Kosovo, the Post Cold War World & the Left By Carl Bloice The following is adapted and updated from a talk presented to the Center for Political Education in San Francisco, May 4, 1999. After my four-year stint as a correspondent in Moscow which coincided with the closing down of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, the question I was most often asked was, of course, "What do you think is going to happen now?" To which I would reply, "The place is likely to fall apart." It was only part hyperbole. While I was greatly impressed by the amity between the diverse nations and ethnicities that made up the USSR, it was hard to avoid the sometimes tenuousness of that unity. This impression became irresistible when amid the disastrous Gorbachovian experiment things started really going wrong. The ethnic and national conflicts sharpening in the USSR as conditions worsened was accompanied by similar conflicts in nearly all of the countries of what was then "the socialist community of nations" or "the Soviet bloc." I recall as if were yesterday, drinking long into the night with media people from other European socialist countries when the subject turned to ethnic, religious and cultural divisions then flaring up in those areas. At one point, I lamented that, as senseless as it is, I had no problem grasping the idea of race as a point of division and conflict but I could not fathom why people would fight each other over religious doctrine or language. The Hungarian sitting to the left of me said he understood why as an African American I could not understand it but I had better accept it because such strife was a reality and was bound to increase. The end years of the last decade played havoc with the lives of the ordinary people of the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe. Of course, they had never lived in the lap of luxury, never experienced the standard of living most of us took for granted, lagged far behind most of the developed world in the practical application of the new instruments of science and technology. But suddenly, the very foundations of what they had accomplished were sweep from under their feet. The social security guarantees they had taken for granted were sacrificed to the new deity called the "free market." Meanwhile, in Moscow and Leningrad, the new "democrats," standing at the gates demanding to be allowed to lead denounced what they called the "half measures" of the Gorbachev government and pressed for policies which when they came to pass only exacerbated the negative processes already at work. As time passed working peoples' job security eroded fast and living standards dropped amid increasing evidence of new and gross inequities. Crime both organized and petty became rampant and personal security declined. World Chess Champion Garry Kasparov wrote recently that "In the minds of many ordinary Russians, democracy has become synonymous with economic hardship, war in Chechnya and high crime rates."(New York Times, May 1, 1999) Actually, it's not "many" but more like most Russians who feel that way. What brought it about was not the coming of "democracy" but the advent of capitalism. Poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko last week summed up the picture thus: "...war veterans with their hands out huddled in underground passageways, teachers and doctors who haven't been paid for half a year, miners crashing their helmets on pavement without a response." I recall a warm and fun evening spent at dinner with a Jewish family. They were not persecuted, had good jobs, free medical care and secure pensions. The grown children were doing quite well, one a rather renowned artist. When it was mentioned that perhaps economically things were looking up, the middleaged mother spoke up and said, "I certainly hope so because if they don't they are going to start blaming us." It hardly surprising that antiSemitism is a political weapon in today's Russia, or that rightist politicians and pseudocommunists willingly employ it. I say all this by way of introduction because I want to underscore one point: For a number of reasons, the fall of 20th Century Communism did not merely coincide with the rise of bigotry, religious intolerance, xenophobia and ethnic conflict in Europe in the 1990s. It nourished it. The people who labored mightily to bring about the end of socialism as it existed for better or for worse have little of which to be proud. In fact, there is considerable reason for shame. What do you think the myriad of institutions like the CIA and Radio Free Europe were doing over the Cold War years? Promoting nationalisms, stoking ethnic resentments and doing everything they could to undermine attempts to solidify and strengthen multinational, multiethnic unified states. The Cold War was not primarily a military confrontation. It was in essence an ideological conflict. What divided the European continent after the war and kept it divided for over 50 years were different notions about how society should be organized, how it should be governed and what economic and social policies should be pursued. More than anything else, it was a conflict over whether capitalism would continue to be the only acceptable form of economic organization. Or, whether another system might spread, one that, if it did nothing else, made no provision for the existence and dominance of a capitalist class and all that entails. The North Atlantic Treaty Organization came into existence to guarantee that capitalist market relations would hold sway in Western Europe. The Warsaw Pact came into existence to ensure inroads were not made into the socialist system. The balance of power standoff mitigated against anyone trying to resolve the conflict by force of arms. With the collapse of Soviet Communism and the breakup of the USSR, the ideological faultline across Europe receded. Francis Fukuyama prematurely proclaimed it to be "The End of History." No, history did not end. Class divisions and conflicts go on. History did not end, it only entered a new and clearly more dangerous and sometimes more confusing stage. Class interests are still very much with us even in tragic Kosovo. When Communism collapsed, wrote New York Times correspondent Craig Whitney wrote April 11, 1999, "...in its place, the virulent nationalisms of the Balkans and the Caucasus that helped sparked World War I became wildly resurgent." Columnist Philip Stephens wrote in the Financial Times May 21, 1999: “The fall of Berlin did not, as it was supposed, usher in a new world order. Instead it returned much of Europe ... When the Wall came down, the West proclaimed the triumph of liberal democracy. Instead we have seen the return of the ethnic rivalries and hatreds that disfigured Europe for the first half of the present century.” Virulent nationalism and ethnic conflicts have now moved from being tools of propaganda and subversion to being instruments of state policy. While only a few years earlier, the governments of Europe, Britain and the United States had solemnly proclaimed the borders of European states to be inviolable, with the end of the Cold War borders were once again called into question. "Yugoslavia and the USSR may not be the only countries that do not remain one country," wrote Lester Thurow in 1992. "The Slovaks and the Czechs may end up in divorce court. Romania has a large Hungarian minority. Bulgaria has a large Turkish minority. Both minorities want more independence." (Lester Thurow, Head to Head, Warner Books, New York 1992) Soon thereafter, Slovakia and the Czech Republic did become independent countries. Yes, when things got tough some people did begin to seek out scapegoats or became susceptible to the siren song of demagogues who would have them turn on each other. But there was another factor also at work. When a political system that was premised on such notions as internationalism, multiculturalism and class solidarity collapsed a way was opened for the competing ideological constructs of national exclusiveness, religious intolerance and divisive nationalist passions. "Just as economic collapse spurred the drift toward separation, the separation in turn exacerbated the economic crisis," observed Michel Chossudovsky. In Yugoslavia, he wrote. "Cooperation among the republics virtually ceased. And with the republics at each others' throats, both the economy and the nation itself embarked on a vicious downward spiral." Chossudovsky went on to describe the horrendous harm done to the Yugoslav economy by the directives from international lending institutions, like the International Monetary Fund, noting that "The austerity measures had laid the basis for recolonialization of the Balkans." In an excellent commentary in a recent edition of The Nation, Hungarian writer George Konrad wrote that in its zeal to pick apart Yugoslavia the West "forgot that the collapse of a federal state with its restraining framework would make ethnicity the chief principle of orientation for individuals." He continued: "On land where the population is mixed, however, the principle turns neighbors who have lived together in peace into enemies...As separatism was legitimized, recognized, even guaranteed by the international community, newly independent member republics began working with all their strength on the ethnic homogenization of their own national consciousnesses, forging it through blood relations and strengthening it with religion. At the same time, they began to feel that members of other ethnicities were foreign bodies in the new nation. 'Ethnic cleansing' originated from this furor of selfhomogenization." Konrad was, of course, wrong about the Western leaders' collective memories. Bill Clinton, Madeleine Albright and Tony Blair didn't forget anything. They knew full well what they were exploiting. (One can only wonder what goes on in the heads of Gerard Schroder, Joschka Fischer and Massimo D'Alema). The present conflict in Kosovo was precipitated when at Chateau Rambouillet, knowing full well Belgrade would never accept it, the Atlantic Alliance presented the Yugoslavian government with a takeitorleave it demand for stationing NATO troops in Yugoslav territory and granting them "free and unrestricted" access to the entire country. Ethnic cleansing is not a new phenomenon. Quiet as it's kept, it did not originate in the Balkans or Africa. Perhaps its most classic manifestation arose when the original 13 American colonies decided the western border of their new country would be the Pacific Coast. The people who had been living between the two coasts for tens of thousands of years were brutally driven into enclaves. Till this day, that bit of genocide is rarely described forthrightly in our textbooks. You can call it a rule of thumb. When an attempt is made to redraw borders along ethnic, racial, tribal or religious lines, the delineations are never neat. People end up on the wrong side of the lines, as it were. The nationalist solution is frequently the forceful displacement of whole populations. Any attempt to redraw national borders along ethnic lines is an invitation to ethnic cleansing. Shifting populations can be carried out in numerous ways but the most common and the one perceived as most effective is intimidation and terror. Civil conflicts based on ethnicity or religious creed are always bitter and cruel and thus can provide a cover for intervention that has little to do with humanitarianism and a lot to do with geopolitical strategy. As we express our horror at the cruelty in the way these population displacements and replacements are carried out we should not lose sight of the circumstances that brought them about. As we justly define ethnic cleansing as a violation of fundamental human rights, we should be clear that international law should hold equally for all. The people running things in Washington, Berlin and London have not done that. They have remained silent in the face of ethnic cleansing in the Balkans. And, when it suited their purpose they have aided and abetted it. In 1995, at what is considered to have been a "turning point" in the contemporary Balkan war, the Croatian Army engaged in indiscriminate shelling of civilians and summary executions. Over the course of four days, about 100,000 ethnic Serbian men, women and children who found themselves on the Croatia aide of a new boundary were driven out. The operation, called “Operation Storm,” had the approval of Washington and was carried out by officers trained by a special unit US military officials. Those being ethnically cleansed were driven from their homes, fleeing in automobiles and animal driven carts. The report from an international war crimes tribunal in The Hague concluded that: "In a widespread and systematic manner, Croatian troops committed murder and other inhumane acts upon and against Croatian Serbs." (NYT March 20, 1999) One of those who helped plan and direct Operation Storm was Agim Ceku, an ethnic Albanian and former officer in the Yugoslav army who went over to and became a general in the Croatian Army. He was recently named chief of staff for the Kosovo Liberation Army. (The Economist, June 12, 1999) In all, over three years, nearly 400,000 ethnic Serbs were forcefully ejected from their ancestral homelands in Croatia. They were once 12 percent of what is now Croatia; they are now 5 percent and the percentage is still declining. Since the moment Yugoslavia began to be wrenched apart, conflicts have claimed the lives of 200,000 people and turned over three million people into refugees. (NYT April 11, 1999) As seeped as we are in our own experience with racial, ethnic and religious conflict, we tend to resist taking at face value reports about Balkan ethnic conflicts tearing apart and turning into murderous enemies people who have for so long "lived side by side." Consider this: Approximately 700,000 mix marriages between Serbs, Croats and Muslims have been broken up by the transfer of those involved from one region to another in accordance with the US dictated Dayton Plan. (Granma, April 26, 1999). That's almost twice as many women and men as are currently living in the City of San Francisco. There is room for debate as to when ethnic cleansing actually began in Kosovo. I want to read a few lines from a report by correspondent David Binder that appeared in the New York Times 12 years ago: "Portions of southern Yugoslavia have reached such a state of ethnic friction that Yugoslavs have begun to talk of the horrifying possibility of 'civil war' in a land that lost onetenth of its population, or 1.7 million people in World War II...Ethnic Albanians in the government have manipulated public funds and regulations to take over land belonging to Serbs. And politicians have exchanged vicious insults. Slavic Orthodox churches have been attacked, and some young ethnic Albanians have been told by their elders to rape Serbian girls... As Slavs flee the protracted violence, Kosovo is becoming what ethnic Albanian nationalists have been demanding for years, and especially strong since the bloody rioting by ethnic Albanians in Pristina in 1981 an 'ethnically pure' Albanian region, a 'Republic of Kosovo' in all but name." (NYT, November 1, 1987). That was in 1987. On April 26, Elson Conception Perez wrote in the Cuban newspaper Gramma: "The disintegration of the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia was part of the process of atomization within the Eastern and Central European socialist states brought about by the collapse of the socialist bloc, a crucial aspect of which was the suicidal disappearance of the Soviet Union." He went on to note that in 1991 Yugoslavia had levels of economic and social development rivaling many Western European countries. However, its participation in the movement of Nonaligned States, its socialist orientation had made it a target first for Germany that has historically meddled in the region and the US. Conception Perez observed that in that context, the socialist bloc's collapse formed a perfect pretext for foreign forces to justify becoming involved and that they did so by "exacerbating millennialong ethnic, religious and nationalist problems." We have every reason to be horrified at what is happening in Kosovo. A human tragedy of unspeakable proportions is being perpetrated. Forceful uprooting and relocation of civilians is never justified and responsibility for the suffering of ordinary ethnic Albanians lies in Belgrade, Washington, Berlin and Tirana. Slobodan Milosevic and those around him may have at some point considered themselves socialists. They certainly were never Marxists. They have done what no Marxists should ever do. They have led their people into undoing the hardly arguable achievement of the government of Yugoslavian leader Joseph Tito. They have replaced a stubborn commitment to building a unified, multinational, multiethnic state with policy of national chauvinism and pursued policies that have brought great misery into the lives of hundreds of thousands and helped set the stage for future conflicts too terrible to contemplate. But Milosevic and Company did not do it alone. Individuals to do not play that big a role in history. A much bigger drama than Kosovo has unfolded in the Balkans. The president of Yugoslavia is did not write the script. He is neither the producer nor the director. He has one of the starring villain roles. The reason for opposition to the continued effort to dismember Yugoslavia is not that national borders are somehow holy and sacrosanct. It lies in the correct conclusion reached by the European powers in the Helsinki Agreement on European Cooperation: that attempts to redraw the postwar borders should not be undertaken or supported. That to do so in today's world is to invite dangerous and farreaching consequences. The starting point for progressives must be that a peaceful future for the continent and the rest of the world lies in an internationalist solutions rather than ethnic and religious separation. It's safe to assume that when the members of the Atlantic Alliance collude to throw their collective weight around they are not doing so for humanitarian reasons. Rather, they are pursuing what they claim to be “national interests.” In fact, Clinton and Albright have made it abundantly clear that is exactly what they are doing in Kosovo. The public argument goes like this: we are involved in the Balkans to defend freedom and our vital interests. "(W)here our values and our interests are at stake, and where we can make a difference, we must be prepared to do so," Clinton said recently in San Francisco. The commitment to freedom is more often honored in the breach, as it was in Croatia and as it is when it comes to the Kurdish people. It is estimated that as consequence of Turkish government’s attack on the Kurds, 2.5 million internal refugees have come into being 3,000 villages have been set afire and 30,000 lives lost. Of course, NATO intervention there has no even been suggested. "Freedom" is too often fleeting. "Vital interests," however, are constant. The Clinton Administration has decided that NATO's role should no longer be restricted to defending its member states but should be expanded to be able to act anywhere its collective interests are perceived as threatened. “Out of area or out of business, says Indiana Senator Richard Lugar, a strong supporter of the war in Yugoslavia, because the US needs 'a reliable set of allies wherever we have vital interests.'" (San Jose MercuryNews, April 13, 1999) Yes, truth is the first casualty in wartime but it does have a tendency to ooze out once the fighting is over and the dead are being counted. There is ample enough evidence now that at the State Department’s insistence the public was deliberately mislead and misinformed by the major media about what really went on at Rambouillet (The Nation, June 14, 1999). As the following paragraph makes clear, the public was also mislead about the objectives of the intervention. “From the outset, the United States and its NATO allies have couched the bombardment of Yugoslavia in high moral terms, as a crusade to restore the rights of a maligned population and to prevent the spread of chaos beyond the borders of Serbia. But all along, many experts and foreign leaders have questioned whether the allies would have acted had Kosovo been in Central Asia, and how much the operation really had a tightly focused purpose - to define the reach, the role and the credibility of NATO and the United States in post-Communist Europe.” (Serge Schmemann in the New York Times June 6, 1999) Kevin Phillips has suggested that when the war began, U.S. President Bill Clinton “might have see a conquered Yugoslavia as the linchpin of a new world order.”(Los Angeles Times, May 22, 1999) The editors of the Financial Times have concluded that the war in Yugoslavia has “set an important precedent by launching a military operation against a sovereign government in defense of that nation’s own citizens” and doing so with UN authorization “greatly extended the legal justification for military action.” The result, the paper’s June 5, 1999 editorial went on, “will provide ample justification of the decision to act without a UN license.” Walter Russell Means, senior fellow at the Council of Foreign Relations agrees that a “key” goal of the war was “to establish the legitimacy of NATO interventions without a U.N. Mandate and to build backing among our European allies for such interventions in the future.” (Los Angeles Times, June 13, 1999). In the new global economy the Clinton Administration is seeking to perfect and expand the relevance of borders between states is being readjusted. Not for the reasons some globalism theory suggests. Nation states are still very important and imperialist competition very real. The problem is that some borders get in the way when a global project is so big it extends across them. Take, for instance, oil pipelines. "All in all, the European Union's target of breaking Russia's monopoly on traffic to and from Asia seems to be in sight," said The Economist April 17, 1999, in an article on present and prospective new pipelines and rail lines crossing the area bordering Europe's southeastern tier. "The United States, which is also determined to prevent oil and freight going south through Iran, is delighted with the new routes set to bypass Russia. They chime with America's ambition to promote an eastwest trade 'corridor' beneath Russia's southern rim, as a way of projecting western influence into the Caucasus and Central Asia." "One reason the Americans might have difficulty convincing the Russian that they're not being edged out is because they are being edged out," Jeffery Goldberg wrote recently Times. (NYT, October, 1998) And all along we have been led to believe that the Western Alliance was committed to aiding the new Russian market economy to become viable and promote the prosperity that the end of the "command economy" was supposed to bring about. In fact, while new IMF loans that will push Moscow further into debt are dangled before the government of Russian President Boris Yeltsin, a coordinated effort is underway to cut the country out of the global market. This at a moment when the World Bank is predicting that by next year 30 million people, or 30 percent of Russia's population, will be living in extreme poverty - twice as many as there were a year ago. It is not only historical affinity for their Orthodox Slavic brothers and sisters that has Russia enraged over the NATO bombing of Yugoslavia. Yes, they have real historical and cultural ties and some of the unscrupulous people around the Kremlin will play them for all they're worth. But Russia also has national interests." The West deceived and robbed Russia," famous Soviet dissident historian Roy Medvedev wrote in the Guardian of London the other day. "Our people were told over and over again about the benefits of democracy and the market economy which the rich western countries would help Russia construct. This illusion has long disappeared. In the minds of the impoverished there is a conviction that the West not only deceived us, but it robbed Russia, trying to turn it into the source of raw materials. New wealthy Russians, stock market gamblers and financial speculators carried billions of dollars away to the West. Life in Russia became worse and poorer, and its debts to the West grew several times over. Russia is being squeezed out of international politics and the international economy." (Guardian, April 28, 1999) On the eve of the recent somber gathering of NATO headsofstate in Washington, Former US Ambassador to NATO Robert Hunter said the summit "must embark on the new business of finally coming to terms with the key security and political challenge in Europe bringing stability to the Balkans and, indeed, throughout all of Southeast Europe." Setting his imperial sights even further afield, Hunter went on: "Nor can the region's importance be judged solely in its own terms. It is the gateway to areas of intense Western concern the ArabIsraeli conflict, Iraq and Iran, Afghanistan, the Caspian Sea and the Transcaucasus. Stability in Southeast Europe must be the precursor to protecting Western interests and reducing threats from further east." It was cleaver sentence construction putting Caspian Sea right there in the middle. It's where it should be there, for while the other areas mentioned have only remote connection to the Balkans, they are all directly connected to the substance that lies beneath that sea: oil. Hunter's frank explanation of the connection between Kosovo and the oil beneath the lands and seas of the countries to the southeast of Europe stands in stark contrast to a strange half page ad the American Jewish Committee placed in the April 18 edition of the New York Times proclaiming: "What is at stake in Kosovo isn't oil or commerce or trading routes." Last October, Stephen Kinzer wrote in the New York Times that the proposal to build a new oil pipeline in the Caucasus had become "a centerpiece of American foreign policy." Kinzer has described in great detail the "grand rivalry" that has begun over control of pipelines that will carry Caspian oil to foreign markets which he noted "will not simply carry oil but will also define new corridors of trade and power." Kinzer wrote that the Clinton Administration had exerted "every form of persuasion at its disposal" to convince oil companies to build the new pipeline running from Azerbaijan to Turkey. At the time last October he had apparently failed to persuade them. The oil companies had pretty much decided that the project's cost estimated somewhere around $2.4 billion was just too much. Oil executives had suggested the US government finance the pipeline construction but Clinton responded that would be politically impossible to put across. The administration had, however, urged Turkey to offer the companies a generous package of incentives and tax breaks. On April 14 on this year, Kinzer reported Turkey has now assured the oil companies it will "guarantee a price for the pipeline and agree to pay any excess." (NYT, April 14, 1999) There are as much as 20 billion barrels of oil beneath Azerbaijan. The whole Caspian region could be the source of as much as 200 billion barrels. Since 1994 Azerbaijan has signed over 20 exploration and development contracts worth well over $50 billion in potential investments. "For America, the stakes are enormous," wrote Jeffery Goldberg, in the New York Times October 4, 1998. He went on: "Baku is a fine place to watch the future of capitalism unfold. The Caspian oil rush is a reminder that not all commerce in the future will be carried out antiseptically over the Internet, that the ethereal talk of globalization means little to men who have to drill for oil and then physically move that oil across dangerous territory. Here, the old verities apply. At least in this corner of the globe, 21stCentury capitalism looks very much like 19th Century capitalism." Azerbaijani President Haydar Aliyev was in Washington for the NATO summit, as were leaders from other Central Asian oilrich countries. The highlight of his visit was a trip to the Naval Academy where he was permitted to describe the situation on the border between his country and Armenia and complain that a large hunk of Azerbaijan was under Armenian control. He was referring to the disputed Nagano Karabakh enclave that has seen ethnic cleansing and could see it again should hostilities resume. The US army has held military maneuvers in the Central Asian region, the US has a defense cooperation agreement with Azerbaijan and similar agreements with others are expected, the Pentagon has provided military equipment to countries in the area and NATO has conducted joint military exercises with the military of three countries in the region explicitly to protect the new AzerbaijantoTurkey pipeline. (NYT, May 2, 1999). The US National Guard scheduled for May what was described as a disaster relief exercise, using computers, in Kazakhstan. They would no be doing these things unless these politically unstable areas were not considered vital interests and thus potential "out of area" site for intervention. "Russia's decline has shifted the balance of power further toward America in the Middle East," read a recent dispatch from Moscow. "It has opened potentially strategic oil deposits in Russia's Caspian Sea backyard to American companies, and spawned a game of pipelinebuilding politics in which the effect of American policy and even perhaps the intent is to weaken Russia's influence with other members of the former Soviet Union." (Michael Wines, NYT, May 2, 1999) Ultimately what is being called into question today is the border between Serbia and Albania. But control over a whole region of the world is at issue. The region is a powder keg with lots of nuclear weapons. The point here is not that the war in Yugoslavia is being conducted to ensure that a pipeline is built from one point to another. It won't pass through Kosovo. But, as it has for centuries, the Balkans lie at an important crossroads astride the EuroAsian land mass, a critical area through which pass trade routes bringing everything from oil to jute from the East to the industrialized capitalist West. This war is being waged to establish military hegemony there and, I would venture, to serve notice to others in the region like the Greeks and the Armenians that those who profit from oil will broke no "instability" that might threaten their investment in Turkey. World War I was an imperialist war fought between imperialist powers. Many socialists at the time, indeed the main socialists parties of Europe, became so confused that in fits of nationalist passions they broke apart from one another and teamed up with the war makers in their own countries. Viewed through a microscope, the conflict in Kosovo is not an imperialist war but from a macro point of view it is part of a much larger conflict with clear imperialist dimensions. The horrendous war that tore across Europe between 1914 and 1918 was imperialist because it concerned the division of the world, the control of colonies, spheres of influence and the impulses of finance capital. Its dynamics were the drive for expanding rates of profit, sources of raw materials and markets for goods as well as political hegemony in the interest of capitalism. Most of these elements are present in the war in Europe today. Perhaps it should not be surprising that the main socialist parties of Western Europe, some former Communists and the world's biggest Green Party have united in a grand alliance with their own and our bourgeoisie as they try, once again, impose their will in the Balkans. However, there is more going on here than meets the eye. Although it appears the Atlantic Alliance is unified in the Kosovo endeavor, the reality is quite different. The fissures that developed over the conduct of the war are revealing. Germany, Italy and Britain are openly at odds with each other. Greece, a member of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization forbid planes from NATO member Turkey from passing through its air space on their way to the war in Yugoslavia. These differences may be partially papered over for a while but they have permitted a glimpse into the very real struggle underway over the direction of Europe. Inner-imperialist rivalry best explains the at first baffling picture of Britain's Prime Minister Tony Blair emerging as the superhawk in the situation, butting heads with Germany's Schroder. One British commentator went so far as to suggest that Blair "is going to emerge from this war with Kosovo back in NATO hands and a position of European leadership no British leader has enjoyed since 1945."(Observer columnist Andrew Marr, quoted in NYT, May 23, 1999. (“back” in NATO’s hands?) Most of us probably view the future rather optimistically, believing human civilization has made considerable progress since the early years of this century and that with the end of the Cold War and superpower confrontation, the threat of war has receded. We have come to imagine that our sons and daughters will not be called upon to risk death on some foreign soil. And, for the impoverished amongst us and throughout the world there may someday be a real peace dividend. Here I would like to quote portions of one of the most astonishing documents I have ever read, one that kept me up at night as no Frankenstein movie ever could. It was the lead editorial in the April 11 edition of the New York Times. The last sentence of the first paragraph reads: "Important lessons can already be gleamed from this war that may help the United States and its allies prevail in Yugoslavia as well as future conflicts." The editors went on to say that when the weather cleared it should be possible to bomb the Yugoslavs into submission. But now that air power is the preferred form of US intervention abroad "the Pentagon needs to develop more effective and varied ways to use its arsenal of warplanes, cruise missiles and precision bombs." Further: "It may also need to adjust the mix of weapons it buys and maintains, and be ready to deal with an exodus of refugees that often materializes when ethnic conflicts suddenly intensify." The Times editors went on to give credit for forcing the Yugoslavs to the table at Dayton in late 1995 to NATO bombing and "Croatian military gains on the ground." That is followed by the admission that "air power is not the most effective way to combat dispersed ground forces in mountainous, heavily forested terrain" and the admonition that: "The Pentagon must try to develop air weapons and reconnaissance systems that can operate in the kinds of unconventional conditions that exist in Kosovo, a battlefield of ethnic conflicts that is sure to become increasingly common in the years ahead." The editorial continued: "In future ethnic conflicts, the United States and its allies will have to be better prepared to handle hordes of displaced people. Governmental resources, including military units, will need to be committed in advance to the effort. Having made the defensible decision to rely primarily on air power in regional conflicts that do not immediately threaten American security, Washington will need to be as imaginative and agile as possible in fighting such wars and preparing for their repercussions." After reading that I got out my globe and spun it around looking for the "mountainous, heavily forested terrain" where these many, and I guess unceasing, ethnic conflicts are expected to take place. A lot of such territory lies in the southeast of Europe, places where it is suggested new ethnic conflicts will soon flare and where, presumably, diplomacy and even the threat of force will ultimately fail. A similar foresightful prognosis was recently laid out by the editors of the Wall Street Journal who offered that the war in Kosovo is "the outcome of historical forces we sooner or later would have to confront" because it "lies in a part of the world where inevitably we will be involved whether we like it or not." On June 11, 1999, the Los Angeles Times editorialized against a reliance solely on air power arguing that “Wherever future crises affecting American Interests might arise - in the Persian Gulf or on the Korean peninsula, for example, air, sea and land forces will be needed.” As the fighting was nearing end, the Financial Times called upon the countries of Europe to increase military spending, “focusing on forces designed for operations such as Kosovo, and by streamlining weapons procurement.” (June 5, 1999) This is scary stuff. But remember the people who wrote these words have access to the corridors of power and know of what they speak. Sometimes their own rhetoric even carries them away, especially when it comes to the damage the war had done to the left. Drawing attention to what it called “the ideological and political implications of these events,” the Wall Street Journal declares, “the political left, long in opposition, now stands heavily invested in it, using traditional methods.” “Yes, distinctions will be drawn between human-rights wars and commercial wars, but the century-long debate over the legitimacy of modern military power is over,” the voice of Wall Street declared. Of course, the Social Democratic parties of Europe don’t speak for the entire left. However, having made political concessions to forces they know full well are up to no good, those sections of the left who rallied support for the war will now be called upon to make ideological concessions as well. Many succumbed to nationalism and chauvinistic patriotism right after the turn of the past century; the question is whether many others will accept the bait as the new one begins. Imperialist projects require ideological foundation, racism and national chauvinism being essential ingredients “The ‘progressive’ elements in America who finally found, in Kosovo’s suffering, a cause worth waging war for, are often the same elements who decry ‘Eurocentrism’ in teaching history and literature, and in interpretation of what it means to be an American, writes conservative columnist George Will (Washington Post, June 11, 1999. “But this was not just a war in Europe. It was about Europe about what Europe means at the end of the century. Hence it was a war also about America’s identity...NATO nations are not claiming a manifest destiny to colonize the world with their values. But they will police their back yard with a new boldness. This, many ‘progressives’ will be disconcerted to learn, reflects a robust patriotism and cultural confidence that is not bashful about claiming moral superiority in the hierarchy of nations.” The Nation was right on target when it said editorially: "A broad national debate in which progressives lay out a new internationalist position is needed now. That position should emphasize forestalling crises rather than reacting to them." The magazine is correct to assert that such a position must make a serious commitment to international law and the importance of international institutions, especially the United Nations. What is most important for our discussion is not the unsurprising failure of the NATO governments to act resolutely and forcefully in response to other ethnic cleansings, especially that carried out by the Croatian regime five years ago. But why did the left fail to have agitated for such a response? How much is being said about the war being carried out against the Kurds, a war employing the same instruments and cruelty once visited three decades ago upon the people of Southeast Asia? Too often the left does not have a thoughtout response to the problem of ethnic violence but rather responds reactively to take sides when armed conflict breaks out and the mass media tells us something important is going on. It will remain so until we can develop a response to the more general questions of ethnic conflicts and imperialist responses. Until we can uncover and elaborate where the class forces line up in today's world and discern what geostrategic strategies are at work we will remain trapped in an empirically defined reality, lured an divided among ourselves by the siren songs of false humanitarians. Thereby, we could well soon find ourselves trying to assess blame in Chechnya, Nagano Karabakh, Cyprus or the borders of Iran.
