_________________________________________________ KOMINFORM P.O. Box 66 00841 Helsinki Phone +358-40-7177941 Fax +358-9-7591081 http://www.kominf.pp.fi General class struggle news: [EMAIL PROTECTED] subscribe mails to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Geopolitical news: [EMAIL PROTECTED] subscribe: [EMAIL PROTECTED] __________________________________________________ ---------- From: "Macdonald Stainsby" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Reply-To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Date: Tue, 27 Mar 2001 15:03:19 -0800 To: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>, <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Subject: [L-I] The Mixed Motives behind NATO's War against Yugoslavia- Diana Johnstone Deception and Self-Deception: The Mixed Motives behind NATO's War against Yugoslavia by Diana Johnstone (7-09-00) Ladies and Gentlemen, First my thanks to the Institute for kindly inviting me to take part in this conference. My subject relates to lies and deception, and this very morning when I turned on BBC television I heard another lie: the description of people marking the anniversary of the start of the NATO bombing by protests as "supporters of Milosevic". Personally, I am certainly not here to support Milosevic -- Yugoslav politics are the business of the Yugoslavs, not my business. I am here to express solidarity with the people of Yugoslavia who have been unjustly subjected to bombing, economic sanctions, political isolation and slander, and with all the people in the world who want peace and the rule of international law. My presence here is in protest against the cruelty of the self-styled humanitarians who wield enormous economic and technological power without a trace of wisdom or compassion, whose wealth and military might have brought them to the state of mind which the ancient Greeks called hubris. "Humanitarian Intervention" Aggressive wars and imperial enterprises usually cloak themselves in noble pretexts. Each pretext must seem plausible in its own historical period. The notion of "humanitarian intervention" grew out of a combination of contemporary factors: the drastic decline of progressive political thinking at the end of the Cold War, the decline of the protective role of the weaker national governments, the rise of "non-governmental organizations", the multiplication of internal armed conflicts often along ethnic lines. In the early nineties, it was being theorized by one of the most prestigious of United States "think tanks" the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. In 1992, the Carnegie Endowment published a book entitled Self-Determination in the New World Order, which foreshadowed the policy of the Clinton administration in Kosovo, since it was the product of a team of policy-makers who went on the design that policy. In the post-Cold War world, the Carnegie Endowment study noted, "groups within states are staking claims to independence, greater autonomy, or the overthrow of an existing government, all in the name of self-determination". In regard to these conflicts, "American interests and ideals compel a more active role". So allow me to quote: "As of mid-1992, neither the United States nor the world community has reached a point where humanitarian calamities resulting from self-determination claims or internal repression automatically trigger collective military intervention to accomplish strictly humanitarian objectives. But humanitarian intervention will become increasingly unavoidable." What is noteworthy here is that the United States policy-makers proposed "collective military intervention", and not any sort of diplomatic or political solution, as the inevitable outcome of "self-determination claims", which could be expected to meet with "internal repression". And already in 1992, this military action was labeled "humanitarian intervention". The statement that "humanitarian intervention will become increasingly unavoidable" was a self-fulfilling prophecy in the unusually literal sense that those who made it helped it come true. The 1992 book, Self-Determination in the New World Order, was the product of a group of foreign policy specialists brought together by the Carnegie Endowment President to work out new policy options for the post-Cold War period. That president was Morton Abramowitz, a former U.S. ambassador to Thailand who has specialized in intelligence matters, and who went on to be a champion of the U?K and an advisor to the Kosovo Albanian delegation at Rambouillet; Abramowitz has since become president of the influential Council on Foreign Relations. He is also on the board of the International Crisis Group, the Brussels-based think-tank that formulates policy options for the "international community" in Bosnia and Kosovo, and is financed by both Western governments and private foundations, notably the Soros foundation. The Abramowitz group of specialists that pondered the theory of "humanitarian intervention" in the early 1990s included Madeleine Albright, Richard Holbrooke and Leon Feurth, who is the foreign policy advisor to Albert Gore, now vice president and leading candidate for the presidency to succeed Clinton. The authors of the book I have cited on Self-Determination in the New World Order were Morton Halperin, head of State Department policy planning under Madeleine Albright, and David Scheffer, who is Albright's special envoy for war crimes issues. rest available at: www.emperors-clothes.com/articles/Johnstone/balk.htm ------------------------------------------- Macdonald Stainsby Rad-Green List: Radical anti-capitalist environmental discussion. http://lists.wwpublish.com/mailman/listinfo/rad-green ---- Leninist-International: Building bridges in the tradition of V.I. Lenin. http://lists.wwpublish.com/mailman/listinfo/leninist-international ---- In the contradiction lies the hope. --Bertholt Brecht _________________________________________________ KOMINFORM P.O. 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