AN OPEN LETTER
TO
GENERAL WESLEY CLARK
Raymond K. Kent
Emeritus, UC
Berkeley
January 14, 2001
FOREWORD: General Wesley Clark is
expressing now regrets for having bombed
Serbia into the 19th Century and
proclaims himself entirely legal in using
and engendering all sorts of
toxins which will manifest themselves sooner or
later in both Serb and
Kosovo Albanian genes as these mutate. But, No, No,
General. You must be
congratulated for becoming a Legend in Your Own Time,
as Madeleine Albright
and Mr. Rubin described you at Rambouillet. So,
herewith is the much
deserved accolade.
CONGRATULATIONS GENERAL CLARK
You have
recently just about destroyed a country in scant 78 days without
losing a
single pilot and while complaining about not being able to do much
more.
There are several admirable aspects of this achievement. Your
systematic
and calibrated targeting will enter into the annals of air war as
a
model of --to coin a term--military deconstruction. By
limiting
collateral damage from the skies you have shown great compassion
for the
Serbs. Your great concern even for the Serb sub-humans surpasses
the acutely
humane feelings for them in the bosom of Madeleine Albright,
our most
talented Secretary of State.
Waging an air war by
Immaculate Conception has depleted our supplies of
Tomahawks and Cruise
missiles. As you know, one defect of the tomahawks is
that if they stay too
long in storage, they become errant, causing
regrettable damage to civilian
life. Thanks to you, there is going to be a
new order for this magnificent
long-range weapon, creating jobs at home and
keeping the unemployment down,
along with targeting errors. You have even
managed to immerse our
parachuted mines into the mine fields prepared by the
Serbs at Kosovo. No
less astute, you have used the Kosovo Liberation Army as
ground troops to
flush out the Serb units so that our B-52s could pulverize
them in the kind
of combat predicated on great courage by their crews. And,
in loaning
of our Airforce to the K.L.A at an airfield near Rambouillet you
have
prevented the loss of life among our ground troops in NATO. Yet, all
of
this pales against the legacy of your glorious Command.
As one of
your Spanish NATO pilots --Captain Marrtin de la Hoz-- put it with
obvious
admiration, your Command was engaged in Yugoslavia, "bombing it with
novel
weapons, toxic nerve gases, surface mines dropped with
parachute,
projectiles containing Depleted Uranium (which is a mutant with
unknown
limits soon to come back into news), black napalm, sterilization
chemicals,
spraying to poison the crops and weapons of which even we still
do not know
anything." You were clearly promoting technological advances in
inflicting
maximum pain on the "designated targets" and thus make the
pleasures of
survival more intense. Your ordnance shattered 81 civilian
industrial
enterprises, according to a preliminary U.N. report, hitting
also oil
refineries and chemical fertilizer plants. As a result
"polychlorbiophenyl,
chloride ethylene, phosogene, nitrogen oxides, heavy
metal particles and a
wide range of other chemical substances were ejected
.... into the air,
water and soil creating a serious threat to human lives
and to ecological
systems both on the spot and on broad areas of the
Balkans and in Europe as
a whole. Hundreds of tons of petroleum have leaked
into the Danube as a
result of NATO air raids and practically every Serbian
river is dramatically
polluted and will affect the neighboring countries as
some 70,000 residents
of the Serb city of Pancevo are in grave
danger."
We all know that only the Serbs commit war crimes and
crimes against
humanity. So you hit them in the genes. Moreover, your (and
Madeleine's)
Virtuous Air War took a million Kosovars out of the Serb
clutches within
Kosovo thanks to your timely intervention which elevated a
minor civil war
into a major military undertaking by the "West." You must
not be too modest
and hide your military genius. After all, a U.S. General
must be allowed to
make things pretty bad in order to make them worse.
Perks like that come
with Super-Power territory. Too bad you were not
allowed to arrest 200
Russians at Pristina as well or at least mow them
down with 32-caliber
machine guns over Sir Michael Jackson's fear for a
Third World War.
Many are accusing you of war crimes and crimes
against humanity but we,
red-blooded Americans, are all proud of you
General. You saved NATO.
Raymond K. Kent
Emeritus
History
Department,
University of California,
Berkeley, Ca.
94720
Mrs Jela Jovanovic, art historian
