NATO, Sig Heil!

by Alexander Cockburn

To add symmetry to the affair, the last time Serbs in Belgrade had high explosives dropped on them was in 1941 by the sons of the Third Reich. To bring even deeper symmetry, the German political party whose leader, Gerhard Schroeder, ordered German participation in the bombing is that of the Social Democrats. It was the great-grandfathers of the Social Democrats who enthusiastically voted credits to wage war in 1914, to the enormous disgust of V.I. Lenin, who never felt quite the same way about social democrats ever after.

Whether in Germany, England or France, all social democratic parties in 1914 tossed aside previous pledges against war, thus helping produce the first great bloodletting of our century. Today, with social democrats leading governments across Europe -- Schroeder, Britain's Tony Blair, France's Lionel Jospin, former Italian Prime Minister Romano Prodi (nominated to head the European Union) -- all fall in behind Bill Clinton. This is, largely, a war most earnestly supported by liberals and many so-called leftists. Rep. Bernie Sanders of Vermont has voted aye, and in London, Vanessa Redgrave cheers on the NATO bombers.

There's been some patronizing talk here about the Serbs' deep sense of "grievance" at the way history has treated them, with the implication that the Serbs are irrational in this regard. But it's scarcely irrational to remember that Nazi Germany bombed Belgrade in the Second World War or that Germany's prime ally in the region, Croatia, ran a concentration camp at Jasenovac where tens of thousands of Serbs -- along with Jews and gypsies -- were liquidated. Nor is it irrational to recall that Germany in more recent years has been an unrelenting assailant of the former Yugoslav federation, encouraging Slovenia to secede and lending determined support to Croatia, in gratitude for which Croatia adopted, on independence in 1991, the German hymn, "Danke Deutschland."

So much for Serb feelings about Germany. Serbia has some reason to feel similar resentment toward the United States. The biggest single ethnic cleansing of the mid-1990s in the former Yugoslavia was conducted by Croatia under the supervision of the United States, whose military generals and CIA officers issued targeting instructions to Croatian artillery for the ethnic clearing. The targets were Serbs, living in Serbian territory, in the Krajina. Heading the Croatian cleansers was President Franjo Tudjman, who has rehabbed Nazi war criminals. Yet somehow, it is Serbia's Slobodan Milosevic who is demonized here as Hitler.

Now, the Serbs are being asked to give the Albanians living in a southern province of Serbia -- Kosovo -- autonomy for three years at the end of which time NATO would probably issue a peremptory command for Kosovo's independence. Even so, the Serbs balked only at NATO's insistence that a Serbian province, Kosovo, should accept a western garrison force, and this doubtless could have been negotiated peacefully. But as Mikhail Gorbachev has been saying in Europe, the United States apparently wanted to rush into war on an obviously illegal pretext.

The Serbs feel as outraged as would India if the United States started bombing New Delhi, Bombay and other towns and cities until India surrendered to the Kashmiris' and Tamils' demands. You can make the same parallel about China and Tibet, or Spain and the Basques, or the Turks and the Kurds, or the Israelis and the Palestinians. Would we ever bomb Istanbul or Tel Aviv? Of course not.

It's remarkable how America's gangsterism has grown more shameless even since the days of George Bush. In 1991, Bush devoted months of diplomatic effort toward getting supportive votes in the United Nations for the expedition to free Kuwait. In 1999, Bill Clinton more or less left the United Nations' secretary general, Kofi Annan, to find out from CNN about NATO's decision to bomb. Appropriately enough, last week brought news that unless the United States pays some of its back dues, it won't be entitled to vote in the United Nations anyway. But would it bother? The U.S. game, abetted chiefly by Blair's United Kingdom, is to make NATO the arbiter of Europe's borders and "security." The strategy deliberately kicks Russia and the United Nations in the face.

Without doubt, it's disgusting that Serb police, paramilitary and army units have been killing Albanians in Kosovo -- 2,000 or so before the bombing began. It was disgusting that Russians killed Chechens, that Indonesians killed East Timorese, that U.S. cavalry killed the Sioux, that ... You get the idea. The Hutus killed around a million Tutsis in Rwanda, and Clinton didn't lift a finger. He refused to call it genocide, a significant decision since it meant U.N. forces weren't compelled to intervene under the Genocide Treaty. If the United States decides in the waning hours of the millennium that it can bomb anyone it wants to, regardless of legality, solemn treaty and obligation, so be it. But do not pretend that cause is just or even humane.

The bombing isn't working. How could it, trying to hit tanks and units from 30,000 feet? The 20th-century illusion of air power is once again being exposed. Now come demands for ground troops and a route march into deeper madness, wider killing and misery.

The only chance is rising protest from Americans, from the world community and from dissident countries in NATO with calls for a cease-fire and a genuine, U.N. peace-keeping force in Kosovo with no troops from the contending parties and their allies. Absent that, why not a drive for impeachment of Bill Clinton, on serious grounds at last, for abusing Congress' war-making powers and also his sworn duty to uphold the international treaties to which the United States has set its name?