-Caveat Lector-
I agree! All the boys should have been on their way home the day Bush
took office!!!!!!!!! And the fact that Powell is incompetent is not news.
On Wed, 2 May 2001 16:03:49 -0500 Taercel <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
writes:
> -Caveat Lector-
>
> From
> http://www.lewrockwell.com/orig/mcadams2.html
>
> > Clinton’s six-month occupation of post-Dayton Bosnia by Nato
> "peacekeepers" has now
> > lasted more than five years and cost the US more than $15 billion.
> What return can we
> > see on our investment?
>
> Bank robbery? T'AER
>
> }}>Begin
>
> Nation-Building
> and Bank Robbery: All in a Day’s Work for Nato in
> Bosnia
> by
> Daniel McAdams
> On the campaign trail, candidate Bush had a simple but effective
> foreign policy message: no more nation-building. Plain
> Texas-style
> talk. It was a promise – and a style – that
> resonated with the
> American people, who despite the screeching propaganda
> of the
> chatterers
> have never supported adventures abroad.
> So why is it that everywhere we were engaged in under that grand
> wizard of the nation-builders, President Clinton, we
> remain engaged
> today? Particularly in places like the Balkans, which
> candidate
> Bush and his national security advisor, Condoleezza
> Rice, specifically
>
> singled out for disengagement? Secretary of State
> Colin Powell,
> in his first foray last month into the Balkan
> minefield, not only
> failed to uphold candidate Bush’s promise but actually
> promised
> the opposite: that we would remain "engaged" in the
> Balkans
> for the foreseeable future.
> That in itself would be a bitter pill, of course, but what is worse
> is the manner in which we remain engaged in the
> Balkans. For, it
> was not only the fact that the US was dumping its
> national treasure
> into an area with little strategic importance, but
> rather that this
> money, used to "build democracy" in the post-communist
> world, has actually been engaged in undermining and
> destroying what
> little democracy had managed to seep through cracks in
> the region’s
> bloody post-communist era history.
> Hard as it may be for some Americans to accept, the truth is that
> Bosnia is further from being a democracy now than it
> was under Comrade
>
> Tito’s rule, and the culprits are the very people we
> are paying
> enormous amounts of money to "build democracy" in the
> Balkans. "Nation-building," in fact, is merely a
> codeword
> for left-wing social engineering with a little bit of
> old-fashioned
> colonialism thrown in for good measure – and profit.
> The Joys of Nation-Building in Bosnia
> Take Bosnia, for example. Clinton’s six-month occupation of
> post-Dayton Bosnia by
> Nato "peacekeepers" has now lasted more than
> five years and cost the US more than $15 billion. What
> return can
> we see on our investment? Have we built any democracy?
> Ask the
> political
> parties who have the misfortune of getting elected
> fairly in the
> new Bosnian democracy. The Croatian Democratic Union,
> the Serb
> Democratic
> Party, and the Muslim-dominated Party for Democratic
> Action have
> campaigned and won election after election in Bosnia
> only to see
> results arbitrarily overturned by the dictatorial rule
> of the UN
> Office of the High Representative (OHR), which uses
> Nato’s
> Stabilization
> Force (SFOR) as its army of enforcement. In one
> election, the OHR’s
> partner organization in Bosnia, the vile Organization
> for Security
> and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) certified with a
> straight face
> an election in which 104 percent of the population.
> One can never
> have too much democracy, perhaps.
> Dayton itself was Clintonian foreign policy at its most grotesque:
> the warring parties are squeezed until they sign on
> the dotted line,
> the ensuing treaty then suddenly takes on a
> supernatural power that
> can only – conveniently – be properly interpreted by
> the Office
> of the High Representative. Remember the Wye accords?
> Rambouillet?
>
> Thus millions of dollars have been spent by the OHR to create and
> fund "multi-ethnic" political parties in Bosnia. The
> election
> law jointly authored by the OHC and the OSCE
> disqualifies any
> political
> party that does not include at 33 percent women
> candidates. Millions
> more are spent to make sure that only these parties
> have access
> to the media. Those radio stations and newspapers that
> are not
> sufficiently
> respectful to the spirit of Dayton are simply shut
> down by the OHR.
> Regardless of their ownership. Non-governmental
> organizations (NGOs)
> have been created and funded by the U.S. government in
> Bosnia to spew
> the U.S. party line.
> Yet the terribly backward voter in Bosnia remains ignorant of what
> is best for him, and keeps voting for the nationalist
> parties. Not
> to worry, though, the OHR has a remedy for that as
> well: Austrian
> diplomat Wolfgang Petritsch, currently serving as the
> High Representative,
> simply dismisses victorious candidates from the wrong
> parties. In
> last November’s parliamentary elections, for example,
> the right-wing
> Croatian Democratic Union (HDZ) swept the elections in
> the ethnic
> Croat regions of the joint Muslim-Croat Federation.
> Petritsch responded
> by disqualifying 13 victorious HDZ candidates. Ante
> Jelavic, the
> elected Croat member of the tripartite presidency of
> Bosnia, vociferously
> protested both the permanent minority status of the
> Croats in Bosnia
> and the heavy-handed OHR approach to his party’s
> victory in the elections. He began the process of pulling out of the
> Dayton-created Muslim-Croat Federation on behalf of his
> constituents. Petritsch
> fired him and barred him from politics.
> Bank Robbers for Democracy
> Furious over the continued popularity of the HDZ and its gall in
> challenging the immeasurable wisdom of the Dayton
> Accords, Petritsch
> determined to break the party once and for all. On 18
> April, on
> his orders, some 400 Nato troops, backed up by 80
> tanks and armored
> fighting vehicles, 20 helicopters, and two jet
> aircraft blew up
> and robbed a private bank in the town of Mostar. The
> contents of
> the Hercegovacka Banka, one of the largest in Bosnia,
> were then loaded into six trucks by Nato’s Stabilization Force
> (SFOR) troops
> and carted away. They left the bank in ruins, its
> 150,000 account-holders
> out of luck. The purpose of the bank robbery was to
> seek proof that
> the HDZ was a corrupt party.
> That’s right: the bank was not raided because there was indeed
> evidence of wrongdoing by the HDZ; rather, it was
> looted in the
> hopes of finding evidence of wrongdoing. In fact,
> little if any
> evidence was offered to support any claims against the
> bank – and
> certainly none against accountholders unaffiliated
> with the HDZ.
> In the US, where that little inconvenience called due
> process still carries some weight, a search warrant request would
> likely have
> been denied on the scant evidence provided. Never
> mind, Petritsch
> was sure something was going on there even if he had
> to blow up
> the bank to find it. The thousands of pensioners who
> relied on the
> bank for their monthly checks were told that until the
> audit is
> completed – which could take a year – their money
> could not be released.
> You have to crack a few eggs to cook a democracy
> omelet.
> And President Bush Really Supports This?
> The Bush Administration has given every indication that it supports
> Petritsch’s raiders. As the people took to the streets
> to protest
> SFOR’s theft of their assets, U.S. Ambassador to
> Bosnia and Herzegovina
> Thomas Miller barked that the HDZ "uses political
> power to
> cover its criminal activities, which are extensive."
> In Miller’s
> world of absolute power, there little need for such
> superfluities
> as evidence, trials, judges. Bush’s Ambassador further
> pronounced,
> with elegant Marxian flourish, "All you have to do is
> drive
> around Herzegovina, see the companies that these
> people own, the
> houses they live in, the cars they are driving, and
> ask yourself
> a simple question: where did all this come from?" How
> dare
> these people own businesses and nice houses –
> something untoward
> must be going on.
> Difficult as it may be for the Bush Administration to understand,
> the solution to Balkan woes is not heavy-handed
> "nation-building,"
> or social-engineering, or open-ended occupation by
> foreign troops.
> Democracy cannot be taught using undemocratic means.
> Autocratic
> "Decisions" from on high do not teach citizens respect
> for the rule of law. Seizure of their assets without
> probable cause
> does not teach respect for private property. Creating
> artificial
> and foreign-funded political parties does not teach
> civic responsibility
> and the democratic process. Massive foreign assistance
> does not
> teach self-reliance and market economy.
> The Bush Administration is going to have to demand some new thinking
> from the State Department. The president can
> jump-start the entrenched apparatchiks there by announcing a
> pull-out of our troops the Balkans.
> It really is that simple. Ignoring the reasons for
> Clinton’s foreign
> policy debacles is a recipe for repeating them again
> and again.
> Americans clearly voted for something different.
> May
> 2, 2001
> McAdams
> has monitored elections throughout Central and Eastern
> Europe with the British Helsinki Human Rights Group. He is Senior
> Research Associate
> at the Center for Security Policy.
> Copyright
> 2001 LewRockwell.com
>
> Back
> to LewRockwell.com Home Page
>
> End<{{
>
> T' A<>E<>R
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> The only real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking
> new landscapes but in having new eyes. -Marcel Proust
> ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
> The libertarian therefore considers one of his prime educational
> tasks is to spread the demystification and desanctification of the
> State among its hapless subjects. His task is to demonstrate
> repeatedly and in depth that not only the emperor but even the
> "democratic" State has no clothes; that all governments subsist
> by exploitive rule over the public; and that such rule is the reverse
> of objective necessity. He strives to show that the existence of
> taxation and the State necessarily sets up a class division between
> the exploiting rulers and the exploited ruled. He seeks to show that
> the task of the court intellectuals who have always supported the
> State
> has ever been to weave mystification in order to induce the public to
> accept State rule and that these intellectuals obtain, in return, a
> share in the power and pelf extracted by the rulers from their
> deluded
> subjects.
> [[For a New Liberty: The Libertarian Manifesto, Murray N. Rothbard,
> Fox & Wilkes, 1973, 1978, p. 25]]
>
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