Kagarlitsky on Yugo
Kjell S Johansen (kjellsjo@online.no)
Wed, 14 Apr 1999 09:15:50 +0200
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>Subject: Kagarlitsky on Yugo
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>[from Johnson's Russia List]
>
>Date: Mon, 12 Apr 1999
>From: austgreen@glasnet.ru (Renfrey Clarke)
>Subject: Kagarlitsky: The Clinton Doctrine
>
>
>
>THE CLINTON DOCTRINE
>
>By Boris Kagarlitsky
>
>MOSCOW - In 1968, when Soviet forces invaded Czechoslovakia, Western
>journalists began speaking of a ``Brezhnev Doctrine''. Its essence
>was simple: the sovereignty of the Warsaw Pact states was limited. If
>something went amiss, the Soviet ``big brother'' would decide who
>would be punished and how.
>
>Since then, an enormous amount has changed, but the desire of big
>brother to poke his nose into other people's business remains
>unaltered. Now that there is only one superpower in the world, the
>right to judge and punish sovereign states has been taken over by the
>president of the United States.
>
>In place of the Brezhnev Doctrine, we now have the Clinton Doctrine.
>When the bombing of Yugoslavia began, it became clear that what was
>involved was not just an attempt by a luckless womaniser to restore
>the nation's respect for him by killing a few hundred or a few
>thousand people. No, we were confronted with a developed political
>concept, one that would be consistently put into effect. So what is
>the Clinton Doctrine all about?
>
>If Louis XIV declared, ``The state? I am the state!'', American
>leaders are now declaring, ``The world community? That's the US!''
>How other peoples, and even their governments, might react to this
>means nothing. The US, acting alone, decides on behalf of everyone.
>Any need for the United Nations Organisation disappears.
>
>Democratic procedures in the countries of the West are also
>superfluous. The second rule of the Clinton Doctrine can be set out
>in this fashion: if the views of the people contradict those of the
>US president, any genuinely democratic government will tell the
>people to go to hell, and will act in line with its duty as an ally.
>If a government pays any regard to the views of its citizens, then it
>is not a truly democratic government.
>
>The third rule runs as follows: the US acts simultaneously as
>accomplice, prosecutor, judge and executioner. The world leader is
>not bound by any legal formalities. It is for the US president alone
>to decide what is ``moral'' and what is not.
>
>US leaders constantly declare their determination to punish evil
>dictators. But starting with Panama's General Noriega, whom the
>Americans overthrew and put in jail on drug-trafficking charges, a
>strange principle has applied. All the foreign leaders whom the US
>has publicly punished have at one stage or another in their careers
>been political sidekicks of the US. Noriega defended US interests in
>Latin America, Saddam Hussein was supported as a counter-weight to
>islamic Iran, and the US relied on Milosevic when it needed to force
>the Bosnian Serbs to accept the US-formulated Dayton accords.
>
>Naturally, everyone the US punishes is an evil human rights
>violator. The trouble is - so are those the US supports. No-one was
>upset by Serbian policies in Kosova when the need was to strengthen
>the West's positions in Bosnia. Turkey can carry out ethnic
>cleansing, since Turkey is a NATO member. The US government can bomb
>whoever it likes without having to answer morally, politically or
>legally for its actions, so long as the victims are not American
>taxpayers. The less logic here, the stronger the position of the US
>as the leading world power, since everyone must feel constantly under
>threat.
>
>Finally, the last rule of the Clinton doctrine: the technological
>and military superiority of the US as the leading world power allows
>it to do whatever it likes with total impunity. This final principle
>underpins all the others. Victors, as we all know, are not put on
>trial. Allies know that it is better to share in the triumph of force
>than to attract suspicions of disloyalty. The victims understand that
>resistance is useless.
>
>Victory wipes the slate clean. The human catastrophe in Kosova can
>be put down to the evil deeds of the Serbs, especially since the
>actions of the Serbian authorities in the region have indeed been
>shocking. The hospitals and schools damaged by NATO's ``pinpoint''
>bombing can be categorised as military targets, and the complaints of
>the victims can be described as hostile propaganda. But all this
>works only so long as the victory of the super-power is not in doubt.
>What if doubts arise?
>
>The Clinton Doctrine suffers from the same problem as the Brezhnev
>Doctrine before it. Such doctrines corrupt and lead into error the
>people who proclaim them. Now that American bombs are falling on
>Yugoslavia, and NATO is preparing to send ground forces, pessimists
>are warning that for America, the Balkans could become a second
>Vietnam. The pessimists are wrong. The Balkans will not be a second
>Vietnam, but a European Afghanistan.
>
>The Soviet intervention in Afghanistan resulted from the complete
>certainty of the Brezhnev Politburo, confirmed by its experience with
>Czechoslovakia in 1968, that it could act with impunity. But unlike
>the civilised Czechs, who knew it was pointless to fight against a
>superpower, the Afghans had little grasp of geopolitics.
>Consequently, they fought back, and the superpower turned out to be
>strikingly weak. The USSR was incapable of waging a drawn-out
>struggle, and as soon as this became apparent, its psychological and
>``moral'' superiority vanished.
>
>In Clinton's response to the conflict in Kosova, there has been a
>good deal to recall the mental habits of Brezhnev and his colleagues.
>The destabilisation of the situation in the Balkans gave the United
>States an opportunity to demonstrate once again the invincible power
>of the Clinton Doctrine. NATO never tried to settle the conflict. Its
>aim was quite different - to occupy the region. This was why the West
>sought to bind both sides in Kosova to terms that were clearly
>unacceptable, and which the Albanians as well as the Serbs tried to
>resist; the Albanians agreed to sign the peace agreement only after
>becoming convinced that the Serbs would not do so.
>
>US policy in the Balkans is justified on the basis that the wicked
>Serbs have to be punished. But the Serbs now have their own
>justification, in the need to stop the high-handed Americans. To any
>normal human being, it is clear that Milosevic's policies in Kosova
>have been monstrous. But the experience of recent years shows that
>for a superpower to be able to act with impunity on a global scale is
>far more dangerous. This is understood even by the Kosova Albanian
>leader Ibrahim Rogova, who in a vain attempt to stop the NATO bombing
>signed an agreement with his long-time foe Milosevic. But when the US
>government has set itself up as the moral standard for the entire
>world, it cannot take account of the views of Serbs, Arabs, Somalis,
>or even of its own citizens, trying perplexedly to find Kosova on the
>map.
>
>The Clinton Doctrine is suffering the same fate in Yugoslavia as the
>Brezhnev Doctrine suffered in Afghanistan. The resistance put up by
>the Serbs is totally changing the rules of the game. The string of
>NATO military failures is turning into a crisis of the whole system.
>Once the US ceases to seem invulnerable, its special position in the
>world, which allows it to ignore international law, also becomes
>subject to doubt. Then everyone remembers their rights, and starts
>putting up resistance.
>
>The growing military resistance of the Serbs, and the
>disillusionment of many Kosova Albanians with their NATO
>``protectors'', are part of a far more powerful shift whose symptoms
>are apparent not only in the Balkans. The facade of loyalty mounted
>by America's allies, like that of Brezhnev's allies in the Warsaw
>Pact, overlies an enormous potential for popular revolt. During the
>period of the Warsaw Pact, anti-Sovietism gradually became a general
>ideology, uniting the profoundly dissimilar Poles, Hungarians,
>Romanians and Afghans. There is nothing to bring people together like
>the existence of a common enemy.
>
>NATO has survived the Warsaw Pact by a whole ten years. But there
>are no eternal empires. The Pax Americana may turn out to be no more
>durable than the ``fraternal alliance'' headed by the Soviet
>Politburo.
>
>