prevent crimes against humanity. Never mind that juridically, the bombing is an act of aggression and unjustifiable under international law. The world should never again stand by and "do nothing" in the face of evil.

Such logic soon began to strain under closer inspection. Slobodan Milosevic's regime has engaged in despicable thuggary, but what sense does it make to destroy a country in order to defend the ethnic rights of one of its minorities, especially since U.S. policy opposed independence for Kosovo? CIA Director George Tenet had warned that the Serbs might respond with a campaign of ethnic cleansing, and sure enough, the NATO bombings of Serbian army and police units accelerated the suffering of the ethnic Albanians (Lippman, 1999). The knowledge that Serbia's Milosevic might unleash a flood of refugees on already teetering neighboring states should have been reason enough to oppose the bombings. Was this misjudgment, incompetence, or the intended effect? Edward Luttwak (1999), a member of the National Security Study Group of the U.S. Department of Defense, argues that NATO started its incremental bombing to help Milosevic in the face of a recalcitrant Serbian opposition prepared to hold onto Kosovo at any cost: the aim was not to hurt Milosevic, but to give him an excuse for capitulating to NATO on Kosovo. (Not mentioned was that it has severely undermined a promising democratic movement in Belgrade, which was the best hope of getting rid of Milosevic.)(1) The endgame was to create the appearance that Milosevic had no alternative but to compromise as he had done at Dayton over Bosnia, but here a negotiated settlement with NATO would involve the partition of Kosovo, with the Serbians hanging on to the resource-rich north, while the south would be an international "protectorate" run by a mixed force of NATO, the Russians and Ukranians, and "nonaligned" countries. But the large-scale expulsion of the ethnic Albanians, like Saddam Hussein's invasion of Kuwait, was unanticipated and transformed Milosevic from a deal maker the West could do business with into evil incarnate, a new Hitler, and a genocidal war criminal whose residence now entered the cross-hairs of NATO smart bombs.

Such a scenario is at least as credible as the belief that NATO and the U.S. are suddenly willing to systematically oppose genocide and defend human rights and liberation struggles whenever circumstances arise. None of NATO's military options adopted in Kosovo could have meaningfully averted the humanitarian crisis that unfolded, and the removal of international monitors certainly sealed the Albanian Kosovars' fate. As such, the bombing campaign provides NATO with the sense of effectiveness while actually creating the military and political conditions necessary for the mass expulsions. Moreover, historical evidence weighs in against an ethical imperative. Where was the outrage when more than 300,000 Serbs were evicted by the Croatian government from the Krajina, a Croatian land inhabited by Serbs for centuries? Circumstances were as brutal as the expulsions we are now witnessing, except that some NATO powers quietly encouraged them because they weakened the Serb position in Bosnia (see Roberts, 1999). There are no longer any Serbs in Croatia or Sarajevo (Bosnia-Hercegovina), and most have left Kosovo. Currently, several NATO members, Spain and Turkey, have secessionist movements within their borders - the Basques and Kurds respectively - that have met levels of repression similar to that experienced by the Kosovar Albanians. Moreover, the formative U.S. made ethnic cleansing and genocide of Native Americans a way of life, the maturing nation gave the world eugenics, and its plump Cold War persona was complicit in the genocide of the Maya people in Guatemala, for which President Clinton ultimately apologized. As Edwardo Galeano (1999) ruefully noted, "Why doesn't Clinton demand that Milosevic apply this successful doctrine of washing of hands? The bombing raids might be stopped in return for a formal promise, that in the year 2012 or 2013 - for example - Yugoslavia's president could ask the cadavers of Kosovo to forgive him and all would be well, end of story, sin absolved, what's done is done. And the killing could continue unabated."

Confusion arises due to the divergence between rhetoric and what is occurring on the ground. Another unspoken logic of world power is at work, which has at its essence the redrawing of the map of Europe given the collapse of the former Soviet Union and the socialist states of Middle and Central Europe. A microcosm of this Great Power contest is the tearing apart of the once relatively prosperous multi-ethnic Yugoslav state of 24 million people, the victim of political maneuvers and globalization processes once the end of the Cold War undermined Yugoslavia's role as a neutral zone. There are no quick or easy answers for those seeking to fix blame or those genuinely seeking mechanisms to stem the carnage of civilians around the globe; we can only hope to educate ourselves and begin the work needed for peace and reconciliation.

Geopolitical Dimensions

Why intervene in Yugoslavia and not elsewhere, where similar atrocities are being committed (e.g., the Congo, Sierra Leone, or East Timor)? There are two compelling lines of argument, one emphasizing the regional stability needed to exploit the gas, oil, and mineral wealth in the Caspian Sea region to Transcaucasia, and the other the competitive relations between the dominant economic powers within the Atlantic Alliance and the crucial role of military spending in the United States.

The bipolar world dominated by the communist-capitalist dichotomy gave way to a politically unitary one after the collapse of the former Soviet Union and the "Velvet Revolutions" in Eastern Europe. This created an anomalous situation with the U.S. as the sole reigning superpower - the only power able to project its forces globally. In terms of global economic ascendancy, however, Europe and China pose the most serious threat to U.S. dominance in the 21st century. Lester Thurow (1992: 67) points out that with the integration of the European Community in 1992, it became by far the world's largest economic market. With the collapse of the Middle and East European socialist states, planned economies became transitional market economies with well-educated populations, low wages, and a convenient location next to the world's largest market.

That transitional period held great promise from the standpoint of rethinking security arrangements in Europe. The rationale for military alliances such as NATO, predicated as it was on Cold War tensions with the former Soviet Union, had vanished. Indeed, the complete abolition of NATO was envisioned. Another option was using NATO as a forum for arms reduction and elimination, and becoming a political force for consolidating democratic, capitalist systems throughout Europe, including Russia. Peacekeeping and conflict prevention could be handled by the 55-member Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE), the designated European collective security organization. The OSCE, which includes all European countries, the U.S., Canada, and the former Soviet republics, specializes in conflict monitoring and prevention, arms reduction, and post-conflict reconciliation (Valasek, 1999a). By the April 1999 ceremonies commemorating the alliance's 50th anniversary, however, NATO was being reconceived as a regional police force capable of intervening in nonmembers' internal affairs to prevent the abuse of human rights - with or without U.N. Security Council resolution approval of such intervention (Kempster and Marshall, 1999). Said NATO Secretary-General Javier Solana, "I think that we are moving into a system of international relations in which human rights, rights of minorities are much, much more important...more important even than sovereignty" (Ibid.).

The crisis in Kosovo offered a new justification for the existence of NATO, given Russia's greatly weakened military and struggling economy. Wallerstein (1999) offers two reasons why the U.S. wishes to invigorate NATO. First, its existence justifies the current military expenditures and build-up in the U.S., which has economic and internal political advantages for the government. The interests of two influential constituencies are served by such priorities: the military-industrial-scientific complexes in the West and their arms dealers and the transnational corporations whose global reach must constantly expand in terms of labor forces, markets, and sources of raw materials. Weakened by the impeachment process, President Clinton announced an increase in Pentagon spending by $112 billion over the next six years (current annual U.S. arms spending of $276 billion is already over twice the combined military budgets of every conceivable U.S. adversary, including Russia, China, Iraq, North Korea, Libya, Syria, and Cuba) and sent to Congress a proposal to spend $6.6 billion developing a national missile defense "Star Wars shield" by the year 2000 (see Hartung, 1999; Pilger, 1999). Boeing, Raytheon, and Lockheed Martin - the nation's "Big Three" weapons makers - will receive the lion's share of the spending increases (Mintz, 1999). Each is on contract to build Tomahawk cruise missiles (at a cost of $1.4 million to over two million dollars each depending on the version), along with Williams International Corp., which builds the engines and Litton Industries Inc., which designs the guidance system. Similarly large "teams" of contractors build the B-2 Spirit or "Stealth" bombers (cost: two billion dollars each) and the EA-6B Prowler, an airborne electronic warfare system, both being used over Yugoslavia.(2) One of McDonnell Douglas' AH-64A Apache helicopter gunships, with a unit cost of $14.5 million, has already crashed over Albania. Beyond short-term warfare replacement requirements, each newly spun off nation-state must acquire its own security and defense apparatuses. NATO expansion into former Warsaw Pact countries also creates new markets for U.S. weapons systems in an effort to bring them up to NATO standards. For example, the U.S. paid for installations of an air surveillance system in Poland and will cover the costs of leasing surplus F-16 or F/A-18 fighter aircraft to the Polish air force (Valasek, 1999a).

Second, a revitalized NATO is necessary to prevent the west Europeans from straying too far from U.S. control and above all from establishing an autonomous armed structure separate from NATO (see also Gervasi, 1998). It should not be forgotten that U.S. taxpayers support the presence of nearly 120,000 U.S. troops in Europe. In the face of persistent U.S. opposition, Britain and France have been promoting a European defense organization without U.S. participation (along the lines of the 1997 Amsterdam Treaty signed by E.U. member states) and Germany and Russia would prefer to move toward a European Security Council, including non-NATO states. Since 1990, the European Union has attempted to create a common foreign and security policy, with the former Yugoslavia as a proving ground. Washington, however, has pushed for NATO expansion as part of a larger agenda, the "new Atlanticism," which identifies an enlarging Atlantic Alliance as part of a process of U.S.-led federation or integration of all the democracies, an alliance capable of reigning in "rogue states" and expanding the "zone of peace." Secretary of State Albright has stated that NATO expansion involves "a solemn expansion of American responsibilities in Europe," meaning increased U.S. leadership and a stifling of the trend in NATO toward a greater role for its European members. According to Paris-based American political commentator, William Pfaff (1998: 6), it is also a betrayal (or, more generously, a case of forgetfulness prompted by the intoxicant of securing political advantage): "Assurances were given to Moscow in the mid- 1990s that if Russia withdrew from the Warsaw Pact states and accepted German unification, NATO would not move eastward."

Primarily at U.S. urging, in March 1999, the Czech Republic, Hungary, and Poland joined NATO. European members of NATO have shown reluctance at increasing the number of member states, and the German chancellor and the Canadian foreign minister have suggested that further expansion be delayed by a number of years. Yet the NATO bombing of Kosovo has created new insecurities among nonmember states, such as Macedonia, Bulgaria, and Romania, who are now knocking at the door demanding full NATO membership and integration into the European Union (Giacomo, 1999). These and other aspiring members - Albania, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Slovenia, and Slovakia - are to submit individual annual national programs on their preparations for possible future membership, covering political, economic, defense, resource, security, and legal aspects as part of NATO's Membership Action Plan (NATO, 1999).

The expansion of NATO into the former Warsaw Pact and the military assault on Russia's ally, Serbia, are not without risk. By promising to include Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia as members, NATO risks a military confrontation with Russia, a nuclear power. The current nationalist forces in Russia are already aghast at the Clinton administration's decision to payroll the biggest war budget since Ronald Reagan. Deployment of the "Star Wars" system violates the ABM Treaty and ends SALT II's chances of ratification in the Russian Duma. Indeed, President Yeltsin has approved a new blueprint for beefing up thousands of short-range or tactical nuclear weapons that were taken out of service unilaterally earlier in the decade (Washington Post, April 30, 1999). With the Western private sector already writing off investments made in Russia as lost in a hopelessly corrupt morass, and with even the IMF reluctant to grant further loans,(3) international constraints on Russia are greatly lessened and its leaders are more likely to adopt a strategy of tension. Some argue that this could portend a new Cold War or even contain the seeds of World War III (in the form of smaller wars bunching up into bigger ones, some kind of star wars, or chaos spreading until it engulfs the globe).

Further, a NATO mission in Kosovo that is not authorized by the U.N. Security Council sets a dangerous precedent. An increasing number of wars begin as internal, civil conflicts that spread to neighboring countries, creating the possibility of a future "Kosovo." A unilateral NATO decision to intervene in Kosovo is a danger to world peace: if the alliance skirts the provisions of the U.N. Charter now, its actions may encourage other countries to carry out unauthorized missions against sovereign states - perhaps for reasons less worthy than human rights. "The United States may find its ability to confront the perpetrators undermined by its own record of lax respect of international treaties" (Valasek, 1998). Global military confrontation can spread when diplomacy is forsaken for forceful solutions: 19 NATO countries are already engaged in a war against Yugoslavia (with nine aspiring members lending support), Russia is making contingency plans and threatening to redirect its missiles against NATO, and bombs are still falling on Iraq. As Schurmann (1999) points out, at a minimum, global nuclear disarmament is severely threatened and remilitarization of Russia's economy - defense spending is a superb Keynesian tool for nations seeking to revive their economies - requires just such external tensions. (Indeed, Sergei Stepashin, who became premier after Yevgeny Primakov's dramatic firing, promised immediately to reinvigorate Russian industry, especially the military-industrial complex, and to "decriminalize" the economy [Landsberg, 1999].) NATO leaders are hoping that Milosevic will turn to the Russians, empowering them to negotiate a settlement with NATO, and Hungarian-born financier and philanthropist George Soros has called Russia a constructive force that is "in a strong position to play a constructive role and I think everyone would appreciate it" (Bloomberg News, 1999a). It could take a rather generous inducement, such as the $14 billion Egypt received to line up against Iraq in the 1991 Gulf War, to persuade the Russian leadership to take this step.

There will also be a huge price tag for rebuilding postwar Southeastern Europe. President Clinton and Secretary of State Madeleine Albright have spoken of a reconstruction and economic recovery plan similar to the Marshall Plan, the economic complement to the NATO military structure, which transformed Western Europe after World War II. Bulgaria, Macedonia, and Greece have also called for measures on the scale of the Marshall Plan. The German presidency of the E.U. has a mini-Marshall plan, and German Chancellor Schroder reiterated interest in initiating a "stability pact for Southeastern Europe" that would involve an economic role in the region for the European Union and a security role for NATO (Rupert, 1999). Financier George Soros has suggested that the European nations prepare a postwar reconstruction and Marshall Plan-type investment effort for Kosovo (Reuters, 1999) and estimates the cost of rebuilding Southeast Europe at $4.7 billion a year. "The private sector has to take the lead in rebuilding war-torn southeastern Europe, but the public sector is needed to create the environment in which private investment can come in" (Bloomberg News, 1999a). U.S. Senator Pat Roberts (R-KS), after returning from a congressional trip to the Balkans, reported that the Clinton administration told Congress that the U.S. had agreed "to pay for 25% of the cost for rebuilding what we are now destroying in terms of a mini-Marshall Plan." The senator stated that Congress would oppose the move since the U.S. "should not be the economic backbone of the European Union" (Stratfor, 1999). The senator should not worry, for as far as the architects of the new Atlanticism are concerned, that has been Germany's role, dating from the Bush years, when a "partnership in leadership" called for German leadership in Europe and its management of both west and east European affairs. Ali (1999) suggests that the European Union could offer a reconstruction plan based on the experience of Marshall Aid and encourage either the rebirth of a third Yugoslavia or a new Balkan confederation of states that could deal as a region with the E.U.

Destroying Yugoslavia to Save It

Once Cold War rivalries relaxed after 1989, Yugoslavia's geostrategic importance as a neutral zone was greatly diminished; it also lacks the oil reserves or mineral deposits that would be needed to risk a global conflagration. The centrality of oil revenues to the last major projection of U.S. military might, the 1990 to 1991 Persian Gulf War, makes it tempting to seek similar causes for recent wars in the Balkans. The Gulf War provided a massive stimulus to the military-industrial complex, with Saudi Arabia emerging as the world's leading arms purchaser (it acquired weapons systems worth $36.4 billion from the U.S. alone between 1994 and 1997) (Hubbell, 1998). The number of U.S. troops based in the Gulf region has swelled to 20,000, and U.S. taxpayers spend a staggering $50 billion annually to maintain and equip them. Moreover, the dual containment strategy (of Iran and Iraq) that emerged in 1993 was premised on the notion that "rogue states" posed the greatest threat to the West following the Soviet collapse, and comparisons of Slobodan Milosevic to Saddam Hussein suggest that Yugoslavia has been added to the rogues' gallery. Public invocation of rollback and the Reagan Doctrine accompanied congressional passage of the Iraq Liberation Act in November 1998, signaling the Clinton administration's acquiescence in a policy of "regime change" - covert support of external opposition groups seeking to overthrow Hussein militarily (Gellman, 1999a). Thus, there are compelling reasons to explore this line of thought in some detail, keeping in mind that U.S.-NATO relations, the stabilization of Europe's southern tier, or even diplomatic bumbling best explain the Western response to the crisis.

The tearing apart of the sovereign state of Yugoslavia happened not by chance or as a result of historic ethnic rivalries. External forces and internal political choices brought Yugoslavia to the point of crisis. According to those stressing "geopolitical" or even darker conspiratorial forces, Yugoslavia is partly a victim, like the Middle East, of global competition over renewable resources and of the remaking of the international division of labor in accord with capitalist globalization. Flounders (1995) and Clark (1996) detail legislation passed by the U.S. Congress in 1991 that cut off all aid, trade, credits, and loans from the U.S. to pre-civil war Yugoslavia, ordered separate elections in each of the six republics that make up Yugoslavia, requiring State Department approval of election procedures and results before aid to the separate republics would be resumed, allowed only forces defined by U.S. State Department as "democratic forces" to receive funding, and required U.S. personnel in all international financial institutions such as the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund to enforce this cut-off policy for all credits and loans. Chossudovsky (1996) examines the history of how macroeconomic restructuring undertaken by the IMF and applied in Yugoslavia under the neoliberal policy agenda has unequivocally contributed to the destruction of that country. (Those who have studied these international financial agencies point out that precisely because the neoliberal agenda is global, its destructive effects are present on every continent, not just in Yugoslavia.) These are part of a larger tapestry involving a new division of labor in Europe, with high-profit, high-technology and product design activities, as well as high wages, salaries, and per capita income centered primarily in Germany, but also in England, France, Belgium, the Netherlands, and northern Italy. It is this economic dynamism that makes this zone a magnet for immigration from the east and central European periphery, accounting for much of the ethnic Albanian diaspora. The transition to democracy in the East has led to incipient deindustrialization and collapsing living standards for the majority there. It has cemented a relation of dependence within the world economy, such that the area will be involved in low-wage manufacturing, processing, and export of agricultural products and raw materials.

A corollary of the enlargement of NATO and the re-creation of a rationale for its existence was the modification of the alliance's defensive orientation to one involving out-of-area missions. The initial Yugoslav crisis was legitimately a cause of concern for European nations. Gervasi (1998) makes the case that Germany and the United States, while seeming to support the idea of ending the civil wars in Yugoslavia, in fact deepened the crisis there and acted instead to expand and prolong the wars, first in Croatia but especially in Bosnia. U.S. and German involvement in Yugoslavia's internal affairs effectively destabilized and dismantled the country by planning, preparing, and assisting the secessions that broke Yugoslavia apart. Once independent, these smaller nation-states became vulnerable to reintegration into the world economy on much less favorable terms. Gervasi cites Intelligence Digest (Summer 1995) to the effect that "the original U.S.-German design for the former Yugoslavia [included] an independent Muslim-Croat-dominated Bosnia-Herzegovina in alliance with an independent Croatia and alongside a greatly weakened Serbia." By splitting off Bosnia, Yugoslavia lost most of its arms industry and weapons stores (CDI, 1993).

Serbia had to be weakened because the 1990 elections in Serbia and Montenegro put in place governments opposed to the fragmentation of Yugoslavia. Gervasi argues that since the third Yugoslavia, formed in the spring of 1992, had an industrial base and a large army, it had to be destroyed. Germany has historically had commercial relations with this area, given the Danube trade traffic, and West Germany was Yugoslavia's main trading partner in Europe even in the early 1980s. The post-Cold War reorganization of the area sought to bring Slovenia, Croatia, and Bosnia-Herzegovina into a German sphere of interest. The U.S. sphere of interest was to include the southern reaches of Yugoslavia, with Macedonia as the centerpiece, plus Albania, and, if they could be stripped away from Serbia, the Sanjak and Kosovo. This is the framework for the emergence of a Greater Albania, under U.S. and Turkish tutelage, which would comprise a chain of small Muslim states, possibly including Bosnia-Herzegovina, with access to the Adriatic.

Oil also plays an essential role. Yugoslavia itself lacks significant oil reserves, although Amoco was among several foreign firms that initiated exploratory surveys in Bosnia, and a 1991 World Bank report indicated substantial petroleum fields in the Serb-held part of Croatia just across the Sava River from the Tuzla region (Chossudovsky, 1996). More important, however, is Yugoslavia's location vis-a-vis an emergent set of Muslim states in the oil-rich zone spanning from the Persian Gulf to the former Soviet republics in the Transcaucuses - the vital Black Sea-Caspian Sea region. According to Pilger (1999) and Amin (1999), U.S. policy hinges on securing an "oil protectorate" in this area. After having attacked Iraq intermittently for eight years, the U.S. can no longer rely on the open support of conservative Muslim states, and a NATO force with an "out-of-area" mandate is to police this zone. U.S. policy aims outward from Kosovo to the East and Middle East. Robert I. Hunter, senior adviser at the Rand Corporation and U.S. ambassador to NATO from 1993 to 1998, recently wrote in the Washington Post (April 21) with respect to the Clinton doctrine and its application in Kosovo: "It is the gateway to areas of intense Western concern - the Arab-Israeli conflict, Iraq and Iran, Afghanistan, the Caspian Sea, and Transcaucasia. Stability in southeastern Europe must be a precursor to protecting Western interests and reducing threats from farther East" (quoted by Amin, 1999). Azerbeijan shares with other Caspian nations an oil strike believed to rival the North Sea in size; the leading consortium to tap this wealth includes Amoco, Pennzoil, Unocal, and Exxon (Case, 1999). The Clinton administration, concerned with safe routes to move the oil and gas resources out of the region, favored running the Baku-Ceyhan pipeline through Azerbaijan, Georgia, and Turkey because it would strengthen the region's ties to the West, while countering Russian and Iranian influence in the area, a U.S. goal during the Cold War (CDI, 1998). In Azerbeijan, U.S. policy and the oil companies have supported President Heydar Aliyev - a former Communist Party secretary and KGB director for the region who negotiated a $7.4 billion oil "contract of the century" - despite criticism from Human Rights Watch and other human fights activists who have detailed credible allegations of government-sanctioned torture and police abuses (Case, 1999). With billions at stake, the U.S. oil firms have "credited Aliyev for creating a stable investment environment," meaning he keeps the oil flowing. This political dimension concerns maintaining relationships that assure that any rights acquired, to pump petroleum or build pipelines to transport it, will be respected given such enormous investments. In Yugoslavia, Milosevic was unable to create such a stable investment environment and jeopardized larger regional initiatives.

Internal factors also accelerated the crisis in Yugoslavia, but not in the way popularized by the mainstream media. In an analysis of ethnic conflict and the authoritarian Right, Hildyard (1999) compares the tragedy in Yugoslavia to that of Rwanda, where ethnicity became the tool through which a small but endangered elite spread fear throughout Rwandan society, legitimizing the suppression of opponents in the process, and ultimately desensitizing people to violence. According to Malcolm (1998: 25):(4)

In the West, the popular view of the recent wars...was always that these were "ethnic conflicts," created by the bubbling up of obscure but virulent ethnic hatreds among the local populations. This approach was essentially false: it ignored the primary role of politicians (above all, the Serbian nationalist-communist Milosevic) in creating conflict at the political level.... As a characterisation of the history of those regions, talk about "ancient ethnic hatreds" was in any case grossly misleading: there had never been ethnic wars in the "ancient" history of Bosnia or Croatia, and the only conflicts with a partly ethnic character were modern ones, produced under special geopolitical conditions (above all, the Second World War). Some elements of prejudice...did of course exist. But between low-level prejudices on the one hand and military conflict, concentration camps, and mass murder on the other, there lies a very long road: it was the political leaders who propelled the people down that road, and not vice versa.

A key turning point came in 1987, when Milosevic decided to build his political future on Serbian nationalism rather than on Yugoslav nationalism/Communism and moved within two years to suppress Kosovo's autonomy. Wallerstein (1999) argues that this gave the excuse for, and perhaps instigated, the wave of successions in Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia-Herzogovina, the attempted secessions within Croatia and Bosnia by the Serbs, then the Kosovars, with the process accelerated by German support for Croatian independence. In the area of interests, leaders of the ruling coalition made up of Milosevic's Socialist Party of Serbia and his wife's (Mirjana Markovic) Party of the Yugoslav Left (JUL) have followed the corrupt, profit-seeking logic typical of other former Communist functionaries and intelligence officials in the newly sovereign nation-states of Eastern and Central Europe. Private companies run by family members of the nomenklatura have appropriated the assets of state industries. The JUL reportedly fixes contracts and pads the portfolios of businessmen and bankers who are JUL members, and runs the ASI Bank, which funds the electoral campaigns of thousands of party members (see Hedges, 1999; Chossudovsky, 1996). Milosevic allows his principal collaborators to get rich shamelessly and compromise themselves through their embezzlement practices. In Serbia, the lines between economic and political circles have become blurred:

[The] Serb prime minister, Mirko Marjanovic (SPS), is also the chairman and managing director of the energy company Progres. The deputy prime minister, Dragan Tomic, runs Simpo, a company that specializes in the agrifood industry and furniture manufacture. His namesake, Dragan Tomic (SPS), the president of the parliament, is also the director of Yugopetrol. The minister without portfolio, Bogoljub Karic, along with his brother, heads a financial empire that includes banks, a television channel (BK), civil engineering companies, and even a university. And the bulk of the country's main entrepreneurs are members of the JUL, the party of Milosevic's wife (Hofnung, 1999).

Hence, when General Clark, the head of NATO forces in Europe, proposed destroying everything Milosevic values by bombing him into the Stone Age, he is talking about concrete forms of wealth in the hands of the political elite. The International Crisis Group (1999) stated that the "primary goal of international policy in the Balkans should be to remove Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic - the single greatest cause of crisis and conflict in the region," and included in the steps to do so the targeting of the personal assets of Milosevic and other key regime officials, destruction of state-run media transmitters, and the indictment of Milosevic and other top Serbian officials on charges of command responsibility for war crimes and crimes against humanity. Yet Milosevic values the exercise of power above all and made keeping the province of Kosovo, with its Albanian majority, within Serbia the springboard for his rise to power. Despite a tradition of electoral fraud, throughout the 1990s, the electoral fortunes of Milosevic's SPS, even in combination with the JUL, have been in a state of constant decline (Ibid.). Politically, the Serbian governing elite views the retention of Kosovo as a fundamental strategic and national security interest. Having surrendered control of Serbian-dominated areas of Bosnia, abandonment of Kosovo could eventually reduce Serbia's size to the extent that its status would be transformed from the dominant power in the former Yugoslavian state to that of a secondary power at the mercy of other coalitions. Once outside forces became dedicated to Albanian autonomy, the Serbs believed that this meant Albanian secession and the creation of a "Greater Albania" under the control of the United States and NATO (Straffor, 1999). Comprehensive autonomy, total independence, or Albania's annexation of Kosovo (the principal source of raw materials for Yugoslavia) could precipitate the total collapse of Yugoslavia as a viable, industrial state. This is particularly true if Montenegro, Yugoslavia's only remaining access to the Adriatic, were to secede and if Vojvodina (the Hungarian section of Serbia), the agricultural bread basket and another source of raw materials for Yugoslavia, were dissociated. Therefore, to render the issue of Albanian autonomy moot, the Serbs began a policy of population transfer under the threat of terror (Ibid.). That measure eliminated the support base of the military threat internal to Kosovo and freed up the Yugoslav army to seal the borders and position themselves against potential NATO troop deployments from Albania or Macedonia. It is equally true that the failure of Serbian authorities to recognize the Kosovo Albanians' right to self-determination, or at least some political framework that would best safeguard their rights (not necessarily a nation-state based on exclusive ethno-national principles), could also lead to dismemberment determined solely by power relations, by the scramble for private appropriation of wealth and territory, and by the political choices of the great powers (Samary, 1999).

Slovenia's ambassador to the United States, Dimitrij Rupel, has argued that the Serbian military was too strong for the region and the NATO bombing aimed to eliminate the "excess capacity" (Dolinsky, 1999). The war has also decimated Yugoslavia's industrial capacity. With an economy already in tatters from eight years of international sanctions and decades of mismanagement and cronyism, the bombing further dismantles it daily. Damage from the air war reached the $100 billion mark in late April (Dobbs, 1999), halved economic output, and threw over 100,000 people out of work; the damage has had a greater effect on GDP than both the Nazi and Allied bombings of Yugoslavia during World War II (Erlanger, 1999).(5) Destruction of oil refineries means that Yugoslavia is no longer capable of meeting its home demand for petroleum products; destruction of the October 14 plant, the biggest heavy machinery plant in the Balkans (bulldozers, excavators, and other heavy construction equipment), removed any hope that the Yugoslavians would themselves be able to reconstruct all the bridges across the Danube River and other central elements of Yugoslavia's economic infrastructure destroyed by NATO. The destroyed Yugo car and truck plant had employed 15,000 workers (an additional 40,000 also worked at 120 subcontractors), thus adding to an unemployment rate that stood at 19.1% in 1994 and ballooned to 27% of the working population in 1999 (Chossudovsky, 1996; Hofnung, 1999). The unemployment rate will probably double again, with up to 500,000 people likely to be laid off or out of work and another 100,000 seeking to emigrate as per capita GDP falls below $1,000 (even factoring in the black market) in a nation of 10 million people (Erlanger, 1999). The bombing has set Yugoslavia back decades. General Klaus Naumann, head NATO's military arm, announced that Milosevic could become "the ruler of rubble," and that if Yugoslavia had been 10 years behind the rest of Europe at the start of the bombing campaign, it is 10 years further behind as a result of the conflict, and could be 50 years behind before the crisis ends (Associated Press, 1999).

The Clinton administration and NATO favor carving out an international protectorate in Kosovo with an international security force safeguarding returning ethnic Albanian refugees (Perlez, 1999). Albania has already become "NATO's first protectorate," or "a military colony, with a status in relation to the United States similar to that of some South American countries or the Philippines in the past," according to Dan Plesch, director of the British-American Security Information Council, an arms control group (Murphy, 1999). As Europe's poorest country, it has a barely functioning state, with competing power circles in the north and south. The Albanian army disintegrated in the orgy of violence that rocked the country in March 1997 after the collapse of fraudulent pyramid investment schemes. At that time, some two million pounds of explosives and 750,000 to 1,000,000 Kalashnikov rifles were looted, making a crackdown on crime unfeasible. Law enforcement is all but nonexistent in the north; the Albanian legislature itself is known locally as "the Kalashnikov Parliament" because of its members' ties to weapons dealers. The resulting power vacuum has had tragic consequences for the 300,000 Kosovar refugees entering northern Albania. Monitors from the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) report that refugees are being preyed upon by "bandits" - criminal gangs known as clans who are exploiting the Kosovo crisis as a money-making opportunity, through smuggling, car theft, the weapons trade, and extortion (Spetalnick, 1999; Viviano, 1999a). Refugees' cars and tractors have been stolen and sold back to them at exorbitant prices. In Kukes, Albanian authorities are involved in the forced clearing of refugees. Special police have been sent into the refugees' tractor camps to order them to depart on buses and leave their tractors behind. The U.N.'s refugee agency has gone along with the expulsions (DePalma, 1999).

Albania will be profoundly transformed by the improved security and infrastructure resulting from the presence of an 11,000-strong NATO military mission, a small offensive force on its border with Kosovo, and the 5,600-member HAWK offensive task force that operates the 24 Apache attack helicopters (Jones, 1999). NATO is rebuilding the transportation and telecommunications infrastructure. Key areas of public life have effectively been handed to international institutions such as the OSCE and the International Monetary Fund, while foreign experts train the police (DePalma, 1999). Wilson (1999) cites a French Press Agency report to the effect that the Central Intelligence Agency has been working in Albania to "modernize" Albania's secret police, usually an indication that the CIA is directing the operations. Albania is the headquarters for the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA), which has been dependent on covert support coming primarily from Germany and the United States.

The republics surrounding Serbia have also taken on the appearance of protectorates. Bosnia-Herzegovina has been a divided territory under NATO military occupation and Western administration. Under the Dayton Accords, 60,000 NATO troops were on hand to enforce the peace (Chossudovsky, 1996). In Macedonia, if the refugee flow continues, displaced Kosovars could constitute fully 40% of the country's total population. The only former Yugoslav republic to secede without a war and maintain an ethnically diverse population, Macedonia now has on its soil between 16,500 and 20,000 NATO troops (Agovino, 1999). Ethnic Albanians in Macedonia are currently on trial on charges of terrorism and hostile activities against the state, having been accused of involvement in a series of bomb attacks against police stations and barracks in several cities during the past two years (BBC World News, 1999a). Although there are ethnic Albanian ministers in the Macedonian government, there are fears that the separatist conflict in neighboring Kosovo might spill over to Macedonia. Hungary, which borders Yugoslavia, is similarly at risk: NATO bombing missions originating from there have accelerated its involvement, creating concern over the 300,000 ethnic Hungarians living across the border in the northern Serbian province of Vojvodina.

The KLA: Choirboys Need Not Apply

[The KLA] does not qualify as a choirboy circle. There are dangerous people in it. They have engaged in atrocities.

For the Serbs to lament publicly about the deaths of these refugees is almost tantamount to Adolf Eichmann complaining about allied forces bombing the crematoriums. These are crocodile tears coming out of mass killers.

- Defense Secretary William Cohen (in Storey, 1999; Hohler, 1999)

NATO does not demand independence for Kosovo. However, the demand to create a protectorate or transitionally autonomous zone for ethnic Albanians in Kosovo implies setting up an incipient (and from the Serb standpoint, rival) state structure safeguarded by NATO in combination with the Russians or perhaps by a nonaligned contingent. Had the Rambouillet agreement been signed by the Serbs, the KLA would have formed the backbone of Kosovo's police force. A consensus on this course seems to exist in U.S. foreign policy circles. Former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger and former National Secretary Advisers Brent Scrowcroft and Zbigniew Brzezinski have argued that with the collapse of the Rambouillet formula, the most probable outcome is a protectorate with self-government for the Kosovars (Lehrer, 1999). It will have a pan-Albanian and Islamist orientation, overlaying a culture steeped in the tradition of extended patriarchal families, blood vengeance, and an incomprehension of women's rights (Kenney, 1998). Organizationally, it will incorporate elements of the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA, or Ushtria Clirimtare e Kosoves, UCK). Very few sources - neither its purported allies, from NATO to U.S. diplomats, nor commentators from the Left or Right - actually defend the KLA. Tags such as "terrorists" and "freedom fighters" are fluid and politically determined in the hands of the State Department and the Right, depending on whether an organization's tactics are consistent with the government's agenda, and the KLA exemplifies this.

The U.S. Right characterizes the KLA as "hard left," but a New York Times (March 28) report states that many KLA leaders trace their roots to a fascist unit set up during World War II by the Italian occupiers. Vickers' Between Serb and Albanian: A History of Kosovo (1998) discusses Albanian separatists in the 1980s and how paramilitary groups with covert Western support began targeting Serbs in Kosovo. Johnstone (1998a) offers a brief organizational overview of the ethnic Albanian movement dating back several decades. By one account, the KLA was founded at a secret meeting that took place in Pristina, Kosovo's capital, in early 1993. A leading role in its creation was taken by a clandestine, fringe political party called the Levizja Popullore e Kosoves (LPK), the People's Movement of Kosovo, and it remains today the KLA's political wing. Founded in Germany in 1982, the LPK consistently argued that the only way to achieve independence was through violence and an armed insurrection. The KLA's leaders include 29-year-old Hashim Thaci, who is the head of the Political Directorate, military commander, and premier designate of the provisional government of Kosovo; Bardhyl Mahmuti, the organization's Swiss-based eminence grise; Jashar Salihu, the chairman of the Homeland Calling fund; and Pleurat Sejdiu, the KLA's London representative (Judah, 1999).

At the end of 1997, the KLA was a force of no more than 50 to 100 armed men, but now, due to recruitment and press-ganging to bolster its ranks, it is the fastest growing insurgency in the world. Its core elements are said to include former Yugoslav intelligence (UDBA - Internal State Security Service), army, and police officials of ethnic Albanian descent,(6) plus veterans of the Bosnian war, who are assisted by Iranians, American Vietnam veterans, and assorted other trainers. In July 1998, General Wesley Clarke expressed displeasure over the flow of professional soldiers from Croatia to Kosovo to bolster the rebel movement (Hedges, 1998). Recently, British Special Air Service (SAS) and U.S. special forces teams have been working undercover in Kosovo with the KLA to identify Serbian targets for NATO bombing raids (Sherwell, 1999). The SAS is advising the KLA at their strongholds in northern Albania, where the KLA has launched a major recruitment and training operation. According to high-ranking KLA officials, the SAS is using two camps near Tirana, the Albanian capital, and another on the Kosovar border to teach KLA officers how to conduct intelligence-gathering operations on Serbian positions. According to a London Telegraph report, the KLA is negotiating for a long-term training deal with Military and Professional Resources International, a mercenary company run by former American officers who operate with semi-official approval from the Pentagon and played a key role in building up Croatia's armed forces (Ibid.).

Weapons, money, and volunteers pour in from the extensive Albanian diaspora: over 200,000 Kosovar Albanians live in New York; 600,000 in Germany and Switzerland; many others live in Turkey, Italy, France, and England (Leyne, 1999; Holbrooke, 1998). According to the Washington Post (July 27, 1998), contributions from the Albanian diaspora to the armed resistance total nearly one million dollars per month. They have contributed money (three percent of their earnings in tax was asked) first to the exile government of Ibrahim Rugova's self-proclaimed Kosovo Republic (which has amassed an estimated $300 million) and then to the KLA's Homeland Calling fund (Judah, 1999). In the United States, many Albanian Americans like Florin and Burim Krasniqi have provided substantial amounts of money and materiel to the KLA, including vital communications equipment (Krause, 1998; Nazi, 1999). According to Layne (1999), the dream of a Greater Albania could be fulfilled by organizing the Western European and American diaspora of ethnic Albanians, funding the Kosovo Liberation Army, publicizing the grim living conditions and savage human-rights abuses in Kosovo, dramatically disobeying Milosevic's hateful policies, starting a war of terrorism on the Serb cops, and demanding NATO intervention.

The Clinton administration is aware ("concerned") that numerous stories have appeared in the European and U.S. press alleging KLA involvement in narcotrafficking. Alfred McCoy's The Politics of Heroin in Southeast Asia details the historic intersection of U.S. intelligence agencies, heroin trafficking, and counterinsurgency in the post-World War II period. The U.S. government has turned a blind eye to, or collaborated with, the narcotics operations of Southeast Asian drug lords and Nicaraguan contras who were allied with the United States in Indochina and Central America (Viviano, 1999b). Drug running plays an important role in the insurgency in Colombia today, where the U.S. is also deeply involved. A similar dynamic characterizes Yugoslavia, which was part of the famous Balkan Route for smuggling heroin and other drugs from Turkey and the Middle East to western Europe, and remains a transit country for narcotics smuggling. It is the principal thoroughfare for an illicit drag traffic worth $400 billion annually. During the breakup of Yugoslavia, the emergent Federal Republic of Yugoslavia was subject to U.N. trade sanctions, which reduced the opportunities for narcotics trafficking through the country; however, narcotics trafficking appears to have increased since U.N. trade sanctions were suspended after the signing of the Dayton accords (U.S. Department of State, 1999). In 1996, the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration reported that ethnic Albanians from Kosovo Province were considered to be second only to Turkish groups as the predominant heroin smugglers along the Balkan Route. In 1997, Interpol reported that Kosovar Albanians hold the largest share of the heroin market in Switzerland, Austria, Belgium, Germany, Hungary, the Czech Republic, Norway, and Sweden. According to Michel Koutouzis (in Viviano, 1999b), a senior researcher at Geopolitical Drug Watch who is regarded as Europe's leading expert on the Balkan Route, the militarization of the Kosovar drug trade diverted drag profits and contributed to the downfall of more moderate forces like Rugova. Under Rugova, clans invested in growth, such as better housing and health care, through a form of social taxation on the proceeds from the drug trade. With the outbreak of war, Koutouzis added, "the investment is only in destruction - and the KLA's first effort was to destroy the influence of Rugova, and no one in the West did much to help him."

Writing in Mother Jones, Layne (1999) describes the KLA as a small, well-funded army of thugs bent on widespread civil war and fueled by the same virulent nationalism of which the West accuses the Serbs:

The architects of this war are themselves ethnic Albanians - the extremist leaders of the Kosovo Liberation Army are the same ethnic Albanians who made fortunes by smuggling weapons, heroin, and illegal immigrants in the chaotic years following the collapse of Yugoslavia's and Albania's communist regimes. On this, even the generally hawkish Republican Party seems to agree.

A Time Magazine report (see Calabresi, 1999) claims that the KLA transformed itself in just over a year from "a disorganized network of bandits into a presentable, if limited, guerrilla army." The KLA's brutality had won its members the label of "terrorists" a year ago, and "they have killed hundreds of Serb security forces in ambushes and sniper attacks." The report adds "millions more in smuggling revenues" to the KLA's sources of revenue. The KLA's decentralized command structure has "produced a wide range of KLA leaders, from bloodthirsty terrorists who target civilians to patriots ready to die for their putative country. Some commanders are outright criminals. Interpol cops say parts of the KLA are funded by profits from smuggling along the infamous 'Balkan Route,' the main line for 90% of Western Europe's heroin" (Ibid.) For detailed discussions of the interplay between the drugs-for-arms trade, organized crime, and the KLA, see Straffor (1999), Layne (1999), Viviano (1995), the Federation of American Scientists (n.d.), and the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia's "White Paper" (1998), which contains numerous extracts from the European press. To suspicions of KLA drug dealing in Europe, the Right adds that the KLA has close ties to Islamist "terrorist forces" like Osama bin Laden, the Hezbollah, and Iran (Family Research Council, 1999). High-level Israeli officials have expressed similar concerns (see Derfner and Sedan, 1999).

Beyond questions regarding the character and alliances of the KLA leadership and membership are critiques of its policies and tactics. According to former diplomat Walter R. Roberts (1999), the author of Tito, Mihailovic, and the Allies, 1941-1945, the situation in Kosovo became really ominous in February 1998 when the KLA came into existence and attempted to change the status in Kosovo by military means, including the killing of many Serbs. Zinn (1999) has chided the KLA for its decision to turn to armed struggle to gain independence, putting their countrymen at risk, when a more protracted nonviolent campaign of resistance was already ongoing and should have continued. Political reporter Johnstone (1998a) and former State Department official Kenney (1998) criticize the ethnic Albanian independence movement for refusing to exercise their political rights under the Serbian Constitution, arguing that they could have built multiparty democracy in Serbia, elected enough representatives to play a swing role in Serbia's Parliament, and altered the political balance of power in Belgrade. Kenney argues that although Kosovar Albanians justly felt provoked and beset by Serbian authorities, their abstentionism quite self-consciously worsened their situation. The million Albanian votes could have ousted Milosevic from power, but they did not want him to go. The ongoing labeling of Serbia as profoundly evil - and they themselves, by virtue of being anti-Serb, as the good guys - was a central condition for them to achieve their goals.

U.S. intelligence reported almost immediately that the KLA intended to draw NATO into its fight for independence by provoking Serb forces into further atrocities. Warnings to the rebel leaders from Washington restrained them somewhat, but they assassinated a small-town Serb mayor near Pristina and were believed responsible for the slaying of six Serb youths at the Panda Cafe in Pec on Dec. 14. That served, one U.S. official said, as "the sort of antipode" to Serb violence: "Pec was 'bad Albanians.' And one of our difficulties, particularly with the Europeans...was getting them to accept the proposition that the root of the problem is Belgrade" (Gellman, 1999b).

Formerly, the Kosovars had viewed granting Kosovo the status of a third republic within Yugoslavia as a transitional stage in achieving Kosovo's independence - an option that was attractive to the international community as it did not result in changing the international border. Yet by mid-1998, the Kosovars had rejected this view, with an international protectorate and demilitarization seen as interim steps toward independence. Since the KLA's agenda of independence contradicted U.S. policy - retaining the integrity of current borders, i.e., a negotiated Serb-Albanian compromise that would keep Kosovo within Serbia, with maximum autonomy - it was difficult to cast the ethnic Albanians solely as victims. However, Richard Holbrooke, the architect of the current U.S.-Serbian policy, reveals in his memoir, To End a War, a tendency to one-sidedly deny the authenticity of Serb nationalism. He accuses the Serbs of committing almost all the wartime atrocities, of being least willing to make peace, and blames the Serbs as criminally responsible for starting Yugoslavia's civil wars, while shrugging off Croat and Muslim culpability (Kenney, 1998). Holbrooke (1998) stated in mid-1998 that he understood the KLA's goal to be "to re-create the Greater Albania that existed briefly during the 30's and 40's, which includes Albania, Kosovo, and part of Macedonia." That "would unravel Southeastern Europe and dramatically increase the chances of a general war." For that reason, as early as February 1998, the State Department began calling the KLA terrorists, the argument being that by openly criticizing the guerrillas, the U.S. hoped to forestall another outbreak of the ethnic cleansing and religious violence that tore apart Bosnia and other regions of the former Yugoslav Republic (Krause, 1998). When U.S. special envoy Robert Gelbard visited the Balkans in 1998, he publicly vilified the Kosovo Liberation Army, saying, "I know a terrorist when I see one, and these men are terrorists" (Vest, 1999).

In Washington foreign policy circles, some regard this statement as the beginning of a chain reaction that resulted in the current situation, rife with the death of both human beings and democratic movements. When Gelbard spoke, the KLA was a fairly marginal force, seen by many in both Belgrade and Washington as a diplomatic irritant. Belgrade interpreted Gelbard's comments as approval to act against the KLA with impunity, which, in practice, meant the massacre of nearly 100 people (mostly women and children) in Kosovo's Benitsar enclave.... By not taking the Kosovars' nonviolent struggle seriously, and by giving the Serbs a green light to massacre in the name of anti-KLA operations, the U.S. helped radicalize many Kosovars who had previously inclined toward nonviolence and didn't necessarily share the KLA's stated goal, which is not merely independence from Kosovo but the establishment of a new, pan-Albanian federation that would encompass Kosovo, Albania, and parts of Macedonia and Montenegro - not exactly stabilizing goals for the Balkans (Ibid.)

Yet by the spring of 1999, U.S. political and military strategists had made an about face, with the KLA now central to any definition of victory. Army General Henry Shelton, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, discussed what victory for NATO would constitute: "I think that when we have degraded Milosevic's forces to the point that he either seeks a political settlement or until the balance of power shifts in the favor of the KLA in Kosovo is the way I would define it right now" (Burns, 1999). Defense Secretary Cohen and the CIA have advocated actively supporting the KLA as a surrogate for allied ground troops (Storey, 1999). Senators Mitch McConell (R-Ky.) and Joe Lieberman (D-Conn.) are reportedly promoting the idea of increased support for the KLA, and NATO alliance spokesman James Shea enthusiastically predicted that the KLA would "rise from the ashes" and play an increasingly important role in the current campaign. The KLA's shifting fortunes have much to do with their successful strategy of appealing to the international community based on human rights, an appeal that resonates with a frustration created by the evident lack of the political will needed to seriously address war crimes, crimes against humanity, and genocide in the post-Cold War world.

Atrocities Management and Double Standards

Atrocities management, according to Herman (1999), is central to the effective demonization of enemies and crucial to the selectivity and hypocrisy in U.S. foreign policy at least since the Vietnam War. It requires a gross misunderstanding of the issues, as well as the context of the actions taken. The Serbs have committed terrible acts in Kosovo and deserve condemnation, but past NATO policies have contributed to the ongoing violence and are part of the problem. Indeed, their bombing strategy is the culmination of policies that have exacerbated the crisis. Like most wars in history, the Balkan wars of the last five years have given rise to atrocities by the Yugoslav government in Kosovo and in Bosnia-Herzogovina, by the KLA, and by the Croatians and Bosnians in the previous war. Even then, Lt. General Satish Nambiar (1999), First Force Commander and Head of Mission of the United Nations Forces deployed in the former Yugoslavia in 1992-1993, has stated that "with 28,000 forces under me and with constant contacts with UNHCR and the International Red Cross officials, we did not witness any genocide beyond killings and massacres on all sides that are typical of such conflict conditions. I believe none of my successors and their forces saw anything on the scale claimed by the media."

Western policies and actions have guaranteed that the conflict would take on an ethnic dimension. As Johnson (1998a) observes, once the international community gave its assent to the unnegotiated disintegration of multi-ethnic Yugoslavia into ethnically defined states, the struggle was on for control of territory along ethnic lines:

In this struggle, Serbs, Croats, Muslims, and Albanians have all accused their territorial rivals of "genocide." These accusations reflect both genuine fears and political calculation, and outsiders should be prudent in echoing such inflammatory terms. In the West, emphasis on "genocide" by analogy with totally different historic situations has obscured the primary political cause of "ethnic cleansing": fear that the presence of members of a politically organized ethnic group will be used to support territorial claims.

Catherine Samary (1999), the author of Yugoslavia Dismembered (1995), accords with this view:

It was ultimately fear rather than hatred that gave nationalism its mass support. In such uncertainty ordinary people came to fear that unless they ended up inside the right borders, with the right state authorities, they could lose jobs, home, land, rights, identity, and even their lives. War became an instrument for displacing people in order to change the ethnic composition of territories.

NATO's military intervention in Kosovo ostensibly relies on a "moral imperative" to prevent the destructive effects emanating from the resulting breakdown of civility. This takes the form in international law of a "right of humanitarian intervention," which requires the creation of a mechanism that allows the international community to intervene militarily in the internal affairs of a sovereign state to enforce human rights compliance. There is no consensus on the doctrine among United Nations members or among international law experts. Among the latter, Thomas Franck and Nigel Rodely contend that countries have no legal right of humanitarian intervention under international law (see Lobel and Ratner, 1999; for a summary of the opposing view, see Chomsky, 1999a). They note that given the failure of countries to intervene when real humanitarian atrocities have taken place - such as those in Nazi Germany, South Africa under apartheid, Indonesia, and more recently, in Turkey - claims of humanitarian intervention are highly suspect. Moreover, such a doctrine reinforces North/South dependency relations, since only the powerful can realistically intervene on these grounds. Alternatively, the "moral imperative" in international relations discourse suggests that to ignore war crimes is to condone them and that it is essential for the international community to realize that it must "do something" (Colwill, 1995). This sentiment is echoed in progressive forums, such as the Mother Jones forum on Kosovo (see Mother Jones MoJo Wire, 1999). However, the deterrent effect of tribunals (much less of military interventions, e.g., against Noriega or Saddam Hussein) is dubious:

As with the Nuremberg and Tokyo international criminal tribunals after World War II, it is very difficult to judge...the real deterrence value of such courts. Unfortunately, the level of criminal activity since 1945 has surpassed the worst nightmares of those who prosecuted the war criminals of that era (Scheffer, 1999).

Violations of international humanitarian law include genocide, crimes against humanity, grave breaches of the Geneva Conventions, and violations of the laws and customs of war. According to the Geneva Convention, genocide consists of acts "committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial or religious group." Adjudication of such crimes falls within the purview of the Hague International Tribunal, which many view as the model for a permanent international criminal court. The International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia was established in 1993 with a brief to prosecute war crimes, crimes against humanity, and genocide committed in the civil wars in Yugoslavia since 1991. It was the first such tribunal since the International Military Tribunals at Nuremberg and Tokyo were set up to try Nazi and Japanese war criminals at the end of World War II (the tribunal on Rwanda was the second). Of the Serbs indicted, the Bosnian Serb leader, Radovan Karadzic, has still not been arrested. The military is responsible for apprehending war criminals, At the time of the Karadzic indictment, the U.S. military and President Clinton were reeling from the failed effort to capture warlord Mohamed Farah Aidid in Somalia, which dealt the entire concept of peacekeeping efforts by the U.N. and other multilateral groups a significant setback and affected a variety of other conflict situations, most notably in Rwanda and the former Yugoslavia. Cynics have suggested that war crime tribunals will never seriously be able to bring leaders accused of atrocities to trial when the possibility of peace ultimately depends on concluding successful negotiations with them - unless it is a case of "victor's justice," where the offending power has been vanquished militarily.

In the current climate, comparisons of Slobodan Milosevic with Nazi war criminals like Hitler and demands that he be removed suggest a "victor's justice" solution, and have a negative impact on a negotiating or diplomatic track. Still, the tribunal could follow the chain of evidence to the highest levels of political leadership, including President Milosevic. According to Louise Arbour (1999), chief prosecutor for the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, there is no immunity for anyone, from heads of states to the highest political or military levels. "The question is, what will the evidence sustain in terms of whether or not the leadership ordered these activities, orchestrated these activities? We are looking not at individual atrocities. Our mandate is to prosecute, for instance, crimes against humanity, which have to be widespread or systemic killings, extermination, rape, torture, enslavement, deportation. It has to be on a widespread or a systemic scale, and then, of course, we have to examine what is the command responsibility for these crimes." Anecdotal evidence like that from refugees broadcast on CNN is instructive, but it must be verifiable. In short, these are empirical questions, verifiable through reliable intelligence, and the crimes must be systemic.

Mary Robinson, the U.N.'s top human rights official, has criticized NATO attacks on Yugoslavia for killing large numbers of civilians and has questioned the legality of the bombings. She told the U.N. Human Rights Commission in Geneva that the international war crimes tribunal could investigate both sides in the conflict. "The actions of individuals belonging to Serb forces, the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA), or NATO may therefore come under scrutiny, if it appears that serious violations of international humanitarian law have occurred," she said (BBC, 1999c). However, the moral justification for intervention by those prosecuting the war is best made when immoralities are one-sided. Since the bombing campaign opened, NATO has relied on the KLA for intelligence. The Serbs' characterization of the KLA as "terrorists" has been dropped by U.S. diplomats, and the KLA view of Serb actions as "genocide," "ethnic cleansing," and a form of "classic fascism, exceeding that of World War II" has become current (BBC, 1999b). Most U.S. and NATO officials tend to avoid calling the atrocities in Kosovo a case of genocide. Some have spoken of "indicators" of genocide, but England's Tony Blair has decried "racial genocide." United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan told the U.N.'s Human Rights Commission that there were signs genocide had been taking place in the province, but added that the world body could not verify this as it had no presence on the ground (Evans, 1999).

As Chomsky (1999b) observes, "the term genocide, as applied to Kosovo is an insult to the victims of Hitler. In fact, it's revisionist to an extreme. If this is genocide, then there is genocide going on all over the world." Experts in surveillance photography, wartime propaganda, and Balkan diplomacy say there is reason to believe that atrocities are being committed against ethnic Albanians in Kosovo, but have serious doubts about claims of genocide. According to Robert Hayden, director of the University of Pittsburgh's Center for Russian and East European Studies, "NATO is running a propaganda campaign.... There have been lots of discrepancies in the official story, but...until now there has been amazingly little scrutiny of that story" (see Radin and Palmer, 1999).

Effective demonization of Milosevic and the Serbs to justify a human rights-driven war policy meant courting human rights organizations and other significant individuals. CounterPunch (1999) reports that as the U.S. stepped up its bombing raids against Yugoslavia, Harold Koh, assistant secretary of state for democracy, human rights and labor, met with the leaders of several U.S. human rights groups to explain that Secretary of State Albright had convinced the Defense Department and President Clinton that human rights concerns should be the driving force behind the bombing of the Serbs. Koh expressed the hope that the human rights groups would support the mission and promised that if they did, Albright might even meet with them in person in the near future. The article takes Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch to task for jumping on the bandwagon.

The essay did not mention Physicians for Human Rights (PHR), an organization that has provided evidence of war crimes for the International Criminal Tribunals on the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda and whose president is Charles Clements. PHR favored the bombing and had, already in December 1998, issued a report detailing Serbian war crimes in Kosovo (concerning 75 cases of alleged abuse of Albanian Kosovar health professionals) and calling for a human rights component to be incorporated into the Kosovo Diplomatic Mission mandate (see PHR, 1998). Albert Cevallos, the Balkans Program coordinator for the International Crisis Group (a private "think tank" dedicated to preventing and resolving global crises that is financed by governments and private sources, including general support funds from George Soros' Open Society Institute) stated: "the use of bombing to bring Serbia back into the peace process is acceptable, but only as one step on the road to peace" (Mother Jones MoJo Wire, 1999). Another voice supporting some aspects of administration's initiatives was Doug Hostetter of the Fellowship of Reconciliation, who, although opposing NATO air strikes in Kosovo and Serbia, proposed that Milosevic was carrying our "genocidal acts" and that the U.S. should seek to bring him before the war crimes tribunal.

The roles of Amnesty International (AI) and Human Rights Watch (HRW) differ markedly. Johnstone (1998a) points out that the traditional AI approach consists in broadly encouraging governments to enact and abide by humanitarian legal standards by calling attention to particular cases of injustice, excessive severity, or violation of legal norms. It thereby participates, through outside moral support, in various internal struggles for the advancement of humanitarian legal standards, in alliance with local forces engaged in such combat. Although an AI press release (1999a) does say that "violations of human rights lie at the heart of the current conflict in Kosovo," the organization took "no position on the political issues surrounding the status of Kosovo and the threat of military intervention on the part of NATO" (1999b). An example of the AI's approach is found in their report (1998) cataloguing human rights abuses in Kosovo, especially cases involving the "disappeared" and "missing." It details the actions of Serb police and the KLA, the latter being "accused of the abduction and presumed unlawful killing or detention of ethnic Albanians whom it alleges are 'collaborators' with the Serbian authorities, although they have failed to define what they understand by 'collaboration.' Other victims include members of the Serbian, Montenegrin, Romani, and other ethnic groups." Gellman (1999b) adds to the list of victims Serb mail careers and others associated with Belgrade killed by the KLA.

The approach of Human Rights Watch and its affiliate, the Vienna-based International Helsinki Federation for Human Rights seems to lack the even-handedness of Amnesty International. As Johnstone (1998a) notes, Aaron Rhodes, executive director of the International Helsinki Federation for Human Rights invoked highly incendiary imagery when writing that Albanians in Kosovo "have lived for years under conditions similar to those suffered by Jews in Nazi-controlled parts of Europe just before World War II. They have been ghettoized. They are not free, but politically disenfranchised and deprived of basic civil liberties." Instead of calling attention to specific abuses that might be corrected or reformed and allying with reformist forces in the targeted country, Johnstone argues, such an approach seeks to discredit the targeted state. Moreover, its rejection of any effort at remaining neutral between conflicting parties contributes to a disintegrative polarization rather than to reconciliation and mutual understanding and even to a deepening cycle of repression and chaos that eventually could justify, or require, outside intervention. In fairness to HRW, their 1998 report does address KLA violations of "the laws of war by such actions as the taking of civilian hostages and by summary executions. Although on a lesser scale than the government abuses, these too are violations of international standards, and should be condemned."

One could argue that the discrediting of, say, Pinochet's Chile would not detract from a progressive agenda. There is even discussion among human rights and humanitarian aid organizations over the issue of partisanship or neutrality in conflict situations. The Cold War often disguised the political/intelligence functions of well-intentioned humanitarian action, with little thought given to the ways in which outside resources were used or abused by factions in a conflict or even altered the payoffs to combatants in such a way as to encourage more intensive fighting. Recently, Weiss (1999: 20) argued in the lead article in the Carnegie Council's Ethics and International Affairs for a realist political humanitarianism, stating that "there is no exit strategy for humanitarians if states do not take their humanitarian responsibilities seriously and use coercion to halt genocide and other massive abuses of civilians." He believes that the convergence of humanitarian action and human rights activism will open a space for humanitarian concerns to play a central role in international politics and governance. It is certainly true that in the post-Cold War world order, humanitarian disasters take place in areas of little concern either geostrategically or economically to the great powers, who allow humanitarian efforts to cover for their diplomatic failures. Rieff (1999) makes the case that after Sarajevo in 1993, many American aid workers allowed themselves to believe that, despite the Vietnam War, U.S. power has become a force for good. There has been a developing consensus that:

if anything is to be done either to prevent or at least curtail a horror like the siege of Sarajevo, only the United States has both the political and the military power to do it. Human rights activists might prefer a standing U.N. army or a genuinely multilateral response, but they know from bitter experience that these are not realistic possibilities at present. Over the course of the 1990s, this recognition has caused many human rights activists to believe that American-led military operations are often the best available alternative and it has involved them in cooperating with and sometimes even lobbying the U.S. military itself and the U.S. political establishment and the Congress to deploy the military (Ibid.: 41).

Humanitarian workers and human rights activists have become the last interventionists, Rieff argues, not so much because they receive government subsidies, but because the logistical capabilities of U.S. and NATO military forces allow aid workers to do their jobs properly in places like Bosnia where conflicts are internal and take place between irregular forces, target civilians for extermination or forcible migration, and in which authorities fail to uphold international law. Yet many believe that a boundary is crossed when a nongovernmental organization overtly supports NATO military intervention or becomes a tool of U.S. foreign policy in terms of atrocity management. The role of Human Rights Watch in exposing "massacres" in Kosovo illustrates a tendency to strip actions from their context. The image has been projected - and not solely by HRW - of a Serb crackdown on an unarmed, peaceful Albanian populace, when, indeed, in 1998 the KLA had announced that the battle for unification of Kosovo with Albania had begun (Johnstone, 1998a). By 1999, the KLA had blundered into abandoning guerrilla warfare for a conventional campaign against much better equipped Serbian forces and diluting their forces while trying to control 40% of the territory in Kosovo Province.

Two atrocities brought to light by HRW, at Drenica in 1998 and at Racak in January 1999, were watershed events in the unfolding crisis. The Drenica region was the KLA's traditional base and in 1998 Milosevic launched his first serious offensive in Kosovo - beginning near Drenica (Gellman, 1999b), with reports of arbitrary killings and extrajudicial executions during police and military operations. The Drenica massacre transformed the KLA from what was still essentially a fringe group into a movement, a development considered to be a serious setback for the architects of U. S. policy in the Balkans (Krause, 1998). Fred Abrahams, Human Rights Watch's Kosovo expert who formerly worked at the Soros Foundation, stated of Drenica: "I think the evidence is very strong that these are war crimes, crimes that can be prosecuted under the war crimes tribunal in the Hague." As for the ethnic Albanian forces, they "have heart" (in Krause, 1998). The HRW September 1998 report of a mass grave in the Drenica region "was the first moment when Western public opinion turned," Abrahams said. "I'm convinced that the administration responded to Kosovo because the public was shocked" (Cole, 1999).

Abrahams has concentrated on exposing the plight of ethnic Albanians and his sources among them kept Human Rights Watch informed of Racak, the Yugoslavia war's equivalent of the Gulf of Tonkin incident in Vietnam. A Washington Post reconstruction of decision making in Washington and at NATO headquarters suggests that Racak transformed the West's Balkan policy as singular events seldom do. The atrocity convinced the administration and then its NATO allies to solve the Kosovo problem instead of keeping it safely confined. Clinton aired the plan with British Prime Minister Tony Blair, and by the end of January the die was cast for NATO's first war and the most consequential conflict in Europe since World War II (Gellman, 1999b). Yet, according to David Scheffer (1999), President Clinton's own U.S. Ambassador-at-Large for War Crimes Issues, "while the world's attention has been focused on the massacre last month of 45 civilians at Racak, Kosovo, and the resulting peace talks in Rambouillet, France, the atrocities in Sierra Leone are far greater in number and severity. The magnitude of massacres, mutilations, torture, rapes, and destruction of civilian property in Sierra Leone is so great that its full extent is unknown."

Organizations like Physicians for Human Rights and Human Rights Watch serve a valuable function. Each has extensive experience in the former Yugoslavia and each has been involved in establishing or supporting an international war crimes tribunal in The Hague. A HRW founder and former executive director, Aryeh Neier, the author of War Crimes: Brutality, Genocide, Terror, and the Struggle for Justice and currently president of the Soros Foundation and its Open Society Institute, perhaps set the organizational tone "to do something" since he was born in Nazi Germany and became a refugee at an early age. Elie Wiesel, speaking at a "White House Millennium Evening," introduced his comments with reference to the liberation of a small boy (himself) from Buchenwald by the U.S. and proceeded to defend NATO's intervention in Kosovo to "save those victims, those refugees, those who were uprooted by a man whom I believe that because of his crimes, should be charged with crimes against humanity. But this time, the world was not silent. This time, we do respond. This time, we intervene." Wiesel, a neoconservative with the Balkan Action Council (BAC), hopes that the action will deter future dictators. Similar reasons - and a sense of collective guilt on the part of "Serbian society," which "cheered on" executioners, those undertaking "genocide" in Bosnia and Kosovo - led Michael Lerner (1999), editor of Tikkun and onetime "spiritual adviser" to the Clintons, to add his name to a BAC ad in the New York Times calling for NATO ground forces in Yugoslavia. (Secretary of State Albright's background as a refugee who lost relatives in the Holocaust is also pertinent.) Yet the NATO bombing, which has killed civilians, wounded health professionals, destroyed hospitals in Nis and outside Belgrade, and caused the evacuation of 80,000 people outside Belgrade to escape a poison cloud released from raids on a petrochemicals, fertilizer, and refinery complex (Walker, 1999) should give pause to those advancing this line of argument. Perhaps they are willing to overlook NATO violations of international law as serving a higher justice, but how can they reconcile their political selectivity and gross double standard in choice of innocents to be protected from crimes against humanity? Here Chomsky's (1999a) observation that preintervention levels of casualties in Kosovo - estimated at 2,000 deaths and several hundred thousand refugees - suggests that a better policy for external powers would have been to "do nothing," rather than to "try to escalate the catastrophe," often the U.S. response. Following the writings of Quaker activist Mary Anderson, we should at least seek to do no harm.

Socialist International Support of NATO Intervention

As noted in The Nation (1999), the Kosovo crisis creates a profound dilemma for principled antimilitarists who do not wish to turn a blind eye to ethnic cleansing, with the corollary creation of a mass of powerless stateless persons, but cannot embrace the NATO air war. This does not deter Bogdan Denitch (1999), a member of the Democratic Socialists of America and the author of Ethnic Nationalism: The Tragic Death of Yugoslavia, who argues that opposition to U.S. military intervention is an understandable rule of thumb, but it "shouldn't become obsessive dogma. After all, most Europeans were happy with U.S. intervention in World War II." This analogy is weak: Serbia has invaded no other nation-state and while an irritant to European nations, Yugoslav coercive forces cannot compare with expansionist German militarism. Similarly, as Stephen F. Cohen (1999), professor of Russian studies and history at New York University, observes, the moral argument for NATO bombing rests primarily on a fraudulent analogy - equating Serbian treatment of Kosovar Albanians with the Nazi extermination of Jews. The analogy wantonly debases the historical reality and memory of the Holocaust: Milosevic's reign of terror has turned most Kosovars into refugees fleeing toward sanctuaries; Hitler gave most European Jews no exit and turned them into ash. Denitch couples support for the NATO bombing with a "case against inaction," arguing the need to stop and reverse the massive ethnic cleansing in Kosovo and to bring Milosevic to justice for carrying out crimes against humanity.

Denitch observes that most NATO governments are members of the Socialist International. Social democracy holds undisputed sway in all the major countries of Europe. The head of NATO, Secretary General Javier Solana, was once a leader of the Spanish Socialist Workers' Party and a critic of the Atlantic Alliance. Labour Party Prime Minister Tony B lair in England, Gerhard Schroder in Germany, Socialist Prime Minister Lionel Jospin in France, and Communist-turned-moderate Prime Minister Massimo d'Alema and former Prime Minister and E.U. Commission President-designate Romano Prodi in Italy - all are eminent proponents of social democracy in Europe. With the exceptions of Greece and Portugal, opinion polls indicate widespread public support for the continued bombing of Serb military targets and increasing acceptance of the idea of using ground troops - except for Germany (Sancton, 1999a). However, opposition to Washington's insistence on force increases the more closely one approaches the conflicted region, even within NATO (e.g., Greece and Italy). Social democratic support of the war has led one European observer to declare, "social democracy is the new right" (Ramonet, 1999). Having renounced the social compact, abandoned any hope of full employment or eradicating poverty, it has adopted a neoliberal program of encouraging privatization, dismantling the public sector, promoting concentrations and mergers of giant corporations, and now, war over negotiation in international relations (Heneghan, 1999; Ramonet, 1999).

Writing in Die Zeit, Germany's Klaus Hartung stated that "two lessons from our past are clashing - 'never again war' and 'never again Auschwitz'" (in Heneghan, 1999). The bombing campaign has support from all political parties except the former Communist Party of Democratic Socialism and the small, extreme right-wing Republikaner Party, although no party favors the use of ground troops (Moseley, 1999). Chancellor Gerhard Schroder, who presides over Germany's first red-green coalition, has faced criticism from the Social Democratic Party's left wing over plans for more market-oriented economic reforms and for his decision to take Germany into its first war since the fall of Hitler by joining in NATO's air attacks on Yugoslavia. The resignation of his left-wing rival, Finance Minister Oskar Lafontaine, in March 1999 (over the Kosovo crisis, making way for Schroder to also assume the party chairmanship) afforded proof of social democracy's inability to provide an alternative to the ruling neoliberal orthodoxy that now finds even Keynesianism too left-wing. The new "business friendly" finance minister, Hans Eichel, offered a cost-benefit analysis for the NATO bombing, stating that funding regional reconstruction would be cheaper in the long-run than allowing the consequences of wanton human rights abuses to continue (Reuters, 1999b). Germany's military role gives Bonn a new voice in world politics. Frustrated by the lack of diplomatic return on its economic might, Germany may now aspire to the role France has played in Europe as an intermediary between the United States and states hostile to U.S. influence. As Russia's chief creditor, Germany can apply subtle pressure on Russia to agree to NATO demands on Kosovo. Germany is skating on thin ice when it comes to criticisms of ethno-nationalism: efforts to reform a 1913 law that defines German citizenship in terms of ethnic ancestry (the bloodline principle) via dual citizenship for some of the eight million foreigners living in Germany provoked a nationwide outcry from German arch-conservatives and neo-Nazi fringe groups (Sancton, 1999b; Geiger, 1999).

NATO air strikes have led to a rift within Germany's traditionally pacifist Green Party, the junior partner in Schroder's coalition government; seven Green deputies broke with party leadership on March 26 and voted against Germany's participation in the air raids (Welt am Sonntag, April 11, 1999). Green Party Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer and Defense Minister Rudolf Scharping, who was once reprimanded by his Social Democratic Party for being too anti-NATO, have skillfully used Nazi terminology to describe Belgrade's campaign against the Kosovo Albanians. Anti-militarists are in disarray as leading figures like the Fischer, the central figure of the "realo" wing of the Green Party, compared Slobodan Milosevic to Adolf Hitler and said that he saw "a parallel to that primitive fascism" to garner support for humanitarian bombing (Reuters, 1999c). Fischer, who is supported in the party by Daniel Cohn-Bendit, the student leader of 1968 ("the truth is we are right to choose force in the Balkans"), has been called a traitor and a warmonger by his party comrades, but survived a challenge at the party congress that would have forced his resignation and caused the governing coalition to collapse (Macdonald, 1999; Sancton, 1999a; Cohen, 1999a and 1999b). Some 50,000 antiwar demonstrators took part in an Easter march against the bombing and antiwar ecologists broke into the Greens' Hamburg headquarters and sprayed graffiti stating "Grune Kriegstreiber" (Green warmongers) on the walls and fired pistol shots at photos of Fischer and Clinton.

In France, Gaullist President Jacques Chirac and Socialist Prime Minister Lionel Jospin are united behind the NATO operation. France is playing a more active role than any other European ally. Communist Party leader Robert Hue and far-right National Front chief Jean-Marie Le Pen both oppose the war (Heneghan, 1999; Sancton, 1999a). The Greens in France have abandoned their pacifist leanings to support the bombing and even call for ground troops to stem the humanitarian tragedy. In England, the Balkan conflict has divided Left and Right. Left-wing Labourite Tony Benn, Alan Clarke, Denis Healey, and Lord Carrington are opposed to the bombing, while Tony Blair, Labor leftists Michael Foot and Ken Livingstone, William Hague, Paddy Ashdown, Vanessa Redgrave, and the editor of the Sun are supporting the NATO offensive. Blair's (1999) rhetoric is replete with anti-totalitarian references: "This is a just war, based not on any territorial ambitions but on values. We cannot let the evil of ethnic cleansing stand. We must not rest until it is reversed. We have learned twice before in this century that appeasement does not work. If we let an evil dictator range unchallenged, we will have to spill infinitely more blood and treasure to stop him later." Tony Benn lamented that the bombing was "bound to cause casualties, worsen the humanitarian crisis and widen the Balkan crisis." According to Ali (1999), the U.S. has used its British Trojan Horse to lead a neoliberal drive in the E.U. "Kosovo is a neat operation in Western European terms to promote a new Anglo-American-French alliance to lead world politics and replace Franco-German hegemony." Blair's tough stance on Kosovo may be to highlight British leadership and his own nationalist credentials in preparation for Britain's merger into European Monetary Union, a divisive issue at home. In Italy, Prime Minister D'Alema voiced reservations about the bombing initially and announced his preference for a diplomatic solution. He is trying to avoid alienating the Italian Green Party and the Communist junior partners in his center-left coalition. The latter are troubled over the weakening of the U.N. that the NATO intervention implies, but do not wish to bring down the government. On April 3,100,000 people demonstrated in Rome against the NATO bombing campaign and over 50,000 marched a week later. The Italian and Greek governments called for a halt to the bombing in the earlier stages of the operation. After some persuasion, both governments went along with the campaign. In Greece, there is overwhelming popular opposition to NATO's attack against the Serbs, due to traditional bonds with Orthodox Christians in Serbia and the threat of spill over from Macedonia. The government of Prime Minister Costas Simitis has refused to take an active role in the NATO operation, providing only logistical support.

In the United States, antimilitarists and the Left failed to move effectively against U.S. policy. Coalitions organizing demonstrations offered different, problematic approaches. On the one hand, the International Action Center (in combination with the Workers World Party) was perceived to downplay Albanian suffering and thus to defend Milosevic by saying "Kosovo is Serbia." On the other had, the demand to "Stop the Bombing" was deemed insufficient. The Green Party USA (1999) and the Black Radical Congress (1999) offered deeper analyses for opposing the NATO bombing mission. Critical intellectuals like Noam Chomsky, Edward S. Herman, and Andre Gunder Frank (1999a, b, and c), among others, quickly and eloquently critiqued NATO's hypocrisy and rhetoric. ZNet, The Nation, and Mother Jones provided valuable forums, in print and on the Internet, that indicated wide dissension. Not surprisingly, the Socialist Scholars Conference split over the issue given its range of sponsors, from the Democratic Socialists of America to Monthly Review and the Socialist Register. As part of a larger, unresolved analysis, Johnstone (1998a) ventures the opinion that the readiness in the U.S. to consider denial of separatist ethnic rights as a violation of human rights represents a deviation that may account for the confusion of the U.S. Left, resulting from the critique of universal values and the rise of "identity politics." In the absence of a draft, and the memory of the Vietnam War but a footnote in history texts for most students, college campuses are quiet. The national climate has also been affected by romanticizations of World War II, such as in the films Saving Private Ryan and the Thin RedLine, and in the national best-seller, The Greatest Generation, by Tom Brokaw.

Although not part of NATO, the Israeli response to the bombing offers insight into the ideological and geopolitical dimensions of the crisis. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu at first greeted the crisis with "thundering silence," but stated that Israel "condemns the massacre being carried out by the Serbs, and denounces any mass murder." Foreign Minister Ariel Sharon, however, quoted in the newspaper Yediot Achronot, stated (though he subsequently denied it) that Israel had reason not to support the strikes out of fear that the Jewish state might one day be similarly targeted. Would NATO strike at Israel if the Arabs declared autonomy for the Galilee and links with the Palestinian Authority, as it had done in the wake of the Kosovo Albanians' attempts at autonomy? Later in the U.S., Sharon warned that the plight of ethnic Albanians could spread Islamic unrest and lead to a "new center of Islamic terrorism" in Europe. "The free world must look forward and see dangers in the future if a large bloc of Islamic states should develop what it's possible to call a Greater Albania," he said (see Definer and Sedan, 1999).

The May national elections (in which Labor's Ehud Barak defeated Netanyahu) affected the Israeli stance on NATO involvement in Kosovo. Sharon, a founder of the Likud bloc, told the New York Times he believed Likud could win the Israeli election if just three percent more of the immigrant community from the former Soviet Union (with which they still harbor emotional and business ties) would vote for its prime ministerial candidate, Netanyahu. Another boost to Likud's electoral chances would be a dramatic Russian-mediated deal between Israel and Syria's President Hafez Assad. That explains Sharon's (with the prime minister's acquiescence) flirtation with Russia and criticism of the NATO operation in Moscow, the suggestion that the Kosovar Muslims are linked to nations and organizations hostile to Israel, and the focus on Holocaust-era memories of Balkan collaboration with the Nazis - when the Serbs stood out for their brave resistance to the Germans (Landau, 1999). A Right-Left split emerged in the Israeli Knesset. Whereas the Right expressed reservations and even condemnation, the Labor "Left" welcomed the attacks on Yugoslavia. Former Labor Prime Minister Shimon Peres lashed out against the mixed messages conveyed by Israel over the NATO offensive against the Serbs. "For the first time after the Nazi Holocaust, when the world does not stand by, we do not know what to say?" Peres said. "We say one thing and then its opposite?" Peres later turned to the Israeli-Palestinian issue, equating far right-wing Moledet Knesset member Rehavam Ze'evi's advocacy of an Arab "transfer" to ethnic cleansing (JTA, 1999). In interviews with citizens, opinion was divided, but reference was made to both Serb and Albanian resistance to the German Holocaust. Others pleaded to leave the Holocaust out of the debate, since it was a unique event in history that should not be used for political reasons.

Right-Wing Peaceniks

Republicans and the Right take every opportunity to bash Clinton, whom they detest for appropriating their agenda on welfare, crime, drags, deficit reduction, and defense issues, and leaving only a pro-gun and anti-abortion plank. With presidential elections approaching, some of the same forces that propelled Cold War militarism and the counterinsurgencies of the Reagan-Bush years now strongly oppose the U.S.NATO action over Kosovo and demand that no U.S. ground troops be used in support of this policy. Their broader critique includes a discomfort with multilateralism, the primacy of international institutions over national interests, the Clinton-Blair "new internationalism" (combined with their "third way" governing philosophy that seeks a middle course between the inefficiencies of the welfare state and the inequities of unbridled capitalism), the placing of U.S. troops under foreign commands, and an alleged degradation of U.S. defense capabilities and budgets during Clinton's tenure. Another concern was the redefinition of the (General Colin) "Powell Doctrine" - the use of military intervention only with overwhelming and decisive force, when vital national interests are at stake and domestic political support is uwavering, with a clear exit strategy - as an all or nothing "paralysis doctrine" by Senator Joseph Biden, Madeleine Albright, and White House national security adviser Sandy Berger. Others express concern with the precedent: Is Israel next if they do not manage the Palestinian conflict suitably or could Latino populations in the Southwest use a similar pretext to secede? The forthcoming presidential elections temper the debate, with signs that Vice President Gore will bear the brunt of criticism for his part in losing "Clinton's war" and compromising national security by allowing vital satellite and nuclear secrets to come into China's possession (the "China sell-out" revisited). Asia scholar Chalmers Johnson even suggests that the bombing of the Chinese embassy in Yugoslavia could be related to efforts by "rogue" officials of the CIA and the U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency, combined with right-wing members of the Republican Party, who wish to ruin relations with China and stimulate a new Cold War in East Asia, isolate Russia, sabotage a U.N.-mediated peace in Europe, and get George Bush, Jr., elected president in the process.(7)

Attention has focused on Congressman Tom Campbell (R-Calif.), who introduced resolutions under the War Powers Act, one formally declaring war and one calling for the withdrawal of troops 30 days after the bill's passage, and on hawkish GOP internationalists (like presidential hopeful, John McCain [R-Ariz.]) and an increasing number of Democrats who insist that the war must be escalated even at the risk of U.S. casualties (see Gugliotta and Eilperin, 1999). Consistent with McCain's approach of calling for ground troops is the Balkan Action Council (BAC, 1999), a reincarnation of the Committee on the Present Danger (CPD), a neoconservative foreign policy lobby that was anti-detente, anti-SALT II, pro-Star Wars - in short, the blatant militarists who were backed by the military-industrial complex and who legitimized the military build-up under Carter and Reagan, as well as the U.S. interventions in Central America, Afghanistan, and Angola. The BAC Steering Committee includes Morton Abramowitz, Saul Bellow, Zbigniew Brzezinski, Richard Burt, Frank Carlucci, Dennis DeConcini, Paula Dobriansky, Geraldine Ferraro, Robert Hunter (principal architect of the "New NATO," including NATO enlargement), Philip Kaiser, Max M. Kampelman, Lane Kirkland, Jeane Kirkpatrick, Peter Kovler, Ron Lehman, John O'Sullivan, Richard Perle, Eugene Rostow, Donald Rumsfeld, Stephen Solarz, Helmut Sonnenfeldt (legal scholar at the Brookings Institution, who advised the administration on its legal strategy), William Howard Taft, Elie Wiesel, Paul Wolfowitz (Governor George W. Bush's foreign policy adviser), and Admiral Elmo Zumwalt. These individuals have moved in and out of high governmental positions in defense, arms control, and intelligence and related support institutions such as the CPD, the Center for Strategic and International Studies, the Council on Foreign Relations, the Committee for Peace and Security in the Gulf, Freedom House, the International Rescue Committee, and right-wing labor organizations associated with the anticommunist "free trade union movement." There is also overlapping board membership with the interventionist International Crisis Group.

The neoconservatives who came to prominence during the Reagan years included a disproportionate number of Jews who had lived through the Holocaust (the CPD itself was strongly pro-Israel) and promoted a moral doctrine of intervention. CPD stalwart Jeane Kirkpatrick formulated the "Reagan Doctrine," which believed in the moral obligation to wipe out communism and foster worldwide democracy - although it also urged support for "authoritarian" regimes, even though they abused the human rights of their citizens (see Diamond, 1995; Bodenheimer and Gould, 1989). This group has maintained its traditional preoccupation with the erosion of U.S. power abroad. In mid-1998, members of an expanded BAC/intelligence community grouping called upon the U.S. to adopt a more muscular policy of removing Saddam Hussein from power; months before the Kosovo bombing began in 1999, on the pretext of defending "NATO's credibility," the Balkan Action Council (1999) called for an end to negotiations, a withdrawal of international monitors, NATO air strikes and ground forces, autonomy for Kosovo, and holding Milosevic accountable for war crimes.

Yet opposition to the U.S.-NATO Kosovo intervention as a model for future actions around the world is heard from various sectors of the Right. A Heritage Foundation backgrounder states plainly that committing U.S. troops to a ground war in Kosovo would be fighting the wrong war, in the wrong place, and for the wrong reasons (see Holmes, 1999). Pushing utopianism to new extremes, the report recommends that the U.S. should arm and train "Kosovar resistance forces," with such aid "conditioned on guarantees from the Albanian Kosovar leadership that it (1) will not resort to terrorism against Serb civilians; (2) will not pursue the goal of a Greater Albania, which would cause further destabilization; and (3) will not fund its activities with profits from narcotics trafficking." The American Enterprise Institute, via Jeane J. Kirkpatrick, uncritically supports the U.S.-NATO bombing, but also states that the U.S. should "arm Kosovo, as earlier Croatia and Bosnia were provided arms and assistance, enabling them to defend themselves.... It is not dominoes we must be concerned about in the Balkans; it is the contagion of mass murder. The only known antidote is the imposition of law and civilization" (Kirkpatrick, 1999).

Other leading lights of the conservative movement oppose Clinton's Kosovo intervention. Patrick Buchanan (1999) argues that "the war was a folly to begin with; surely, the answer is to cut our losses and let the idiot-adventurers who urged the attack resign to write their memoirs, rather than send 100,000 U.S. troops crashing into the Balkans to save the faces and careers of our blundering strategists." He does not support arming the Kosovars, fearing "another Afghanistan - in the underbelly of Europe" (see also Boris Kagarlitsky, 1999, on this point). The lone African American candidate for the Republican nomination, talk show host Alan Keyes, condemned the Kosovo bombing campaign as an unjustified act of aggression on a sovereign nation (DelVecchio and Wildermuth, 1999). To the roaring approval of the anti-abortion, pro-gun, grass-roots California Republican Assembly, Keyes thundered: "Declare the war, declare it now, or declare it over get us out!" Christian Right presidential candidate Gary Bauer has expressed opposition to U.S. military involvement in Kosovo, since it is not certain to solve the region's endemic conflicts (San Francisco Chronicle, April 22, 1999). Lt. Col. Robert Maginnis (Ret. Army), Senior Director for National Security and Foreign Affairs at Bauer's anti-abortion Family Research Council states that "the ethnic Albanian sector should become autonomous, but the Kosovo Liberation Army must not be armed. The KLA has close ties to Islamist terrorist forces like Hezbollah and Iran and the KLA is a suspected drug dealer in Europe" (Family Research Council, 1999). (As an aside, the Vatican has opposed distributing the "morning-after pill" to rape victims among Kosovo refugees [see Goodman, 1999].)

The often conspiratorially minded John Birch Society came out against the war since "the mission would advance the cause of international narco-terrorism, help entrench the European network of the world's most notorious Islamic terrorist [Osama bin Laden], and accelerate the erosion of U.S. sovereignty." This article refers to an August 12, 1998, analysis by the U.S. Senate Republican Policy Committee, which stated that "planning for a U.S.-led NATO intervention in Kosovo is now largely in place.... The only missing element seems to be an event - with suitably vivid media coverage - that would make the intervention politically salable, in the same way that a dithering Administration finally decided on intervention in Bosnia in 1995 after a series of 'Serb mortar attacks' took the lives of dozens of civilians attacks which, upon closer examination, may in fact have been the work of the Muslim regime in Sarajevo, the main beneficiary of the intervention." Others on the Right from Christian broadcasters fearing that diversion of U.S. troops abroad weakens the nation as Armageddon approaches to Rush Limbaugh - also weigh in against the NATO intervention.

Although there is a convergence of interests between antimilitarists and sectors of the Right on the issue of "no U.S. troops," clear differences arise over "arming the Kosovars." There is no hope for a common platform on the issue of war and defense spending priorities, any more than there is in the environmental arena, where the Right's social agenda is motivated by racist and anti-immigrant sentiments.

Concluding Comments

NATO's air campaign to dislodge Yugoslav forces from Kosovo costs at least $50 million a day and could cost as much as $70 to $100 million a day. Using ground forces to finish the job could cost $200 million per day (Bloomberg, 1999b). The war has already cost the NATO countries approximately $10 billion, representing resources that could be better spent for unmet civilian needs at home and abroad, including providing adequate backing to U.N. or other internationally-based peacekeeping forces that could be used to protect civilian populations from state-sponsored genocidal actions in Yugoslavia or elsewhere. The cost of a single cruise missile could provide the seeds and tools for 50,000 poor peasants in the Third World to grow their own food for a year. As "Business Leaders for Sensible Priorities" - with sponsors ranging from Ted Turner, Paul Newman, and Ben & Jerry's to Working Assets - pointed out in a full-page ad in the New York Times (March 24, 1999), the elimination of 6,500 nuclear weapons at $17 billion a year would pay for 425,000 teachers; canceling the 339 F-22 fighters, at a cost of $11 billion a year, would fund health insurance for all 11 million uninsured American children; and freeing up four billion dollars a year from the Pentagon would fund 971,000 kids in Head Start. Moreover, dedicating a small fraction of the current war chest to the United Nations or the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) verification mission would have made much more sense for creating a secure environment in the former Yugoslavia. Preventive diplomacy - genuine support the nonviolent Kosovar movement and timely attention to the grievances of the Kosovars at the 1995 Dayton meeting - would have proved to be a bargain compared to the costs of military operations. The cost of preventive deployment of a modest U.S. force in Macedonia, which has been credited with helping to keep this country out of the Balkan wars, only amounted to $11 million a year. Since March 1995, when the U.N.-sponsored force was deployed in Macedonia, U.S. expenses amounted to about one-half the cost of the F-117 fighter plane lost over Yugoslavia (Valasek, 1999b). So, too, would addressing the massive polarization of wealth in Europe, since Kosovo is the most impoverished area in all of Europe. Congress should reverse its defense priorities by reducing the military budget. A more prudent approach would abandon the two-war strategy and replace it with a strategy based on one major regional conflict, with an emphasis on peacekeeping. This would allow for additional force reductions. The main threats to U.S. interests take the form of terrorism, the spread of weapons of mass destruction, and the escalation of ethnic conflicts. Spending tens of billions of dollars on stealth fighter planes, attack submarines, and Star Wars missile defenses has little impact on these problems (Hartung, 1999). For the sake of the victims of modern wars, especially women and children, the Clinton administration should reverse its opposition to the Oslo accord banning the production, use, and export of antipersonnel landmines.

The U.S. has the military and political power to design and control key international institutions (e.g., the IMF, the Word Trade Organization, and the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia), as well as to undermine those it dislikes, such as UNESCO. It has used this clout regularly to discipline international institutions into conforming to U.S. interests, and the current circumvention of the U.N. is a prime example. By so doing, the U.S. has placed itself above the rule of international law and international institutions - to the extent that hawkish policy analysts like Samuel Huntington warn that Washington is becoming the "rogue superpower" and in the eyes of much of the world is considered the single greatest external threat to their societies. Despite their imperfections, there is a need to preserve international law, the United Nations, the World Court, and international treaties in the service of human rights and the rights of peoples. In the absence of Cold War pretexts, the right of "humanitarian intervention" is likely to be more frequently invoked in coming years. Endorsing a principle that holds that a military alliance like NATO can declare the universal right to intervene in the internal affairs of another country is highly questionable, however heinous the behavior of the country in question may be. We may soon regret the principle, even though we may endorse a particular application.

Human rights violations must be remedied by peaceful means, and wars of aggression undertaken "to defend human rights" violate the cardinal principles of outlawing war and prohibiting the use of force to settle international differences. Some have argued (Wilmer, 1998) that where civility has completely broken down within a state, the international community and global civil society must be willing to intervene with force if necessary. This assumes a willingness to devote the resources and loss of life that troop involvement would entail for the protection of U.N.-designated "safe areas." In Kosovo, there continues to be a lack of resolve on the ground troops needed to prevent a humanitarian catastrophe.(8) Moreover, there is little thought about what to do once the shooting stops. For beyond the direct violence unleashed by civil wars, genocide, or ethnic cleansing, structural violence such as discrimination, marginalization, imperialism, and repression must also be met with new forms of reconciliation.

This war violates the Daton Accords and marks the transition of NATO into a worldwide police force. It severely undermines the role of the U.N. Security Council, the supreme arbiter on international conflicts, as well as the U.S. Congress' prerogative to declare war. In most European countries, the bombing was ordered by governments without a parliamentary vote, undermining the role of parliament. In addition, a series of human rights are violated by NATO, not the least the "third generation" rights such as the rights to peace, development, and a healthy environment (TFF, 1999). Preventive diplomacy would better be served by developing clear ground rules for delegating peacekeeping and conflict prevention to broad-based regional organizations such as the OSCE and by strengthening U.N. peacekeeping capabilities, starting with the repayment of U.N. dues owed by the U.S. (without the usual right-wing riders attached) to support the development of a standing, credible police-oriented peacekeeping force that would replace the current system whereby the Secretary General must seek commitments on a case-by-case basis. This force could be financed either by a modest tax on international financial transactions or through Nobel laureate Oscar Arias's suggestion for a global demilitarization fund that would draw upon a small percentage of the military budgets of U.N. member states. In the longer term, we should support initiatives that have as their goal eliminating nuclear weapons, radically reducing conventional arms production and sales, and establishing regional and international mechanisms for conflict prevention and peacekeeping that would be internationally financed and universally recognized.

With Clinton now essentially adding Milosevic's resignation - and presumably trial as a war criminal - to NATO's demands, hope for a quick negotiated settlement has dimmed. If war crimes have been committed, the bodies to adjudicate such matters exist. The future strengthening of an international criminal court is also an important step in that direction, but the Clinton administration must reverse its opposition to empowering such a court by overriding long-standing resistance from the Pentagon. In the meantime, international treaties allow mass murders such as Pinochet to be held accountable. The much greater challenge, once the bombing subsides, will be for the parties involved, Serbs and ethnic Albanians, to move toward a reconstruction of civil relations. If neither party agrees to demilitarize the situation, the hopes for reconciliation (much less the return of refugees to their homes) seem slim.

NOTES

1. On the strengths and weakness of opposition movements and parties in Serbia, see Hofnung (1999).

2. Contractors for the B-2 are Northrop Grumman Corp., Boeing Military Airplanes Co., General Electric Aircraft Engine Group, and Hughes Training Inc., Link Division; the EA-6B Prowler is built by Grumman Aerospace Corporation, using Pratt and Whitney turbojet engines (see Grossman, 1999; USAF, 1999; U.S. Navy, 1999; Softwar, 1999).

3. To avoid a dispute with the Russians at a time when Moscow was being courted to play the role of mediator in the Kosovo conflict, the IMF agreed to lend Russia $4.5 billion, the first resumption of loans since the country defaulted on its debts and devalued its currency in the summer of 1998. Responding to pressure from Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin and finance ministers from other European nations, the money will never be sent to Moscow. To avoid a repeat of the embarrassing immediate disappearance of the $4.8 billion loan made in July 1998, the money will be transferred from one IMF account to another, and is essentially a form of debt rescheduling that will enable Russia to make it through elections in the year 2000 without a default to the IMF (Sanger, 1999).

4. As Kenney (1998) observes, Malcolm's book, Kosovo: A Short History, regrettably uses Albanian sources to buttress Albanian legal and moral claims to independence while systematically neglecting the Serb story and using few Serbian source materials. See Miranda Vickers' Between Serb and Albanian: A History of Kosovo for a more balanced view.

5. On the tattered state of the Serbian economy, see Dobbs (1999), Hofnung (1999), and Erlanger (1999). Total collapse could be forestalled if the West grants loans to Milosevic in exchange for an agreement on Kosovo.

6. According to Binder (1987), already in the 1980s, illegal organizations with members of Albanian nationality were discovered in the Yugoslav People's Army and ethnic Albanian subversives had been preparing for "killing officers and soldiers, poisoning food and water, sabotage, breaking into weapons arsenals and stealing arms and ammunition, desertion and causing flagrant nationalist incidents in army units."

7. Chalmers Johnson states: "I believe that in addition to wanting to sabotage a U.N.-mediated peace in Europe, 'rogue' officials of the CIA and the U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency, combined with right-wing members of the Republican Party, want to ruin relations with China and stimulate a new Cold War in East Asia. Their purpose is to give the American military-industrial-educational complex a new lease on life, sell arms to Japan and Taiwan even though they know they are worthless (e.g., the Theater Missile Defense, a new version of Star Wars), and elect George Bush, Jr., as president (note that the CIA buildings in Langley, Virginia, have just been renamed in honor of Governor Bush's father, former president George Bush)" (posting in response to Shekhar Krishnan, School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, Centre of South Asian Studies, on World Systems Network, May 12, 1999).

8. Indeed, after four years of horrendous violence in the Bosnian conflict, of all the NATO countries, only the Dutch voted in a referendum in favor of providing ground troop support for the protection of the U.N.-designated "safe areas" of Srebenica, Gorzde, and Zepa. Although the West failed to intervene in Bosnia to prevent massacres, when Iran offered to do so, it was dismissed with ridicule.

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1999 "Social Democracy Betrayed." Translated by Barbara Wilson. Le Monde Diplomatique (April).

Reuters

1999a "Global Financial Crisis 'Now Over' - Soros." Reuters (April 23).

1999b "Germany Says Balkans Need New Marshall Plan." April 16.

1999c "German Minister Warned Milosevic of Sea of Blood." April 11.

Rieff, David

1999 "Moral Imperatives and Political Realities: A Response to 'Principles, Politics, and Humanitarian Action.'" Ethics and International Affairs Volume 13.

Roberts, Walter R.

1999 "Serbs as Victims." Washington Post (Saturday, April 10): A-21.

Rupert, James

1999 "KLA Urges NATO to Form Alliance for Ground Troops." Washington Post, in San Francisco Chronicle (April 26): A-12; A-14.

Samary, Catherine

1999 "War in the Balkans: Confederation or Explosion." Le Monde Diplomatique (May).

1995 Yugoslavia Dismembered. New York: Monthly Review Press.

Sancton, Tom

1999a "Holding Together: NATO Members Are Standing Firm on Kosovo, but Some Cracks Have Begun to Appear." Time Magazine 153, 15 (April 19).

1999b "Will Schroeder Blow It?" Time Magazine 153,7 (February 22).

Sanger, David E.

1999 "IMF to Resume Making Loans to Russia with $4.5 Billion Deal." New York Times, reprinted in the San Francisco Chronicle (April 29): C-5.

Scheffer, David

1999 "Deterrence of War Crimes in the 21st Century." Paper delivered at the International Military Operations and Law Conference, Honolulu, Hawaii, February 23.

Schurmann, Franz

1999 "Why Milosevic Could Drag the World Towards World War III." Jinn Magazine Issue No. 5.07, Pacific News Service (April 1).

Schwarz, Benjamin and Christopher Layne

1999 "The Case Against Intervention in Kosovo." The Nation (April 19).

Softwar

1999 "BGM-109 'Tomahawk' Cruise Missile." At http://www.softwar.net/bgm109.html.

Spetalnick, Matt

1999 "Bandits Ruling Albania's Badlands." Reuters, in San Francisco Chronicle (April 16): A-18.

Storey, David

1999 "U.S. Calls Boosting KLA Effectiveness a NATO Goal." Reuters Limited (April 15).

Stratfor

1999 Global Intelligence Update Archives. "Yugoslavia's Strategy" (March 31). At http://www.stratfor.com/.

Transnational Foundation for Peace and Future Research (TFF)

1999 "NATO's War - Boomerang Against the West (Part A)." PressInfo #65, Lund, Sweden. At http://www.transnational.org.

Thurow, Lester

1992 Head to Head: The Coming Economic Battle Among Japan, Europe, and America. New York: William Morrow and Company.

U.S. Air Force (USAF)

1999 "USAF Fact Sheet: B-2 Spirit." At http://www.af.mil/news/factsheets/B_2_Spirit.html.

U.S. Department of State

1999 "International Narcotics Control Strategy Report." Released by the Bureau for International Narcotics and Law Enforcement Affairs, U.S. Department of State. Washington, D.C. (February). At http://www.undp.org/rbec/pubs/nhdc97/summary/yugoslavia.htm.

U.S. Navy

1999 "Aircraft Data Series: EA-6B Prowler." Department of the Navy. At http://www.history.navy.mil/planes/ea6.htm.

Vest, Jason

1999 "Clinton Bombs Again: How the Air Strikes Destroyed Democratic Movements in Kosovo, Serbia, and Montenegro." Village Voice (April 7-13). At http://www.villagevoice.com/features/9914/vest.shtml.

Valasek, Tomas

1999a "NATO at 50." In Focus Briefs 4,11 (March). A joint project of the Interhemispheric Resource Center and the Institute for Policy Studies. http://www.foreignpolicy-infocus.org/briefs/vol4/v4n11nato.html.

1999b "Diplomacy vs. Bombs: Congress' Wrong Turn." The Center for Defense Information, Defense Weekly Monitor Volume 3, Issue 15 (April 15). At http://www.cdi.org/weekly/1999/issue15.html#l.

1998 "No Kosovo Intervention Without U.N. Authorization." Position Brief Prepared by the Center for Defense Information (June 26). At http://www.cdi.org/issues/europe/posbr4.html.

Vickers, Miranda

1998 Between Serb and Albanian: A History of Kosovo. New York: Columbia University Press.

Viviano, Frank

1999a "Albanians Try to Take Over Kosovars' Crime Network." San Francisco Chronicle (May 11): A-1.

1999b "KLA Linked to Enormous Heroin Trade: Police Suspect Drugs Helped Finance Revolt." San Francisco Chronicle (May 5): A-1; A-13.

1995 "The Wretched of the Earth: Kosovo's Mafia." Mother Jones (May/June). At http://www.motherjones.com/total_coverage/kosovo/viviano.html.

Walker, Tom

1999 "Poison Cloud Engulfs Belgrade." The Times (UK, April 19).

Wallerstein, Immanuel

1999 "Bombs Away!" Article available on ZNet. At http://www.zmag.org/waller.htm.

Weiss, Thomas G.

1999 "Principles, Politics, and Humanitarian Action." Ethics and International Affairs Volume 13.

Wiesel, Elie

1999 "The Perils of Indifference." Remarks by Elie Wiesel at the White House Millennium Evening (April 12). USIA. At http://www.usia.gov/regional/eur/balkans/kosovo/wiesel41.htm.

Wilmer, Franke

1998 "The Social Construction of Conflict and Reconciliation in the Former Yugoslavia." Social Justice 25,4.

Woodward, Susan

1995 Balkan Tragedy: Chaos and Dissolution After the Cold War. Washington, D.C.: Brookings.

Zinn, Howard

1999 "A Few Points on the Kosovo Situation." ZNet Commentary (April 5). At http://www.zmag.org.

GREGORY SHANK (e-mail: GregoryS9@aol.com) is a member of the Editorial Board of Social Justice. This "Commentary" builds upon discussions within the Editorial Board and incorporates comments from Elizabeth Martinez, Tony Platt, Bill Felice, and Bob Gould on earlier drafts.