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| Return to: Left History: a digital archive | Return to: Say no to imperialist wars! | Return to: NATO-Yugoslav War Internet Resources |
WHEN the United States dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima, the front page of the London Daily Express said: ``This is a warning to the world.'' When American missiles and bombs attacked a sovereign European state last Friday, it was another clear warning to the world, with the message fundamentally unchanged.
The most powerful and rapacious imperial power in history will stop at nothing to secure its domination over human affairs.
The basic details of the assault on Serbia illuminate this truth vividly. The bombing has nothing to do with a humanitarian concern for the suffering Kosovans. On the contrary, ``the West'' (as the Anglo-American imperial forces are known) has consistently used humanitarian rhetoric to justify intervening in the Balkans, mostly on the side of regional power, often the Milosevic regime. Last October, the US drafted an entirely pro-Serbian plan for the Kosovans, giving them a fake autonomy with far less freedom than they had under the old Yugoslav Constitution.
Similarly, in the early 1990s, Anglo-American propaganda during Bosnia's life-and-death struggle masked Washington's true aims. It was an American plan, devised by former US Secretary of State Cyrus Vance in 1992, that handed the Milosevic regime and the fascist Bosnian Serbs the entire arsenal of former Yugoslavia. Thereafter the people of Bosnia hardly stood a chance. At the time, NATO navies and UN troops enforced an arms embargo against the Sarajevo government.
To the Americans, what mattered, above all, was that Serbia was not fragmented and did not slip beyond Western - that is, American - control.
Today, NATO, which of course is Washington, is bombing Serbia because the Milosevic regime - like Suddam Hussein in 1990 - has become uppity. The man is not following orders. He is not subduing the Kosovans as the American plan dictated. He has become all too flagrant, allowing his troops to slaughter people and leave their bodies to be filmed by Western television. More seriously, he is challenging the ``stability of the region''; the kind of false stability essential for an imperial power to go about its God-given tasks.
US special envoy to the Balkans Richard Holbrooke has admitted, in effect, that the real reason for the bombing is ``the credibility of NATO'' - in other words, the credibility of American power. Since the end of the Cold War, the US has sought new reasons for maintaining NATO, which ensures US control over European military forces.
Since 1990, Washington has pushed for NATO to be used ``out of area'' and to act without UN approval: in other words, to usurp the role of the UN as the world's ``peacekeeper''.
This has not proved an insurmountable problem in the past. The slaughter in the Gulf ``war'' in 1991 was legitimised by the UN after US Secretary of State James Baker travelled the world offering the biggest bribes in history to potential military allies. In Cairo, for example, Baker bribed the Egyptians with $14 billion, which wiped out a third of the country's foreign debt.
However, these days, having attacked Iraq on and off for eight years, the US can no longer rely on the open support of conservative Muslim states. The imperial godfather is impatient to complete its main project following the collapse of its former rival, the Soviet Union - and that is to secure an oil ``protectorate'' all the way from the Gulf to the Caspian Sea, thus controlling most of the world's principal energy reserves.
NATO is to be the policeman of the new American oil protectorate, and we can expect to see more NATO (mainly Anglo-American) violence in support of this newly charted imperial hegemony. It is a bitter irony for the Serb regime that, while the US actually regards Milosevic as useful and is opposed to an independent Kosovo, the attack on his country is too good an opportunity to pass up. It demonstrates to the world what NATO is really for, in the same way that the 1991 Gulf ``war'' was as much a demonstration of American power.
The NATO attacks will kill civilian Serbs who have nothing to do with Kosovo. They are ``collateral damage''. The NATO action threatens to trigger a wider war. Macedonia could break up, drawing in Bulgaria and Greece, both of which have rival claims on Macedonia.
``We shall work through bilateral forums and bilateral relationships to spread the valise of human rights,'' Britain's New Labour Foreign Secretary Robin Cook said soon after coming to office. This nonsense is still reported seriously in the West, where the media has played a historic role of minimising the culpability of Western adventures. Cook's announcement was at odds with the historical record, for which a wider understanding is vital now that Britain and the US have embarked on a new era of imperial expansion.
Beyond the current adventure in the Balkans, the dangers that will herald in the new millennium remain substantially unreported. Among a number of proposals seriously considered by the Americans for NATO is a nuclear expeditionary force ``primarily for use against Third World targets'', according to one report. There are plans for Stealth bombers, the kind that were used in the attack on Serbia, to carry a new type of bomb, a B61-11, the ``penetrator nuclear weapon''. Designed to drill into the earth before exploding in a blast whose shock waves can destroy ``command bunkers'' thousands of feet below, these low-yield ``mini-nukes'' can also be delivered by F-16 fighters.
Last week, Russian protests were dismissed by the West. What we are not told is how gravely the Russian military establishment views the expansion of NATO. Since the fall of the Berlin Wall, NATO has expanded rapidly into Eastern Europe, right up to the borders of Russia. The Russian response has hardly been reported in the West, yet the Defence Ministry in Moscow has formulated plans to deploy new tactical nuclear weapons near Russia's western border. The National Security Council in Moscow also intends to drop Moscow's longstanding doctrine of ``no first use'' nuclear weapons.
The Russians look aghast at the Clinton administration's decision to payroll the biggest war budget since Ronald Reagan. Indeed, it was back to the future in February when President Clinton sent to Congress a proposal to spend $6.6 billion developing a national missile defence ``shield'' by 2000. This is the sequel to Reagan's infamous ``Star Wars''. The US arms industry is delighted. For the Russians, the prospect of building a competitive system means that it must stop cutting back its arsenal, and prepare for a war no one can comprehend. The rest of us might ask, if we are about to leave what is sometimes called the American Century, what are we entering if not its more dangerous sequel?