-Caveat Lector- from: http://www.aci.net/kalliste/ <A HREF="http://www.aci.net/kalliste/">The Home Page of J. Orlin Grabbe</A> ----- Kosovo/Vietnam Bill Clinton, Aggressor by Ted Galen Carpenter There are some occasions when one should not mince words, and the spectacle of U.S.-led air strikes on Serbia is one. Put bluntly, President Clinton's assault on Serbia is a flagrant, shameful act of aggression. U.S. forces are attacking a country that has not attacked the United States, a U.S. ally, or even a neighboring state. That is the very definition of an aggressor. Belgrade is guilty of nothing except attempting to put down a secessionist rebellion in one of its own provinces. Nearly a dozen other countries have done the same thing in this decade alone -- often with far greater bloodshed. Russia's war in Chechnya, Sri Lanka's conflict with Tamil rebels and Turkey's suppression of the Kurds are merely a few examples. The Clinton administration's spin meisters insist that Serbia is the aggressor in the current confrontation, but that argument twists language in a manner reminiscent of characters out of George Orwell's novels 1984 and Animal Farm. "Aggression" is a long-standing concept in international relations, and it has a very specific meaning: unprovoked cross-border warfare -- an unwarranted attack by one state on another. A country cannot commit aggression in its own territory any more than a person can commit self-robbery. The argument that Serbia has committed aggression in Kosovo, thereby justifying military intervention by NATO, is not only an Orwellian distortion, it sets an extremely dangerous precedent. The traditional standard that developments within a country, however sad and tragic, do not justify military intervention by outside powers is one that should not be cast aside lightly. Without that limitation, weak and imperfect as it may be, the floodgates are open to intervention by an assortment of countries for any number of reasons -- or pretexts. Before the proponents of NATO intervention in Kosovo cheer too loudly, they ought to consider the potential ramifications. For example, might Russia and its ally Belarus someday cite the Kosovo precedent for attacking Ukraine because of the latter's alleged mistreatment of Russian-speaking inhabitants in the Crimea? Could China and Pakistan argue that India's suppression of secessionists in Kashmir is a humanitarian tragedy and a threat to the peace of the region, justifying joint military action against that "aggressor"? Of course, the Clinton administration contends that the events in Kosovo are not really an internal Serbian affair, because the conflict might spread southward in the Balkans. According to that scenario, the fighting threatens to draw in Albania and Macedonia and, eventually, NATO members Greece and Turkey. That argument is a refurbished version of the old domino theory, and it is dubious on two levels. First, it is curious (if not nauseating) to see Clinton, Deputy Secretary of State Strobe Talbott and other alumni of the anti-VietnamWar movement make that argument. They ridiculed the domino theory when Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon invoked it during the conflict in Southeast Asia. They were even more scornful when Ronald Reagan invoked it with regard to the communist insurgencies in Central America and the Caribbean during the 1980s. Now, suddenly, they believe the theory has indisputable validity in the Balkans in the 1990s. At the very least, they owe the American people an explanation of their dramatic change of perspective. Second, even if one accepts the dubious domino theory, the administration's policy is making the spread of the Balkan conflict more rather than less likely. The Serbs are not the party with expansionist ambitions in the southern Balkans; the Albanians are. Kosovo Liberation Army commanders have stated that their ultimate goal is, not merely an independent Kosovo, but the creation of a Greater Albania. Nationalist groups in Albania openly circulate maps of Greater Albania -- an entity that includes not merely Albania and Kosovo but an additional slice of Serbia, all of western Macedonia and a large chunk of northern Greece. By facilitating Kosovo's secession -- and the NATO-imposed peace settlement is nothing more than Kosovo's independence on the installment plan -- the United States and its allies would be strengthening the very faction that is the most likely to stir up additional trouble in the southern Balkans. Thus, the administration's policy lacks even internal coherence. War against Serbia is unwarranted on strategic, legal and moral grounds. Serbia is the fourth country Bill Clinton has bombed in the past seven months. That record is one of a trigger-happy administration that is creating an image of America as the planetary bully. Decent Americans need to make a stand when it has reached the point of a full-scale war of aggression against a country that has done us no harm. Ted Galen Carpenter is vice president for defense and foreign policy studies at the Cato Institute in Washington, DC, and the author or editor of 10 books on international affairs. The Cato Institute Kosovo/Vietnam Fear of Wider Instability in Balkans on the Rise Meanwhile, Aggressor Clinton amusingly cites "international law" & "war crimes" PARIS - The North Atlantic Treaty Organization vowed Thursday to grind ahead with its air assault against Serbian forces, but there was growing tension and concern in the region and inside the alliance, too, that the massive human toll and refugee exodus from Kosovo could spread instability to Balkan states. Allied air strikes were taking their toll on Serbia's military strength, said the NATO supreme military commander, General Wesley Clark, without offering any detailed new evidence to back up these assertions. Even as Washington repeated that the use of Western ground forces was not being contemplated, General Clark conceded that ''air power alone cannot stop paramilitary murder'' of the type that Western officials accuse the Serbs of pursuing in Kosovo under orders from President Slobodan Milosevic. General Clark's grim determination in responding to reporters' questions at NATO headquarters in Brussels set a somber tone, apparently shared in Western capitals, about the difficulties the alliance has encountered in breaking Serbian resistance, forcing concessions from Belgrade and containing the Kosovo crisis. That mood was not eased by the appearance on Serbian television of three U.S. Army scouts seized late Wednesday near the border between Macedonia and Yugoslavia. Serbian media reported that the three Americans were going to be put on trial, perhaps this weekend, and the United States immediately denounced the prospect as a violation of international law. President Bill Clinton, reiterating threats from other Western leaders about possible war crimes prosecutions against Serbian leaders and commanders, warned Mr. Milosevic against any mistreatment of the airmen, saying that he ''should make no mistake, we will hold him and his government responsible for their safety and their well-being.'' Alliance officials said that they were still trying to clarify the circumstances of the soldiers' capture, adding that the Serbian leadership seemed to consider the soldiers as potential hostages during the military escalation against Belgrade. Belgrade television also reported a surprise meeting between Mr. Milosevic and a Kosovo Albanian political leader, Ibrahim Rugova, who had earlier told journalists that ''the bombing must stop'' and that ''Belgrade must help'' to end the conflict. The NATO secretary-general, Javier Solana Madariaga, said that Mr. Rugova, a political moderate well known personally by Western leaders, appeared to be acting under duress in Belgrade. The BBC later reported that the television interview may have been a fabrication using old pictures. It cited diplomatic sources in Macedonia as saying that the meeting had not taken place, and that the television broadcast had been propaganda. Prime Minister Massimo D'Alema of Italy, meanwhile, will fly to Albania on Easter Sunday to visit refugee camps and show his ''solidarity'' with those suffering from the war in Kosovo, his office said Thursday. Aides to Mr. D'Alema said he spoke Thursday by telephone with Prime Ministers Lionel Jospin of France and Jose Maria Aznar of Spain to ''investigate the possibility of a cease-fire.'' As the human tide of refugees fleeing Kosovo passed the 150,000 mark, scenes on television evoked harrowing memories of World War II, with lengthening columns of women and children trudging along nameless roads to escape the fighting and threats of enemy cruelty. Crowds of ethnic Albanian civilians were said to be backed up at border-crossing points as neighboring countries sought to slow the influx, which threatened to swamp facilities and, much more alarming, aggravate internal ethnic tensions and suspicions to a point of political crisis. As air strikes went into their eighth day, weather was expected to improve in the Serbian skies, lifting the cloud ceiling that has hampered U.S. and European warplanes' attacks against Serbian tanks and other mobile military targets. NATO appeared to launch its biggest air raids so far as witnesses reported that an estimated 100 planes had taken off from bases in Italy on Thursday. With improved flying conditions expected for several days, alliance commanders had promised to hammer Serbian ground forces in Kosovo and their supply routes in order to break their military presence in Kosovo. But General Clark said that NATO was inhibited in launching air strikes near civilians because the ground spotters who normally guide planes to their targets in these circumstances were not available in Kosovo, where NATO apparently has been unable to infiltrate its own commandos for this purpose or to rely on Kosovo Liberation Army guerrillas trained for that mission. Meanwhile, questions were being pressed harder in Western capitals by political leaders and media commentators about possible changes in the alliance's tactics if Mr. Milosevic continued to hold the initiative and the sophisticated Western arsenal failed to subdue his comparatively rudimentary forces as they continued wreaking havoc on the ground. Questions also surfaced about Western war aims, including suggestions that Mr. Milosevic had already gone too far for the West to maintain its avowed goal of making a political deal with him. In a bid to deter Serbian leaders and perhaps aggravate dissidence in the military, Western leaders vowed that those who committed war crimes would face international prosecution. But ignoring Western warnings, Mr. Milosevic intervened in the affairs of Montenegro, dismissing the army commander there and replacing him Wednesday with a close personal ally, General Milorad Obradovic. The small republic, Serbia's partner in the Yugoslav Federation, has distanced itself from Belgrade at Western urging. Mr. Milosevic's action, reported by Tanjug, the official Yugoslav news agency but not independently confirmed, could signal an imminent military coup in the pro-Western republic despite warnings from Britain's foreign secretary, Robin Cook, that Serbian interference there would dangerously escalate the stakes and the risks to himself. NATO air strikes have already destroyed military installations controlled from Belgrade in Montenegro. But Western officials offered no hint that any change in direction or tactics was imminent, not even an airlift of weapons to the ethnic Albanian guerrillas. A KLA spokesman said Thursday that the movement was at the brink of total military defeat. Western leaders brushed off a proposal from President Boris Yeltsin of Russia, who called for a meeting of foreign ministers of the Group of Seven leading industrial countries. They showed little interest in Moscow's renewed efforts to broker a cease-fire in the conflict and played down the dispatch of seven warships from Russia to the Adriatic as a gesture intended to impress Russian domestic opinion and prevent the government from being outflanked rhetorically by nationalists. The other leading critic of NATO's offensive, China, signaled mounting alarm Wednesday when officials in Beijing indicated that Prime Minister Zhu Rongji might cancel his planned visit to the United States next week. International Herald Tribune, April 2, 1999 Kosovo/Vietnam KLA Faces Collapse, as Guns & Men Run Out But I thought Washington didn't like militia groups THE Kosovo Liberation Army, the ethnic Albanian guerrilla group which has come under sustained Serb attack, is on the verge of collapse, Western diplomats and military analysts said yesterday. Despite initial successes in holding back the advance of the Yugoslav army, which launched a blistering attack against ethnic Albanian strongholds two weeks ago, the guerrillas are running out of guns, ammunition, soldiers, food and communications equipment. Experts say that a last-ditch attempt by the KLA to unleash a counter-offensive in the main cities has failed and urban guerrilla units, though still holding out in a district of Pristina, have been largely isolated. In several areas of Kosovo, including the southern border region with Macedonia, the south-western area around Prizren and Suva Reka and the far western regions around Pec, the KLA units are reported to be in disarray and have been all but routed by the Yugoslav army and Serb police. Only in the central region of Drenica, near their fallen base of Likovac, is the KLA still reported to be holding out. They are in the Cicavica mountains to the south of Vucitrn and in the Lapp region near the border with Serbia proper. There are also believed to be scattered units operating around Malisevo. Even in these regions, traditionally the areas of greatest resistance to the Serbs, KLA sources say that ammunition and manpower are running low. While there is no word on casualties, they will almost certainly be running into the hundreds. At the last count the guerrillas had only 12 field hospitals and very few have staff with basic medical training or even field dressings. Serbia inherited a huge army when Yugoslavia broke up and has used its firepower to effect against the lightly armed Albanians, pummelling villages for days before sending in fresh and well-armed infantry to over-run the battered defences. The KLA, which numbered around 25,000 before the latest offensive, has put up a harder fight than last summer when Serb forces took almost all their strongholds without heavy resistance. Unconfirmed reports suggest that dozens of Serb tanks may have been lost to the few anti-tank mines and shoulder-held rocket launchers that the KLA possesses. Before the latest offensive by the Serbs, the guerrillas had smuggled in several Barrett sniper guns and a few modern rocket-propelled grenade launchers but their lack of training means they have been unable to use them to maximum effect. The KLA was hurriedly put together after Serb special forces massacred dozens of innocent people in central Drenica just over a year ago. Thousands of emigres flooded back from the West to fight for an independent Kosovo. Last summer the guerrillas were comprehensively beaten by Serb armour and special forces who carried out massacres of women and children to avenge their losses, eventually provoking Western bombing threats and the intervention of unarmed monitors. With the KLA now set to collapse for a second time in six months, the West will have lost a de facto ally on the ground. Military experts have suggested that only a vigorous last effort by the allies to arm the KLA with effective anti-tank weapons can prevent that happening. But the toughest KLA fighters are likely to survive as the Serbs do not have the manpower to comb the mountains, hills and forests looking for them. The London Telegraph, April 2, 1999 ----- Aloha, He'Ping, Om, Shalom, Salaam. Em Hotep, Peace Be, Omnia Bona Bonis, All My Relations. Adieu, Adios, Aloha. Amen. Roads End Kris DECLARATION & DISCLAIMER ========== CTRL is a discussion and informational exchange list. Proselyzting propagandic screeds are not allowed. Substance�not soapboxing! These are sordid matters and 'conspiracy theory', with its many half-truths, misdirections and outright frauds is used politically by different groups with major and minor effects spread throughout the spectrum of time and thought. 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