Most people assume that the Serbian government refused to sign, because the 'Agreement' would lead to the independence of Kosovo. The 'Agreement' did involve a de facto NATO Protectorate (not, by the way, a democratic entity. The Chief of the Implementation Force could dictate to the Kosovo government on any aspect of policy he considered relevant to NATO (i.e. US) concerns.) But the real sticking point for the Serbian government seems to have been the threat that the 'Agreement' posed to the rest of Yugoslavia. The NATO compliance force would have complete control of Kosovo deploying there whatever types of forces it wished: ' NATO will establish and deploy a force (hereinafter KFOR) which may be composed of ground, air, and maritime units from NATO and non- NATO nations, operating under the authority and subject to the direction and the political control of the North Atlantic Council (NAC) through the NATO chain of command. The Parties agree to facilitate the deployment and operations of this force.' Thus, if the US wished to use Kosovo as a base for the invasion and occupation of the rest of Yugoslavia it could do so. This was threat enough. But the so-called 'Appendix B' added to the document at Rambouillet itself and kept secret until it was leaked and eventually published in the French press, insisted that NATO forces could move at will across the whole of Yugoslavia. Thus: 'NATO personnel shall enjoy, together with their vehicles, vessels, aircraft, and equipment, free and unrestricted passage and unimpeded access throughout the FRY including associated airspace and territorial waters. This shall include, but not be limited to, the right of bivouac, manoeuvre, billet, and utilisation of any areas or facilities as required for support, training, and operations.' NATO could also alter the infrastructure of Yugoslavia at will: 'NATO may.... have need to make improvements or modifications to certain infrastructures in the FRY, such as roads, bridges, tunnels, buildings, and utility systems.' It could thus move around investigating all Yugoslav infrastructures with a view to destroying them (in an attack) later. And the Yugoslav authorities 'shall provide, free of cost, such public facilities as NATO shall require.' The Yugoslav authorities 'shall, upon simple request, grant all telecommunications services, including broadcast services, needed for the Operation, as determined by NATO. This shall include the right to utilise such means and services as required to assure full ability to communicate....free of cost.' 'NATO is granted the use of airports, roads, rails, and ports without payment of fees, duties, dues, tolls, or charges occasioned by mere use.' The Yugoslav authorities must not merely tolerate this: they must facilitate it:' The authorities in the FRY shall facilitate, on a priority basis and with all appropriate means, all movement of personnel, vehicles, vessels, aircraft, equipment, or supplies, through or in the airspace, ports, airports, or roads used. No charges may be assessed against NATO for air navigation, landing, or takeoff of aircraft, whether government-owned or chartered. Similarly, no duties, dues, tolls or charges may be assessed against NATO ships, whether government-owned or chartered, for the mere entry and exit of ports.' And in all such activities in the whole of Yugoslavia, NATO shall be completely above the law: 'NATO shall be immune from all legal process, whether civil, administrative, or criminal.' And again: 'NATO personnel, under all circumstances and at all times, shall be immune from the Parties' jurisdiction in respect of any civil, administrative, criminal, or disciplinary offences which may be committed by them in the FRY. ' And again: ' NATO and NATO personnel shall be immune from claims of any sort which arise out of activities in pursuance of the operation'. This threat to move from Kosovo to the overthrow of the entire Serbian and Yugoslav regime was underlined by the fact that NATO claimed the right to dictate the fundamentals of socio-economic policy within Kosovo, with the Yugoslav and Kosovo governments completely under the diktat of US policies. Thus:' The economy of Kosovo shall function in accordance with free market principles.' And: 'There shall be no impediments to the free movement of persons, goods, services, and capital to and from Kosovo.' And again: 'Federal and other authorities shall within their respective powers and responsibilities ensure the free movement of persons, goods, services, and capital to Kosovo, including from international sources. There must also be complete compliance with the IMF and World Bank. Thus: 'International assistance, with the exception of humanitarian aid, will be subject to full compliance with....conditionalities defined in advance by the donors and the absorptive capacity of Kosovo.' The Yugoslav government must also agree to handing over economic assets to foreign interests. Thus: 'If expressly required by an international donor or lender, international contracts for reconstruction projects shall be concluded by the authorities of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia.' These statements made it perfectly clear that NATO was out to destroy the existing character of the Serbian economy. The ultimatum also demonstrated that NATO was determined to wage war against the Serbian media. It demanded 'Free media, effectively accessible to registered political parties and candidates, and available to voters throughout Kosovo.' And it said that 'The IM shall have its own broadcast frequencies for radio and television programming in Kosovo. The Federal Republic of Yugoslavia shall provide all necessary facilities.....' Rambouillet was thus an ultimatum for a war against Serbia and the terms of the ultimatum demonstrated that if the Serbian government accepted Rambouillet they would very likely face a crushing attack in the future from NATO forces on Yugoslav soil. 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. And to this stupidity the European pundits of NATO can add many other supposed American stupidities. The stupidity of trying to save the Kosovar Albanians with an air war instead of a ground war. The stupidity of killing so many Albanian and Serbian civilians. The stupidity of not swiftly admitting such killings when they occur. And then there is the most fascinating stupidity of all: the bombing of the Chinese Embassy in Belgrade. This particular stupidity must have been a defining moment for the European powers, a moment for hard, focused thinking, for one very simple reason: stupid or not, the governments of Western Europe know that it was not a mistake. They know that the US military attaches in Belgrade had dined more than once at the Chinese Embassy compound in the city before the war started. They know very well how prominent the compound is and how professional the US intelligence operation for targeting is. They know that the Embassy was hit on a special mission by a plane from the United States. And they noted Clinton's casual response: no press conference to make a formal public apology. Just an aside about an unfortunate mistake in a speech about something else. They know too that China is by far the most important issue in the entire current US foreign policy agenda. And the West European states have learned more about the stupidity of the bombing of the Chinese Embassy since it has occurred: it resulted in the collapse of weeks of German-Russian diplomacy which had gone into producing the G8 declaration agreed just before the Embassy was bombed. That G8 declaration threatened to undermine the US's 5 conditions for ending the war and threatened to rebuild the central authority of the UN over NATO: the Embassy bombing put a stop to all that. More, it completely sabotaged Schroeder's planned business visit to China: West European efforts to steal contracts with China by taking a softer line than the Clinton administration were brought to a standstill and the West Europeans are being brigaded into line behind Washington's policy in a new confrontation with China. All this, for the West Europeans is surely the height of stupidity. But pennies have been dropping in the Chancelleries of Western Europe. They are realising that even if there has been plenty of stupidity in the NATO war against Yugoslavia, the stupidity may not lie in Washington. It may lie in quite a different quarter, namely in the state executives of Western Europe itself. To see why, we need an entirely different take on the origins of the NATO attack on Yugoslavia. PART 2: THE THEORY OF EUROPEAN STUPIDITY The alternative take on the origins of the NATO war against Yugoslavia starts from the fact that the war did not derive from big power reactions to local events in the Balkans at all. Instead, this theory starts from the premise that the Clinton administration was seeking a war against Yugoslavia as a means for achieving political goals outside the Balkans altogether. The conflict between the Serbian state and the Kosovar Albanians was to be exploited as a means to achieve US strategic goals outside the Balkans on the international plane. This conception turns the cognitive map used by the proponents of American stupidity on its head. Thus, for example, instead of thinking that the US was ready to overthrow the norms of the international order for the sake of the Kosovar Albanians, we assume exactly the opposite: the US was wanting to overthrow the principles of state sovereignty and the authority of the UN Security Council and used the Kosovo crisis as an instrument for doing so. Instead of imagining that the US was ready to shut Russia out of European politics for the sake of the Kosovar Albanians, we assume that the Clinton administration used the NATO attack on Yugoslavia precisely as an instrument for consolidating Russia's exclusion. Instead of assuming that the US was ready to abandon its policy of engagement with China for the sake of the Kosovo Albanians, we assume that the Clinton administration used the war against Yugoslavia to inaugurate a new phase of its policy towards China. And last but not least, instead of assuming that the US firmly subordinated the West European states to its military and political leadership in order create a new dawn in the Western Balkans, it used a number of ingenious devices -- especially the dilettantish vanity of messieurs Chirac and Jospin -- to drag the West European states into a Balkan war that would consolidate US hegemony over them, the EU and the Euro's development. This is where the European stupidity enters the theory. The one strategic interest of the main West European states (Germany and France) in the Balkans lies in maintaining stable and strong enough states in the region to keep their impoverished populations firmly in place. West European military intervention in the Balkans has essentially been concerned with preventing mass migrations Westwards when states collapse. Anglo-French military involvement in Yugoslavia through UNPROFOR was essentially about that: 'humanitarian aid' in the war zone to ensure that the civilian population did not leave the war theatre. Italian military intervention in Albania in 1997 was about the same thing: stanching the flood of humanity out of Albania Westwards, by rebuilding an Albanian state while blocking emigration and asylum rights. Anglo-French efforts in Macedonia and Albania in the current war are similarly about caging the Kosovar Albanians within the Western Balkans. Yet now the American air force has, with European support, turned the Western Balkans into twenty years (minimum) of chaos from which all the energetic younger generations of all ethnic groups will rightly wish to flee West for decades to come. This is the first European stupidity. The second strategic interest of the West European states (especially Germany) in Eastern Europe is to maintain stable, friendly governments in Russia and Ukraine. That too can be ruled out as a result of this war as far as Russia is concerned; Ukraine will have to choose between Russia and the USA (the EU is not a serious alternative. And both Russia and Ukraine could spiral out of control with disastrous consequences for Central Europe Western Europe. This is the second European stupidity. The third strategic interest of the main West European states has been to combine an effort to bandwagon with US power with preserving an effective check on US efforts to impose its will on their foreign policies, whether in Europe or other parts of the world. That too seems finished now. The basic West European check on US power was the French veto at the UN Security Council, restraining the US with its 2 votes (including that of the UK). Now that Chirac has chosen to discredit the UN Security Council, he has undermined his own ability to speak for Europe at the UNSC and to be a useful partner for other states seeking to gain European help to restrain the US. That is a third stupidity. A fourth West European priority was to be able to claim that the EU is an independent, West European political entity with a dominant say at least over European affairs. Yet the current war demonstrates that this is a piece of pretentious bluff: the EU has played absolutely no role whatever in the launching or the management of this war. It will play no role whatever in the ending of the war. It is simply a subordinate policy instrument in the hands of a transatlantic organisation, the North Atlantic Council, handling the economic statecraft side of NATO's policy implementation. And within the North Atlantic Council the United States rules: the way the war ends will shape the future of Europe for at least a decade, yet that decision will be taken in the White House: the West European states (not to speak of the EU institutions) are political voyeurs with their noses pressed against the windows of the Oval Office trying to read the lips of the people in there deciding Europe's fate. This is a fourth stupidity. To explain the background to these stupidities we must examine US strategy since the collapse of the Soviet Bloc. US GLOBAL STRATEGY IN THE 1990S In some conditions the cognitive framework -- local actions, big power reactions -- is useful. Such conditions exist when the superpower is satisfied and secure that the structures which it has established to ensure its dominance are safely in place. It is sitting astride the oceans comfortably and it reacts now and again to little local blow-outs and break downs. Some might regard that as being the situation of the United States after the collapse of the Soviet Bloc. If we look at the power of the United States in the 1990s in resource terms, it has had no rival or even potential group of rivals in the military field, it dominates the international political economy, there is no power on earth remotely able for the foreseeable future to challenge the United States for world leadership. Yet curiously enough, the United States has been far from satisfied with its situation in the 1990s. It has felt itself to be facing a number of important challenges in the two key traditional regions of the world where it must exercise leadership -- Europe and the Pacific Rim -- and the challenges there are linked to another big challenge: the battle to ensure the preponderant weight of US capitalism in the so-called 'emerging markets'. Leadership of Europe and of the Pacific in turn ensure that the United States can channel the activities of these states to ensure that US interests predominate in designing regimes to open up and dominate the 'emerging markets'. These problems were all connected to another, deeper issue: concerns about the basic strength and dynamism of the American economy and American capitalism. When the Clinton administration came into office it was determined to rejuvenate the dynamism of American capitalism through an activist foreign drive to build a new global set of political economy regimes accented to the strengths and interests of American capitalist expansion. Getting leverage over the Europeans and Japanese to achieve that was key. To understand US policy in the 1990s, we must appreciate the double- sided situation that it found itself in: on one side, its old way of dominating its capitalist 'allies' had been shattered by the Soviet Bloc collapse, giving lots of scope for these 'allies' to threaten important US interests in their particular regional spheres. But on the other side, the US had gigantic resources, especially in the military-political field and if it could develop an effective political strategy it could convert these military power resources into a global imperial project of historically unprecedented scope and solidity. We must grasp both the challenges and the great opportunities after the Soviet Bloc collapse to understand the strategy and tactics of the Bush and Clinton administrations. (a) The Post-Cold War Problems The challenge to the US in Europe created by the collapse of the Soviet Bloc has too often been ignored. That collapse not only made the USA the sole global super-power. It also simultaneously destroyed the political structures through which the USA had exercised its direct leadership over West European capitalism. And it simultaneously opened the whole of Eastern Europe for business with the West, a business and political expansion opportunity which the West European states, especially Germany, would spontaneously tend to control. What if West European capitalist states threw off US leadership, forged their own collective military-political identity, joined their capitals with Russian resources and Russian nuclear capacity? Where would that leave the USA in Western Eurasia outside of Turkey? The central political pillar of US leadership over Western Europe during the Cold War was NATO. The US-Soviet confrontation positioned Western Europe on the front line in the event of a US-Soviet war. This situation enable the USA to gain political leadership over Western Europe by supplying the military services -- the strategic nuclear arsenal -- to protect Western Europe. In return for these military services, the West European states agreed to the US politically brigading them under US leadership. The US could exercise control over their foreign policy apparatuses, integrating the bulk of their military forces under US command, imposing discipline of the dealings of West European capitalism with the East and so on. And the US could also exercise this political leadership for economic purposes, especially to assure the free entry of US capitals into Europe, to ensure that Europe worked with the US over the management of the global economy etc. So NATO was a key military- political structure. The hierarchy was: US military services give political leadership which gives leadership on the big economic issues, those to do with the direction of accumulation strategies. But the Soviet collapse led to the redundancy of the US strategic arsenal which led to the redundancy of NATO, the collapse of the political leadership structure for the US in Europe and the undermining of the US's ability to impose its core political economy goals for Europe and for the world on the West Europeans. This is one of the key things that has made the United States a paradoxically dissatisfied power in the 1990s. It has had to combat all kinds of European schemes for building political structures that deny the US hegemonic leadership in Europe. And in combating such schemes it has had to develop a new European programme and strategy for rebuilding US European leadership. In short, the USA has been an activist and pro- active power in Europe during the 1990s, not a satisfied and reactive power. The 1990s have been a period of political manoeuvres amongst the Atlantic capitalist powers as the key players have sought to advance their often competitive schemes for reorganising the political structures of the continent. And in these manoeuvres, the territory and peoples of the former Yugoslavia have played a very special role. The states bearing competing programmes for a new European political order have all sought to demonstrate the value of their political project for Europe by showing how it can handle an important European problem: the long Yugoslav crises. Yugoslavia has been the anvil on which the competing great powers have sought to forge the instruments for their new European orders. No power has been more active in these endeavours than the United States. And this means that a cognitive framework for understanding the Balkan wars cannot take the form of local actions, great power reactions. We need an entirely different framework: great power European strategies, and the tactical uses of Yugoslavia's crisis for advancing them. (b)The New Opportunities. Yet the United States was not just a power dissatisfied with the international arrangements it confronted at the end of the Cold War. It was also aware that it had a gigantic relative lead over all other powers in the world in terms of the resources for entirely reshaping arrangements on the planet. It had not only unrivalled military capacity but command of new military technologies that could enable it to strike safely and fairly accurately at will anywhere on the planet. It could, for example, out of a clear blue sky, destroy the great dam on the Yangtse river and drown 100 million Chinese at the heart of the Chinese economy without the Chinese government being able to stop it: that kind of power. It could take on China and Russia together and win. It could militarily seal of Japan and Western Europe from their sources of vital inputs for their economies and from the export markets vital for their economic stability. The United States also have supreme command over the international political economy through the dominance of the Dollar-Wall Street Regime over international monetary and financial affairs and through US control over the key multilateral organisations in this field, especially the IMF and the World Bank. With resources like these, the collapse of the Soviet Bloc opened up the possibility of a new global Empire of a new type. An empire made up of the patchwork of the states of the entire planet. The legal sovereignty of all these states would be preserved but the political significance of that legal sovereignty would be turned on its head. It would mean that the state concerned would bear entire juridical and political responsibility for all the problems on its territory but would lose effective control over the central actual economic and political processes flowing in and out of its territories. The empire would be centred in Washington with Western Europe and Japan as brigaded client powers and would extend across the rest of the world, beating against the borders of an enfeebled Russia and a potentially beleaguered China. And it would be an Empire in which the capitalist classes of every state within it would be guaranteed security against any social challenge, through the protection of the new Behemoth, provided only that they respected the will and authority of the Behemoth on all questions which it considered important. It the US played its new strategy for empire building effectively, it could thus earn the support and even adulation of all the capitalist classes of the world. Thus the decade from 1989 to 1999 has been marked above all by one central process: the drive by the US to get from (a) to (b): from political structures left over from the Cold War which disadvantaged and even threatened the US in the new situation, to entirely new global political and economic structures which would produce an historically new, global political order: New Democrats, New Labour, New NATO, new state system, new world economy, new world order. This is the context in which we can understand the various Yugoslav wars, including the current one. Peter Gowan is a correspondent for the New Left Review.
