-Caveat Lector- http://english.pravda.ru/main/2001/12/18/23938.html
WJPBR Email News List [EMAIL PROTECTED] Peace at any cost is a Prelude to War! AN AMERICAN POPULIST: PRAVDA.RU INTERVIEWS PATRICK BUCHANAN NATO expansion, Russia’s place in Europe, and the coming clash of civilizations: Patrick Buchanan gives an exclusive interview to PRAVDA.Ru Q. You are known as being a critic of the NATO actions against Yugoslavia during 1999. As you know, the majority of the Russian population was against the war. Many Russians feel as if the Serbs are their "little brothers." In addition, many people here believe that the stories of large-scale "ethnic cleansing" were simply designed to convince the American public to support the actions. Why, exactly, were you opposed to this war? A. I am well aware of the historic feelings of the Russian people for the Serbs, who are fellow Slavs and Orthodox Christians. Indeed, it was the unwillingness of Russia to permit the Austro-Hungarian empire to crush Serbia, after the assassination of the Archduke in June of 1914, that led to World War I. I opposed the Yugoslav war because I thought it was an unjust war against a small nation that had done nothing to us. Serbia had not threatened us, had not attacked us, and had been our friend and ally in two world wars. Serbs had rescued hundreds of downed American pilots when we were fighting the Nazis. And Serbia had not attacked any NATO nation. Why then did NATO attack Serbia? The U.S. launched a 78-day air war against a nation of ten million, because that nation refused to permit NATO troops to march with impunity across its sovereign territory. As for the allegations of mass atrocities by Serbs, -- that 100,000 Kosovar Albanians had been massacred -- that turned out to have been almost 100% propaganda. Before our air strikes began, in one year of Serbia’s civil war there had been only 2,000 casualties, and 95,000 Kosovar Albanians had gone into exile. Yet, in just one day in our own Civil War, at Antietam, there were 10,000 dead in one day of fighting. Nobody accused us of genocide. Almost all of the ethnic expulsions in the Yugoslav civil war occurred after the U.S. bombing began. Moreover, at the war’s end, there were atrocities against Serbs, and 250,000 Serbs were pushed out of their province, and many of their beautiful old churches and cathedrals were smashed. Who has been made to answer for those crimes? No one. Milosevic was a thug, but he did not want war with the United States and it was not our responsibility to remove him. As Lord Byron said, "Who would be free/Themselves must strike the blow." Q. Do you think that the American press accurately covered the events that took place? A. I was campaigning for President at the time, but my recollection is that the coverage was biased against the Serbs, that Americans had been made to believe the Serbs were some kind of wild beasts. What the U.S. press did not explain was how these wild beasts could vote Milosevic out, then be hailed as the newest members of the Great Western Democratic Club. Q. What do you think the long-term solution to the ethnic problems in Yugoslavia could be? A. Given the memories of atrocities on all sides, it is foolish to try to force these peoples to live together, as in Bosnia. In the end, I think an eventual partition of Bosnia is inevitable. As for Kosovo, we should have stayed out militarily, and tried to broker a deal whereby the Kosovar Albanians could have more autonomy, without breaking up Yugoslavia. Unlike Slovenia and Croatia, which were given to Belgrade in 1919 -- after being taken from the Austro-Hungarian Empire -- Serb roots in Kosovo go back centuries to a time even before Columbus discovered America. Kosovo is the cradle of Serbia. If the NATO allies let Kosovo be severed from Serbia, I believe we will be creating the conditions of future war. There is already a movement afoot to create a Greater Albania by tearing off Kosovo and parts of Montenegro and Macedonia and attaching them to Albania. Should this happen, we will face endless Balkan wars. But this is Europe’s problem, not America’s. Q. It is well known that NATO and the USSR had an agreement that when Russian troops withdrew from countries such as East Germany and Poland, that NATO said it would not expand eastward. In your opinion, should Russia be concerned about the continued expansion of NATO? A. Clearly, from the record, the U.S. led the Soviet Union to believe that If it abolished the Warsaw Pact and if the Russian Army went home from Central and Eastern Europe, we would not move NATO one inch further east. So, the U.S. did not keep its word, given verbally by our diplomats, including, I believe, Secretary of State James Baker. Even though I used to write "Captive Nations" resolutions when I worked for Presidents Nixon and Reagan, and welcomed the liberation of Eastern Europe and the Baltic states from Communist rule and Soviet rule, I opposed NATO expansion. Why? First, NATO was created to prevent the Red Army from overrunning all of Germany and Western Europe. It was to be a purely defensive alliance. Second, for the U.S. to commit itself to fight forever in Eastern Europe is abridge too far. We have no vital interest there. We have never fought there. When we had four million soldiers in Europe in 1945, Eisenhower stopped the U.S. Army at the Elbe. In 1961, Eisenhower told President Kennedy to pull all U.S. troops out of Europe, that it was time to let Europeans pay the cost and provide the troops for their own defense. We are a republic, not an empire, and America should let Europeans, who are as prosperous and populous as we are, defend their own continent. We are not the Roman Empire which stayed in Germany 400 years. Third, the Soviet Army was not defeated by NATO. It got up and went home voluntarily. To move NATO into Russia’s front yard was an act of bad faith, a provocation. George Kennan called it the greatest mistake of the post-Cold War era. To move NATO into the Baltic republics, into the suburbs of St.Petersburg, would be a terrible blunder. But does NATO threaten Russia? My answer is no. President Bush truly and rightly believes friendship with Russia is in the best interests of both nations. We are both huge and great countries. We have never fought each other in a hot war; we have no great quarrel with each other -- ideological, territorial or historical -- now that the Cold War is over. (As long as Mr. Zhirinovsky does not try to take Alaska back.) Mr. Bush is right. We should be partner-nations. Q. There is even talk of Russia someday joining NATO, but it seems that, for some reason, there are people on both sides who do not want this to happen. Some feel that this talk of Russia joining NATO is just Putin forcing NATO to admit that their expansion does have a long-term goal directed against Russia. How do you see possible NATO-Russian cooperation in the future? A. There is no question but that NATO expansion was designed to say to Moscow: If you move into Poland again, you will have to face the United States. Let’s not kid ourselves. But I do not believe NATO expansion is directed, in an aggressive way, against Russia. I think it is more of a bureaucratic imperative that Senator Lugar touched on in his famous phrase: "NATO must either go out of area, or go out of business." One of the primary reasons NATO was not dissolved after the Cold War is that too many rice bowls would be broken. Brussels is wonderful duty for the U.S. and British Army. One of NATO’s functions is to serve as a jobs program for American generals. Why did the British Colonial Office and British Army want to keep India? They loved life in the Raj. All those servants and gin and tonics in the afternoon. My belief is, as I wrote in 1990 in an article titled "America First, Second and Third!", if the Russian Army goes home, the American army should come home. If Russia abolishes the Warsaw Pact, we should abolish NATO, or turn it over to the Europeans. With the Cold War over, we should have returned to the policy of America’s Founding Fathers, who approved of temporary alliances, but not permanent alliances. World War I taught us what happens to great nations that get ensnared in permanent alliances. Because America was not part of the Triple Entente, we lost fewer men in that war than any other great nation. The historian A. J.P. Taylor wrote that the purpose of becoming a great power is to be able to fight a great war, but the only way to stay a great power is not to fight a great war. We Americans have been fortunate that we have had courageous men who fought to keep us out of the great wars of the last century, until the worst of the blood-letting was over. We came in at the end, like Fortunado coming in at the end of Hamlet, when everyone else is lying wounded or dead on the floor. I am opposed, however, to bringing Russia into NATO, while we are in it, because I am afraid Russia is going to have to fight to keep control of its Far East and Siberia, where Russians are out-numbered many times over by Chinese, and the Russian people are dying out. In a Sino-Russian war, it is not in America’s interest to be militarily involved, though we surely prefer Russian neighbors across the Bering Strait. However, while I don’t support Russia’s admission to NATO, I do support the kind of entente, short of an alliance, Britain developed with Russia in 1907. But it would be a mistake for us to commit ourselves to any new alliances. Alliances are the transmission belts of war. I was opposed to expanding NATO under Clinton and I am against further expansion of NATO. But we are in a box, because we have made some commitments. A way out may be for Russia to give solemn assurances of the independence of the Baltic states and Ukraine, in return for which the U.S. postpones NATO expansion indefinitely. Ultimately, the U.S. should get its forces out of Europe and let Europeans defend their own continent. Europeans used to put million-man armies in the field. Now, they squabble for years over how to put together a "rapid reaction force" of 60,000. Can this be the Europe that gave us the armies of Wellington, Napoleon and Von Moltke? Q. You are coming out with a new book, The Death of the West. It appears this book is about the decline of civilizations. Have you read Oswald Spengler’s Decline of the West? If so, did Spengler’s work influence your latest work? In your opinion, why is the West dying, and is there anything that it can do to stay alive? A. No, I did not read Spengler, though I am familiar with his thesis. If there were two writers who reflect my views, they are the poet T. S. Eliot and the former Trotskyite who became a great Cold Warrior and Man of the Right, James Burnham, who wrote Suicide of the West. But a friend who read my book tells me it makes Spengler sound like an optimist. Why is the West dying? First, for a simple reason, its people are dying. There is not one European country, except Moslem Albania, where the population is not stagnant or falling. In not one European nation are women having enough children to keep the nation alive. In some twenty European nations, there are already more burials than births, more caskets than cradles. Russia is one of them. Second, the dying peoples of European descent are being quickly replaced by immigrants from non-Western nations. Chinese and Islamic peoples will be moving into Siberia, Central Asia and the Caucasus. Arab, African and Islamic peoples are moving into Europe in the hundreds of thousands every year. America is being swamped. We have 35 million Hispanics, and 1.5 million immigrants coming in every year, a third of them illegal aliens, and 90% of them from the Third World. There are 45 million people in our country who do not speak English at home. We face the same Balkanization that pulled the Soviet Union apart. By 2050, a majority of Americans will trace their ancestry to Asia, Africa and Latin America, not Europe. America will be, predominantly, a Third World country. While these are hard-working good people, they will not preserve the Western heritage, history, heroes, literature, faith or culture. All the subject peoples from the Western colonial empires, from China to Southeast Asia, from India and Pakistan, to Arabia and Africa, are sending their peoples north to invade the Mother Countries of the West. Invading armies go home, immigrant armies do not. The West is being invaded, peacefully, and occupied. Mexicans and even Mexican-Americans talk of a "Reconquista," the recapture of the lands they lost to America in The Mexican War. Third, the great Catholic writer Hillaire Belloc said: "The Faith is Europe, Europe is the Faith." In Europe and Russia, the Christian faith is dying. In America, Christianity is under assault. Secularism and hedonism, the values of the 1960s, are dominant in our media, culture and education. On issues like abortion, homosexuality, euthanasia, pornography, a pagan world view predominates. Our rivers and lakes are being cleaned up, but American culture is being poisoned and polluted. In Europe, the churches -- Catholic, Protestant, Orthodox -- are emptying out, while the mosques are filling up. Fourth, as President Ronald Reagan warned us: We have forgotten who we are and where we came from. To America’s cultural elite, the Crusaders are villains, the great explorers and conquerors of the New World were genocidal racists, our Founding Fathers were evil slaver-owners, the old cowboys and soldiers who won the West are accused of cultural genocide and atrocities against the Indians. The battle flags and the statues of Civil War heroes from the South are being torn down. America’s young learn no history at all. Many are ignorant of their past. Our civilization will not survive if we do not know who we are or where we came from, or if we hate those who went before us and gave us all that we have. Finally, Western countries are surrendering their national sovereignty to transnational institutions. There are powerful ethnic forces pulling apart Britain, Spain, France, Canada. Yugoslavia, Czechoslovakia, the USSR have already broken up. There are secessionist movements even inside Russia. In Western Europe, all the ancient nation-states are selling out their sovereignty and independence to disappear inside a bureaucratic superstate called the EU. This is the great fight that succeeds the Cold War. I would hope Russia will struggle to retain its national identity, independence, sovereignty, culture and faith. Q. In Russian history there has always been the question of whether or not Russia was a part of Europe, part of Asia, or something completely different. Do you think Russia can ever be a part of Europe? A. Russia is part of Europe, all the way to the Urals. And I have always believed Russia belonged to the West. By the West, I mean those nations whose culture and civilization were formed by the Christian faith. Was not Moscow once "The Third Rome," after Rome fell and Constantinople was overrun in 1453? In my view, Russia was captured by a Christian heresy, Communism, that was imposed through terror upon her people. As Solzhenitzyn reminded Americans: Russia was the first Captive Nation. Russia’s great poets and novelists have always been considered among the greatest of the West. Since Peter the Great, Russia has been a force in Europe. I was in the old Soviet Union in 1971 and spent three weeks there. In the old cathedrals you could see that this was part of us. You are as much a part of the West as America is. If a great final clash of civilizations is coming, Russia will hold the eastern and southeast flank of the West, just as the Polish King John Sobieski defended Vienna. 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