denne svære artikkel fra CounterPunch er spennende:
The Twilight of the European Project
By Peter Gowan
http://www.counterpunch.org/gowan.html
Peter Gowan er korrespondent for New Left Review.
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5. The Launch of the War and the Need for Stupidity With the 'failure' of
Rambouillet, the Clinton Administration took open charge of the
preparations for war. And it is at this point that the analysis of those
who support the NATO Air War faces absolutely irreconcilable
contradictions. For the way in which the war was launched is, on the face
of it, absolutely inexplicable.
The bombing campaign was launched in 24th March. But President Clinton
announced on the 19th of March that the bombing campaign would be launched
and nothing now could block it. The US administration thus gave the Serbian
government 5 days in which they could do as their pleased in Kosovo. And
when the bombing started, it was organised so that the Serbian authorities
could continue to have a free hand in Kosovo for more than a week. The air
war's first phase was directed largely at targets outside the Kosovo
theatre itself for a full week.
And this military side of the attack was combined with an absolutely
contradictory set of explanations for NATO's aggression. On one side, the
attack was justified as an attempt to prevent the genocidal threat to the
Kosovar Albanians from the Milosevic regime. But on the other side, the
attack was simultaneously justified by the claim that the Milosevic regime
had no such genocidal intentions and indeed wanted the bombing campaign in
order to use it to sell Rambouillet to the Serbian people.
These contradictions cannot be explained away by haste, improvisation and
confusion on the part of the Clinton administration. We know that the US
National Security Council and the State Department had been planning this
war in detail for 14 months before it started. We know also from the
Washington Post that the experts in the US administration spent those 14
months running over, day after day, all the variants of the course of such
a war, all the scenarios of possible Yugoslav government responses to the
air attack. We know that they foresaw the possibilities of mass refugee
exits from Kosovo. The Pentagon foresaw a long air war: the notion that
Milosevic wanted the bombing attack was political spin put about by General
Wesley Clark: it was nonsense. So why did they plan the start of the war in
this particular way?
There is only one serious explanation: the Clinton administration was
giving the Serbian authorities the opportunity to provide the NATO attack
with an ex post facto legitimation. The US was hoping that the five days
before the launch of the bombing and the first week of the war would give
various forces in Serbia the opportunity for atrocities that could then be
used to legitimate the air war.
This was a rational calculation on the part of the US planners. They knew
that the main political opponents in Serbia of Milosevic's Socialist Party
-- the Radical Party of Seselj and various Serbian fascist groups --
supported the ethnic cleansing of Kosovo, though the Socialist Party did
not. They knew also that Yugoslav military forces would pour into positions
in Kosovo as the OSCE personnel left, clearing strategic villages, driving
forward against KLA-US supporters. They could predict also that there would
be a refugee flow across the borders into Macedonia and Albania.
And the US planners were proved right. Extremist Serbian groups did, it
seems, go on the rampage in Pristina for three days after the start of the
war. Refugees did start to flood across the borders. And the resulting news
pictures did indeed swing European public opinion behind the war. As for
the Serbian government organising a genocidal mass slaughter, this did not
happen: the Clinton administration organised the launch of the war to
invited the Serbian authorities to launch a genocide, but the Milosevic
government declined the invitation.
It is simply impossible to argue that the US military campaign was designed
to stop the brutalities against the Kosovo Albanians. It would be far
easier to demonstrate that this thoroughly planned and prepared war was
designed to increase the chances of such brutalities being escalated to
qualitatively higher levels. The way that the war was launched was designed
to increase the sufferings of the Kosovar Albanians in order to justify an
open-ended US bombing campaign against the Serbian state. The technique
worked. But this success cannot be acknowledged. Instead it must be hidden
by the notion of Clinton administration stupidity.
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Knut Rognes