by Diana Johnstone
Book Excerpt
May 26, 2003
Diana Johnstone, FOOLS' CRUSADE Yugoslavia, NATO and Western Delusions, Monthly Review Press, New York, N.Y, 2002; ISBN 1-58367-084-X. $19.95 paper; 288 pp. This book was simultaneously published in the United Kingdom by Pluto Press, London, Sept. 2002; ISBN 0745319505. £14.99 paper; 328 pp. Introduction TURNING POINTS At the end of November 1999, an important new movement against "globalization" emerged in massive protests against the World Trade Organization meeting in Seattle. Strangely enough, only months earlier, when NATO launched its first aggressive war by bombing Yugoslavia, there had been remarkably little protest. Yet NATO's violent advance into southeast Europe was precisely related to the globalization process opposed in Seattle. Few seemed to grasp the connection. Was it really plausible that overwhelming military power was being wielded more benevolently than overwhelming economic power? Or that the two were not in some way promoting the same interests and the same "world order"? Apparently, many people on the left, who would normally defend peace and justice, were fooled or confused by the claim that the "Kosovo war" was waged for purely humanitarian reasons. The altruistic pretensions of NATO's Kosovo war served to gain public acceptance of war as the appropriate instrument of policy. This opened the way for the United States, in the wake of 11 September 2001, to attack Afghanistan as the opening phase of a new, long-term "war against terrorism". The bombing of Yugoslavia marked a turning point in the expansion of U.S. military hegemony. For the first time, a European country was subjected to the type of U.S. intervention usually reserved for Central America. It also marked the end of Germany's postwar inhibition about foreign military intervention, and saw Germans returning to the scene of Nazi crimes with a clear conscience. For the first time, NATO abandoned its defensive posture and attacked a country that posed no threat to its member states, outside the NATO treaty area, and without seeking UN Security Council authorization. International law was circumvented in the name of an alleged higher moral imperative. A precedent was set. When the United States subsequently arrogated the right to bomb and invade Afghanistan on moral grounds, its NATO allies could only meekly offer to tag along. In a world with no more legal barriers to might proclaiming itself right, there was nothing to stop a U.S. president from using military force to crush every conceivable adversary. For all its dubious origins, the 1991 Gulf war against Iraq was waged against a militarized single-party dictatorship, condemned by the United Nations for invading another country. And yet, remarkably, the war against Yugoslavia aroused less public protest than the war against Iraq. (1) A significant difference was that the war against Yugoslavia was waged by the political center-left. The NATO governments were mostly led by liberals and "Third Way" social democrats. The attack on Serbia was endorsed by politicians and intellectuals identified with the left, who exhorted the public to believe that the United States and its allies no longer made war to advance selfish interests, but might be coaxed into using their overwhelming military might to protect innocent victims from evil dictators. This caused considerable confusion in the very segments of public opinion that would normally be expected to oppose war. In most Western countries, only a few drastically weakened fragments of left-wing movements and isolated individuals still remembered that humanitarian intervention, far from being the harbinger of a brave new century, was the standard pretext for all the Western imperialist conquests of the past. The left was too confused, feeble, or isolated to provide a vigorous challenge to the official claim that the NATO war against Yugoslavia marked a new era in global morality. On the contrary, much of the most pertinent challenge came from right-wing analysts, whose minds were kept relatively clear, either by awareness of traditional realpolitik or by libertarian suspicion of official propaganda. Not since the Socialist Parties of Europe rallied to their governments' war programs in 1914 has the left opposition to war collapsed so ignominiously and with such good conscience. .............................................................................. |
