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When we see now Madeleine "not so bright" Albright tenure as a Secretary of State, we see her first of all as one of the first neocon foreign minister of the USA. She was the precursor of is equally infamous Hillary "Warmonger" Clinton. Personally she is a bully and probably a female sociopath (note her quote about children of Iraq, see below).
This woman’s words and actions in the Balkans as well as her neocon babblings about Iraq will remain a stain on America for as long as neocons history is a subject for study (truth be told she has plenty of competition for that recognition; Hillary is another harpie aka female neocon warmonger .
By Nuremberg principles she is a war criminal:
The crimes hereinafter set out are punishable as crimes under international law:
- (a) Crimes against peace:
- (i) Planning, preparation, initiation or waging of a war of aggression or a war in violation of international treaties, agreements or assurances;
- (ii) Participation in a common plan or conspiracy for the accomplishment of any of the acts mentioned under (i).
- (b) War crimes:
- Violations of the laws or customs of war which include, but are not limited to, murder, ill-treatment or deportation to slave labor or for any other purpose of civilian population of or in occupied territory; murder or ill-treatment of prisoners of war or persons on the Seas, killing of hostages, plunder of public or private property, wanton destruction of cities, towns, or villages, or devastation not justified by military necessity.
- (c) Crimes against humanity:
- Murder, extermination, enslavement, deportation and other inhumane acts done against any civilian population, or persecutions on political, racial, or religious grounds, when such acts are done or such persecutions are carried on in execution of or in connection with any crime against peace or any war crime.
Principle VII[edit]
Complicity in the commission of a crime against peace, a war crime, or a crime against humanity as set forth in Principle VI is a crime under international law.
In a sense fascism as a derivative of corporatism (control of the state by finance and large industrialists and in turn enforcing policies beneficial for this group) won in the form of "inverted totalitarism". So dominance of intelligence agencies was preserved and amplified, but the political mobilization of masses are discouraged under neoliberalism. Go shopping was famous Bush II recommendation to US citizens after the 9/11.
Use of terms fascism or neofascism in propaganda purposes more often then not constitute projection. Neocons such as Madeleine Albright exploit the term "fascism" as a powerful propaganda cliché ( Everything Madeleine Albright Doesn’t Like is Fascism ). In the review of her book Guillaume Durocher noted:
Opponents of American imperialism will observe that Albright's list of quasi-Fascist states corresponds quite closely with those who have opposed U.S. foreign policies in recent decades. There is barely a word about America's authoritarian allies Saudi Arabia and the Gulf States.
... ... ...
Strikingly, the word "Netanyahu" does not appear in the book's Index at all. The existence of a democratic ethno-nationalist state goes against her whole narrative. For what it's worth, I suspect most people in European nationalist parties and in the Alt-Right would be happy to preserve democracy if they could have their own Netanyahus, with the establishment of Western ethnostates dedicated to their own people, with the explicit goal of preserving or restoring ethnic European demographic supermajorities.
This selectivity will encourage the impression that the State Department's talk of "human rights" has less to do with upholding universal moral principles than with demonizing the United States' geopolitical opponents du jour . The American Establishment does not bully China as much as Russia, despite being obviously more authoritarian. I suspect this is because China is already too big to bully, while Russia can still be pushed around and serve as a useful bogeyman (always useful to the Military-Industrial Complex, the National Security State, and for all the Establishmentarians who need a scapegoat for the rise of populism). On that note, I suspect most diplomatic conflicts today have less to do with "realist" international power dynamics than with the utility of foreign enemies for governments domestically.
... ... ...
In a dictatorship, the elimination of political and ideological pluralism means that the country can enjoy political stability. This, by the way, is crucial in multiethnic countries such as Yugoslavia or Iraq, for which the fall of the dictatorship and democratization led to atrocious ethno-religious civil war. As Lee Kuan Yew , my favorite antidote to the political childishness that prevails in the West today, said concerning his multiracial state of Singapore: "We had to lock up people, without trial, whether they are communists, whether they are language chauvinists, or religious extremists. If you don't do that the country would be in ruins today!" Few things have been as murderous as the promotion of "democracy" in Iraq, Libya, and Syria, a policy which, not coincidentally, has destroyed several geopolitical opponents of Israel.
Madeleine Albright neocon credentials are well known and especially evident in her infamous reply to the question posed by 60 Minutes’ Lesley Stahl about the sanctions against Iraq in May 1996. “We have heard that a half million children have died,” stated Stahl. “I mean, that’s more children than died in Hiroshima. And, you know, is the price worth it?” “I think this is a very hard choice,” replied Albright, “but the price–we think the price is worth it.”
This how a typical neofascist would answer to the same question. Wouldn’t you consider a woman unbelievably comfortable with using sanctions to snuff a half-million Iraqi children to achieve US policy objectives to be the poster-child of a fascist regime?
"Could you have one of our U-2s shot down?"
Reproduced in full from Dissident Voice, The Evil of Madeleine Albright Dissident Voice, by Gary LeuppOctober 18th, 2010
Madeleine Albright is infamous for her reply to the question posed by 60 Minutes’ Lesley Stahl about the sanctions against Iraq in May 1996.“We have heard that a half million children have died,” stated Stahl. “I mean, that’s more children than died in Hiroshima. And, you know, is the price worth it?”
“I think this is a very hard choice,” replied Albright, “but the price–we think the price is worth it.”
Albright, who served as Bill Clinton’s Secretary of State from 1997 to 2001, had a cruel disregard for the lives of Iraqis, Serbs, and others. But like Hillary Clinton, she apparently had a callous attitude towards the lives of U.S. servicemen and servicewomen too. In his new memoir, General Hugh Shelton, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff from 1997 to 2001, writes about a White House breakfast in late 1997. (The account is cited by Justin Elliott in Salon.)
Early on in my days as Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, we had small, weekly White House breakfasts in National Security Advisor Sandy Berger’s office that included me, Sandy, Bill Cohen (Secretary of Defense), Madeleine Albright (Secretary of State), George Tenet (head of the CIA), Leon Firth (VP chief of staff for security), Bill Richardson (ambassador to the U.N.), and a few other senior administration officials. These were informal sessions where we would gather around Berger’s table and talk about concerns over coffee and breakfast served by the White House dining facility. It was a comfortable setting that encouraged brainstorming of potential options on a variety of issues of the day.
During that time we had U-2 aircraft on reconnaissance sorties over Iraq. These planes were designed to fly at extremely high speeds and altitudes (over seventy thousand feet) both for pilot safety and to avoid detection.
At one of my very first breakfasts, while Berger and Cohen were engaged in a sidebar discussion down at one end of the table and Tenet and Richardson were preoccupied in another, one of the Cabinet members present leaned over to me and said, “Hugh, I know I shouldn’t even be asking you this, but what we really need in order to go in and take out Saddam is a precipitous event — something that would make us look good in the eyes of the world. Could you have one of our U-2s fly low enough — and slow enough — so as to guarantee that Saddam could shoot it down?”
The hair on the back of my neck bristled, my teeth clenched, and my fists tightened. I was so mad I was about to explode. I looked across the table, thinking about the pilot in the U-2 and responded, “Of course we can …” which prompted a big smile on the official’s face.
“You can?” was the excited reply.
“Why, of course we can,” I countered. “Just as soon as we get your ass qualified to fly it, I will have it flown just as low and slow as you want to go.” The official reeled back and immediately the smile disappeared. “I knew I should not have asked that….”
“No, you should not have,” I strongly agreed, still shocked at the disrespect and sheer audacity of the question. “Remember, there is one of our great Americans flying that U-2, and you are asking me to intentionally send him or her to their death for an opportunity to kick Saddam. The last time I checked, we don’t operate like that here in America.”
Imagine that! A Cabinet official suggesting a deliberate provocation endangering a military pilot’s life in order to justify a war: “…but what we really need in order to go in and take out Saddam is a precipitous event — something that would make us look good in the eyes of the world.” Is this mere amoral pragmatism? Machiavellianism? It is in any case evil.
(I’m reminded of how the key neocon text “Rebuilding America’s Defenses” authored by Paul Wolfowitz for the Project for a New American Century (PNAC) “thinktank” in Sept. 2000, states that the “process of transformation” to the kind of super-militarized aggressive state the neocons hoped for “will be a long one absent some catastrophic event like a new Pearl Harbor.” And as the Deputy Secretary of Defense he warned of another Pearl Harbor in his speech at West Point in June 2001. After 9-11, widely compared in the media to the Pearl Harbor attack of 1941, he immediately set about preparations for war with Iraq.)
On January 31, 2003 President George W. Bush in a meeting with British Prime Minister Tony Blair seriously proposed provoking Saddam to shoot down a U.S. aircraft. According to notes taken my Blair advisor David Manning (the accuracy of which has never been challenged), Bush suggested “flying U-2 reconnaissance aircraft with fighter cover over Iraq, painted with UN colors. If Saddam fired on them, he would be in breach” of UN resolutions. Maybe then the UN, which had refused to endorse the plan to attack Iraq and was sceptical about the justifications given by then-Secretary of State Colin Powell, would endorse war. (Perhaps the military brass opposed the plan, which was never carried out.)
At the Clinton White House breakfast described by Gen. Shelton, Berger, Cohen, Tenet and Richardson were involved in separate conversations. The other cabinet members were Robert E. Rubin (Treasury), Janet Reno (Attorney General), Bruce Babbit (Interior), Dan Glickman (Agriculture), Mickey Kantor (Commerce), Alexis Herman (Labor), Donna E. Shalala (Health and Human Services), Andrew M. Cuomo (Housing and Urban Development), Rodney Slater (Transportation), Richard W. Riley (Education), Jesse Brown (Veteran’s Affairs), Federico F. Pena (Energy), and Albright.
Out the 14 members of the Cabinet, there were four women. The fact that Shelton deliberately avoids indicating the gender of his interlocutor may hint that it was one of them. It is hard to believe that Attorney General Reno would suggest sacrificing an airman to the head of the Joint Chiefs at a White House breakfast. Or the Secretary of Labor, or Secretary of Health and Human Services. It’s hard to believe anyone on the above list would so – except Albright.
Albright in her memoirs expresses regret for her “it was worth it” statement in the 1996 interview. And she told Newsweek in 2006, “I’m afraid that Iraq is going to turn out to be the greatest disaster in American foreign policy—worse than Vietnam.” But she bears partial responsibility for the December 1998 bombing of Iraq (“Operation Desert Fox”), a prelude to the 2003 invasion. She helped produce the disaster.
And she helped produce disaster in the former Yugoslavia. As violence rose in the Serbian province of Kosovo, between the Kosovo Liberation Army and security forces, she (and Cohen) deliberately exaggerated the Kosovar Albanian death toll and demanded the U.S. right to intervene. She arranged the de facto alliance with the KLA, earlier labelled “terrorist” by U.S. officials. In March 1999 at the Rambouillet talks between Serbia and the Kosovar rebels, along with the U.S., its European allies and Russia, the U.S. demanded that the whole of Serbia (and other states within what was left of Yugoslavia) submit to virtual occupation by NATO. Yugoslavia had proudly remained outside the Warsaw Pact and had prided itself on participation in the Non-Aligned Movement. No government in Belgrade could have complied with Albright’s demands.
The so-called Rambouillet Agreement was rejected outright by the Serbs as well as their Russian allies. But Albright immediately stated, “We accept the agreement” – as though there was any agreement. The bullying was conducted in such a smug fashion that the French Foreign minister accused the U.S. of becoming a hyperpuissance – not a mere superpower but a “hyperpower.”
John Pilger wrote, “Anyone scrutinizing the Rambouillet document is left with little doubt that the excuses given for the subsequent bombing were fabricated. The peace negotiations were stage managed and the Serbs were told: surrender and be occupied, or don’t surrender and be destroyed.”
This was indeed Albright’s plan (and that of Bill Clinton, egged on by Hillary, who has confessed, “I urged him to bomb”), resulting in the deployment of NATO to bomb a European capital for the first time since 1945, killing at least 500 civilians (Human Rights Watch) and maybe ten times that number.
A Republican official later told a think tank that a certain “top official” had told him: “ We intentionally set the bar too high for the Serbs to comply. They need some bombing, and that’s what they are going to get.” Don’t we see a pattern here?
Throughout the last decade the neoconservatives have been the leading warmongers. But they have no monopoly on imperialist arrogance, contempt for truth and indifference to human life. Madeleine Albright is proof of that.
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Aug 18, 2019 | www.zerohedge.com
stevek , 18 minutes ago link
Creative_Destruct , 22 minutes ago linkHillary has always loved to kill people. Its in her (evil) blood.
TheDayAfter , 1 hour ago link"This damn Serbian war is a symbol of all that is wrong with the righteous approach to the world and to problems within this nation."
Story of the last several decades (fill in the blank with your pick of the name of a US war or a SJW cause):
This damn _________ war is a symbol of all that is wrong with the righteous approach to the world and to problems within this nation.
Kissinger had many flaws, but he hit the nail on the head when he said:
"The fundamental problem in politics is not the opposition of wickedness, but the restraint of righteousness"
TeaClipper , 1 hour ago linkWe all know the Hypocrisy of that War. Clinton had to distract the masses from MonicaGate and Hillary had to prove to the MIC that she could be beneficial to them.
Result : Those Kosovo Albanians had a state handed to them, and instead of building it(with uncle Sam's and EU help) as prosperous country, they used their weapons and "expertise" in becoming the low level gangsters of Europe. Every Europol analysis points to the direction of Kosovo Albanians as the criminal thugs in prostitution and drug trade and protection rackets. The largest percentage of a single ethnic group in European jails is that of Albanians.
PKKA , 3 hours ago linkThe most unjust and illegal of wars in the late 20c.
There was only one reason to bomb white Christian brothers in Serbia thereby aiding the Muslim of Kosovo and Albania, and that was Russia, which by that stage had got its act together and dealt with the traitorous oligarchs who had sold their country out to the west.
Hillary and her cronies no doubt lost a lot of money when the Russians shut their rat lines down.
I hope I live long enough to see those fuckers swing, and Tony Blair, Alistair Campnell and Peter Mandelson as well.
Joe A , 3 hours ago linkAgain, your Muslims are to blame for everything. Muslims are all different. And it is necessary to separate the faithful Muslims from the bandits who are only covered by Muslim slogans.
NATO and your godless government are to blame!An Afghan Freedom Fighter in Donbass - ENG SUBTITLE
HoyeruNew , 3 hours ago linkIt happened at the time of the Lewinsky affair and the possible impeachment of Clinton. They needed a distraction.
Milosevic btw. agreed to all conditions imposed on the FR of Yugoslavia except for one condition that nobody would accept: the full and unhindered access to the territory of FRY by NATO troops. That effectively meant an occupation. Nobody would agree to that. NATO and Albright deliberately came up with that condition for they knew it was unacceptable. Even Kissinger said that condition was over the top. NATO and Albright wanted that war. Serbia btw. saved Albright twice when she was still a little Slovakian Jewish girl whose family found refuge twice in Serbia. Once they escaped the Nazis that way and the second time the communists.
NATO thought they would need 48 hours but they needed 78 days and Milosevic only gave in after NATO switched from hitting military targets to civilian targets: Hospitals, commuter trains, civilian industry, an open market, random houses in random villages. After Milosevic pulled out his troops out of Kosovo, the KLA started killing Serbs and moderate Albanians, not to mention engage in organ trafficking (...). As the article said, well over 200k Serbs, moderate Albanians, Roma and other minorities were ethnically cleansed from Kosovo.
The US also used cluster bombs and DU weapons. Of the 4000 Italian KFOR troops that went into Kosovo after the bombing, 700 are dead from cancer and leukemia with several hundreds more seriously ill. The American KFOR troops wore hazmat suits. The Italians did not have them and were not warned. Today, many people in southern Serbia, Montenegro and Kosovo itself are sick and dying.
ItsDanger , 2 hours ago linkyes just like USA tried to help Vietnam against communists... by killing 2 million Vietnamese. and tried to help Korea by killing 20 % of the population. and by helping Iraq get rid of "bad" Saddam Hussein by killing 2 million Iraqies.
Oh, the Americans are oh so helpfiul!
seryanhoj , 1 hour ago linkNot disagreeing with you but lets remember that communists were killing a lot of people in other areas not long before those wars in SE Asia. May have been a wash in the end.
Magnum , 3 hours ago link13 million gallons of agent orange dropped on Vietnamese forests was our way of saying we love you. The genetic deformities are still widespread.
So glad they kicked the US out of there.
JoeBattista , 3 hours ago linkThat conflict led to hundreds of thousands of BOSNIANS moving to USA. Gotta keep the refugees flowing no matter what....
seryanhoj , 1 hour ago linkBring back the draft. On the whole Americans have no idea what the carnage of combat produces. Combat vets do. And the ones that aren't natural psychopaths never want to experience it again. This volunteer army we have is over loaded with a them. A military draft will actually bring some sort civilian control.
seryanhoj , 1 hour ago linkThey killed the draft so they would no longer be embarrassed by student protests and having to mow them down.
It worked. Today's snowflakes don't care about slaughter , only mini verbal aggressions against perverts.
He–Mene Mox Mox , 3 hours ago linkSuch ********. Do the millions we kill have any human rights? It's been going on for 4000 years. Ruthless pursuit of empire and fabricating phony justifications.
Red Corvair , 4 hours ago linkHillary seems to enjoy killing people. If it wasn't Gaddaffi, it was all the people on her body bag count, and now it's known she encouraged killing people in Serbia. Someone needs to take that old cow out into the center of the town and burn her at the stake.
Partially true, otherwise as usually excellent Dr. Paul, ... The Pandora's box situation was opened years before Clinton's bombing of Serbia, which was part of a larger scheme started nearly a decade before.
That was when the US armed the religious extremists in Bosnia, in order to bring war, "civil war" and chaos, and disintegration, the way they more recently tried to do with Syria, or "succeeded" in doing in Libya, bringing chaos and open-air slave markets in a country that was one of the most developed on the African continent under Gaddafi (a truth that was so easily erased by propaganda).
And the whole neocon scheme started two decades before, with the Zbigniew Brzezinski doctrine, when the US started arming the mujahedin in Afghanistan, provoking the trap for the Soviet invasion of 1979, which was the real opening of US neocon's Pandora's box we are regrettably so familiar with by now. We've all fallen in that old neocon/military-industrial-congressional-complex trap by now. And there seems to be no end in sight to those eternal wars "for civilization" (the old colonial trope dressed under new fatigues). Unless serious societal and political changes take place in the US to put an end to the US "imperial" death drive.
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Aug 16, 2019 | www.fff.org
Twenty years ago, President Bill Clinton commenced bombing Serbia in the name of human rights, justice, and ethnic tolerance. Approximately 1,500 Serb civilians were killed by NATO bombing in one of the biggest sham morality plays of the modern era. As British professor Philip Hammond recently noted, the 78-day bombing campaign "was not a purely military operation: NATO also destroyed what it called 'dual-use' targets, such as factories, city bridges, and even the main television building in downtown Belgrade, in an attempt to terrorise the country into surrender."
Clinton's unprovoked attack on Serbia, intended to help ethnic Albanians seize control of Kosovo, set a precedent for "humanitarian" warring that was invoked by supporters of George W. Bush's unprovoked attack on Iraq, Barack Oba-ma's bombing of Libya, and Donald Trump's bombing of Syria.
Clinton remains a hero in Kosovo, and there is an 11-foot statue of him standing in the capitol, Pristina, on Bill Clinton Boulevard. A commentator in the United Kingdom's Guardian newspaper noted that the statue showed Clinton "with a left hand raised, a typical gesture of a leader greeting the masses. In his right hand he is holding documents engraved with the date when NATO started the bombardment of Serbia, 24 March 1999." It would have been a more accurate representation if Clinton was shown standing on the corpses of the women, children, and others killed in the U.S. bombing campaign.
Bombing Serbia was a family affair in the Clinton White House. Hillary Clinton revealed to an interviewer in the summer of 1999, "I urged him to bomb. You cannot let this go on at the end of a century that has seen the major holocaust of our time. What do we have NATO for if not to defend our way of life?" A biography of Hillary Clinton, written by Gail Sheehy and published in late 1999, stated that Mrs. Clinton had refused to talk to the president for eight months after the Monica Lewinsky scandal broke. She resumed talking to her husband only when she phoned him and urged him in the strongest terms to begin bombing Serbia; the president began bombing within 24 hours. Alexander Cockburn observed in the Los Angeles Times,
It's scarcely surprising that Hillary would have urged President Clinton to drop cluster bombs on the Serbs to defend "our way of life." The first lady is a social engineer. She believes in therapeutic policing and the duty of the state to impose such policing. War is more social engineering, "fixitry" via high explosive, social therapy via cruise missile . As a tough therapeutic cop, she does not shy away from the most abrupt expression of the therapy: the death penalty.
I followed the war closely from the start, but selling articles to editors bashing the bombing was as easy as pitching paeans to Scientology. Instead of breaking into newsprint, my venting occurred instead in my journal:
- April 7, 1999: Much of the media and most of the American public are evaluating Clinton's Serbian policy based on the pictures of the bomb damage -- rather than by asking whether there is any coherent purpose or justification for bombing. The ultimate triumph of photo opportunities . What a travesty and national disgrace for this country.
- April 17: My bottom line on the Kosovo conflict: I hate holy wars. And this is a holy war for American good deeds -- or for America's saintly self-image? Sen. John McCain said the war is necessary to "uphold American values." Make me barf! Just another Hitler-of-the-month attack.
- May 13: This damn Serbian war is a symbol of all that is wrong with the righteous approach to the world and to problems within this nation.
The KLA
The Kosovo Liberation Army's savage nature was well known before the Clinton administration formally christened them "freedom fighters" in 1999. The previous year, the State Department condemned "terrorist action by the so-called Kosovo Liberation Army." The KLA was heavily involved in drug trafficking and had close to ties to Osama bin Laden. Arming the KLA helped Clinton portray himself as a crusader against injustice and shift public attention after his impeachment trial. Clinton was aided by many congressmen eager to portray U.S. bombing as an engine of righteousness. Sen. Joe Lieberman whooped that the United States and the KLA "stand for the same values and principles. Fighting for the KLA is fighting for human rights and American values."
In early June 1999, the Washington Post reported that "some presidential aides and friends are describing [bombing] Kosovo in Churchillian tones, as Clinton's 'finest hour.'" Clinton administration officials justified killing civilians because, it alleged the Serbs were committing genocide in Kosovo. After the bombing ended, no evidence of genocide was found, but Clinton and Britain's Tony Blair continued boasting as if their war had stopped a new Hitler in his tracks.
In a speech to American troops in a Thanksgiving 1999 visit, Clinton declared that the Kosovar children "love the United States because we gave them their freedom back." Perhaps Clinton saw freedom as nothing more than being tyrannized by people of the same ethnicity. As the Serbs were driven out of Kosovo, Kosovar Albanians became increasingly oppressed by the KLA, which ignored its commitment to disarm. The Los Angeles Times reported on November 20, 1999,
As a postwar power struggle heats up in Kosovo Albanian politics, extremists are trying to silence moderate leaders with a terror campaign of kidnappings, beatings, bombings, and at least one killing. The intensified attacks against members of the moderate Democratic League of Kosovo, or LDK, have raised concerns that radical ethnic Albanians are turning against their own out of fear of losing power in a democratic Kosovo.
American and NATO forces stood by as the KLA resumed its ethnic cleansing, slaughtering Serbian civilians, bombing Serbian churches, and oppressing non-Muslims. Almost a quarter million Serbs, Gypsies, Jews, and other minorities fled Kosovo after Clinton promised to protect them. In March 2000 renewed fighting broke out when the KLA launched attacks into Serbia, trying to seize territory that it claimed historically belonged to ethnic Albanians. UN Human Rights Envoy Jiri Dienstbier reported that "the [NATO] bombing hasn't solved any problems. It only multiplied the existing problems and created new ones. The Yugoslav economy was destroyed. Kosovo is destroyed. There are hundreds of thousands of people unemployed now."
U.S. complicity in atrocities
Prior to the NATO bombing, American citizens had no responsibility for atrocities committed by either Serbs or ethnic Albanians. However, after American planes bombed much of Serbia into rubble to drive the Serbian military out of Kosovo, Clinton effectively made the United States responsible for the safety of the remaining Serbs in Kosovo. That was equivalent to forcibly disarming a group of people, and then standing by, whistling and looking at the ground, while they are slaughtered. Since the United States promised to bring peace to Kosovo, Clinton bears some responsibility for every burnt church, every murdered Serbian grandmother, every new refugee column streaming north out of Kosovo. Despite those problems, Clinton bragged at a December 8, 1999, press conference that he was "very, very proud" of what the United States had done in Kosovo.
I had a chapter on the Serbian bombing campaign titled "Moralizing with Cluster Bombs" in Feeling Your Pain: The Explosion and Abuse of Government Power in the Clinton–Gore Years (St. Martin's Press, 2000), which sufficed to spur at least one or two reviewers to attack the book. Norman Provizer, the director of the Golda Meir Center for Political Leadership, scoffed in the Denver Rocky Mountain News, "Bovard chastises Clinton for an illegal, undeclared war in Kosovo without ever bothering to mention that, during the entire run of American history, there have been but four official declarations of war by Congress."
As the chaotic situation in post-war Kosovo became stark, it was easier to work in jibes against the debacle. In an October 2002 USA Today article ("Moral High Ground Not Won on Battlefield") bashing the Bush administration's push for war against Iraq, I pointed out, "A desire to spread freedom does not automatically confer a license to kill . Operation Allied Force in 1999 bombed Belgrade, Yugoslavia, into submission purportedly to liberate Kosovo. Though Serbian leader Slobodan Milosevic raised the white flag, ethnic cleansing continued -- with the minority Serbs being slaughtered and their churches burned to the ground in the same way the Serbs previously oppressed the ethnic Albanians."
In a 2011 review for The American Conservative, I scoffed, "After NATO planes killed hundreds if not thousands of Serb and ethnic Albanian civilians, Bill Clinton could pirouette as a savior. Once the bombing ended, many of the Serbs remaining in Kosovo were slaughtered and their churches burned to the ground. NATO's 'peace' produced a quarter million Serbian, Jewish, and Gypsy refugees."
In 2014, a European Union task force confirmed that the ruthless cabal that Clinton empowered by bombing Serbia committed atrocities that included murdering persons to extract and sell their kidneys, livers, and other body parts. Clint Williamson, the chief prosecutor of a special European Union task force, declared in 2014 that senior members of the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) had engaged in "unlawful killings, abductions, enforced disappearances, illegal detentions in camps in Kosovo and Albania, sexual violence, forced displacements of individuals from their homes and communities, and desecration and destruction of churches and other religious sites."
The New York Times reported that the trials of Kosovo body snatchers may be stymied by cover-ups and stonewalling: "Past investigations of reports of organ trafficking in Kosovo have been undermined by witnesses' fears of testifying in a small country where clan ties run deep and former members of the KLA are still feted as heroes. Former leaders of the KLA occupy high posts in the government." American politicians almost entirely ignored the scandal. Vice President Joe Biden hailed former KLA leader and Kosovo Prime Minister Hashim Thaci in 2010 as "the George Washington of Kosovo." A few months later, a Council of Europe investigative report tagged Thaci as an accomplice to the body-trafficking operation.
Clinton's war on Serbia opened a Pandora's box from which the world still suffers. Because politicians and pundits portrayed that war as a moral triumph, it was easier for subsequent presidents to portray U.S. bombing as the self-evident triumph of good over evil. Honest assessments of wrongful killings remain few and far between in media coverage.
This article was originally published in the July 2019 edition of Future of Freedom .
Category: Foreign Policy & WarJames Bovard is a policy adviser to The Future of Freedom Foundation. He is a USA Today columnist and has written for The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, New Republic, Reader's Digest, Playboy, American Spectator, Investors Business Daily, and many other publications. He is the author of Freedom Frauds: Hard Lessons in American Liberty (2017, published by FFF); Public Policy Hooligan (2012); Attention Deficit Democracy (2006); The Bush Betrayal (2004); Terrorism and Tyranny (2003); Feeling Your Pain (2000); Freedom in Chains (1999); Shakedown (1995); Lost Rights (1994); The Fair Trade Fraud (1991); and The Farm Fiasco (1989). He was the 1995 co-recipient of the Thomas Szasz Award for Civil Liberties work, awarded by the Center for Independent Thought, and the recipient of the 1996 Freedom Fund Award from the Firearms Civil Rights Defense Fund of the National Rifle Association. His book Lost Rights received the Mencken Award as Book of the Year from the Free Press Association. His Terrorism and Tyranny won Laissez Faire Book's Lysander Spooner award for the Best Book on Liberty in 2003. Read his blog . Send him email .
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Jun 18, 2019 | www.zerohedge.com
Authored by Doug Bandow via National Interest,
Albright typifies the arrogance and hawkishness of Washington blob...
How to describe US foreign policy over the last couple of decades? Disastrous comes to mind. Arrogant and murderous also seem appropriate.
Since 9/11, Washington has been extraordinarily active militarily -- invading two nations, bombing and droning several others, deploying special operations forces in yet more countries, and applying sanctions against many. Tragically, the threat of Islamist violence and terrorism only have metastasized. Although Al Qaeda lost its effectiveness in directly plotting attacks, it continues to inspire national offshoots. Moreover, while losing its physical "caliphate" the Islamic State added further terrorism to its portfolio.
Three successive administrations have ever more deeply ensnared the United States in the Middle East. War with Iran appears to be frighteningly possible. Ever-wealthier allies are ever-more dependent on America. Russia is actively hostile to the United States and Europe. Washington and Beijing appear to be a collision course on far more than trade. Yet the current administration appears convinced that doing more of the same will achieve different results, the best definition of insanity.
Despite his sometimes abusive and incendiary rhetoric, the president has departed little from his predecessors' policies. For instance, American forces remain deployed in Afghanistan and Syria. Moreover, the Trump administration has increased its military and materiel deployments to Europe. Also, Washington has intensified economic sanctions on Cuba, Iran, North Korea, and Russia, and even penalized additional countries, namely Venezuela.
U.S. foreign policy suffers from systematic flaws in the thinking of the informal policy collective which former Obama aide Ben Rhodes dismissed as "The Blob." Perhaps no official better articulated The Blob's defective precepts than Madeleine Albright, United Nations ambassador and Secretary of State.
First is overweening hubris. In 1998 Secretary of State Albright declared that
"If we have to use force, it is because we are America: we are the indispensable nation. We stand tall and we see further than other countries into the future, and we see the danger here to all of us."
Even then her claim was implausible. America blundered into the Korean War and barely achieved a passable outcome. The Johnson administration infused Vietnam with dramatically outsize importance. For decades, Washington foolishly refused to engage the People's Republic of China. Washington-backed dictators in Cuba, Nicaragua, Iran, and elsewhere fell ingloriously. An economic embargo against Cuba that continues today helped turn Fidel Castro into a global folk hero. Washington veered dangerously close to nuclear war with Moscow during the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962 and again two decades later during military exercises in Europe.
U.S. officials rarely were prepared for events that occurred in the next week or month, let alone years later. Americans did no better than the French in Vietnam. Americans managed events in Africa no better than the British, French, and Portuguese colonial overlords. Washington made more than its share of bad, even awful decisions in dealing with other nations around the globe.
Perhaps the worst failing of U.S. foreign policy was ignoring the inevitable impact of foreign intervention. Americans would never passively accept another nation bombing, invading, and occupying their nation, or interfering in their political system. Even if outgunned, they would resist. Yet Washington has undertaken all of these practices, with little consideration of the impact on those most affected -- hence the rise of terrorism against the United States. Terrorism, horrid and awful though it is, became the weapon of choice of weaker peoples against intervention by the world's industrialized national states.
The U.S. record since September 11 has been uniquely counterproductive. Rather than minimize hostility toward America, Washington adopted a policy -- highlighted by launching new wars, killing more civilians, and ravaging additional societies -- guaranteed to create enemies, exacerbate radicalism, and spread terrorism. Blowback is everywhere. Among the worst examples: Iraqi insurgents mutated into ISIS, which wreaked military havoc throughout the Middle East and turned to terrorism.
Albright's assumption that members of The Blob were far-seeing was matched by her belief that the same people were entitled to make life-and-death decisions for the entire planet. When queried 1996 about her justification for sanctions against Iraq which had killed a half million babies -- notably, she did not dispute the accuracy of that estimate -- she responded that "I think this is a very hard choice, but the price -- we think the price is worth it." Exactly who "we" were she did not say. Most likely she meant those Americans admitted to the foreign policy priesthood, empowered to make foreign policy and take the practical steps necessary to enforce it. (She later stated of her reply: "I never should have made it. It was stupid." It was, but it reflected her mindset.)
In any normal country, such a claim would be shocking -- a few people sitting in another capital deciding who lived and died. Foreign elites, a world away from the hardship that they imposed, deciding the value of those dying versus the purported interests being promoted. Those paying the price had no voice in the decision, no way to hold their persecutors accountable.
The willingness to so callously sacrifice so many helps explain why "they" often hate us, usually meaning the U.S. government. This is also because "they" believe average Americans hate them. Understandably, it too often turns out, given the impact of the full range of American interventions -- imposing economic sanctions, bombing, invading, and occupying other nations, unleashing drone campaigns, underwriting tyrannical regimes, supporting governments which occupy and oppress other peoples, displaying ostentatious hypocrisy and bias, and more.
This mindset is reinforced by contempt toward even those being aided by Washington. Although American diplomats had termed the Kosovo Liberation Army as "terrorist," the Clinton Administration decided to use the growing insurgency as an opportunity to expand Washington's influence. At the 1999 Rambouillet conference Albright made demands of Yugoslavia that no independent, sovereign state could accept: that, for instance, it act like defeated and occupied territory by allowing the free transit of NATO forces. Washington expected the inevitable refusal, which was calculated to provide justification for launching an unprovoked, aggressive war against the Serb-dominated remnant of Yugoslavia.
However, initially the KLA, determined on independence, refused to sign Albright's agreement. She exploded. One of her officials anonymously complained: "Here is the greatest nation on earth pleading with some nothingballs to do something entirely in their own interest -- which is to say yes to an interim agreement -- and they stiff us." Someone described as "a close associate" observed: "She is so stung by what happened. She's angry at everyone -- the Serbs, the Albanians and NATO." For Albright, the determination of others to achieve their own goals, even at risk to their lives, was an insult to America and her.
Alas, members of the Blob view Americans with little more respect. The ignorant masses should do what they are told. (Former National Security Adviser H.R. McMaster recently complained of public war-weariness from fighting in Afghanistan for no good reason for more than seventeen years.) Even more so, believed Albright, members of the military should cheerfully patrol the quasi-empire being established by Washington's far-sighted leaders.
As Albright famously asked Colin Powell in 1992:
"What's the use of having this superb military you're always talking about if we can't use it?" To her, American military personnel apparently were but gambit pawns in a global chess game, to be sacrificed for the interest and convenience of those playing. No wonder then-Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Colin Powell's reaction stated in his autobiography was: "I thought I would have an aneurysm."
When asked in 2003 about the incident, she said "what I thought was that we had -- we were in a kind of a mode of thinking that we were never going to be able to use our military effectively again." Although sixty-five years had passed, she admitted that "my mindset is Munich," a unique circumstance and threat without even plausible parallel today.
Such a philosophy explains a 1997 comment by a cabinet member, likely Albright, to General Hugh Shelton, then Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff: "Hugh, I know I shouldn't even be asking you this, but what we really need in order to go in and take out Saddam is a precipitous event -- something that would make us look good in the eyes of the world. Could you have one of our U-2s fly low enough -- and slow enough -- so as to guarantee that Saddam could shoot it down?" He responded sure, as soon as she qualified to fly the plane.
For Albright, war is just another foreign policy tool. One could send a diplomatic note, impose economic sanctions, or unleash murder and mayhem. No reason to treat the latter as anything special. Joining the U.S. military means putting your life at the disposal of Albright and her peers in The Blob.
Anyone of these comments could be dismissed as a careless aside. Taken together, however, they reflect an attitude dangerous for Americans and foreigners alike. Unfortunately, the vagaries of U.S. foreign policy suggest that this mindset is not limited to any one person. Any president serious about taking a new foreign-policy direction must do more than drain the swamp. He or she must sideline The Blob.
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Doug Bandow is a senior fellow at the Cato Institute. A former special assistant to President Ronald Reagan, he is author of Foreign Follies: America's New Global Empire .
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May 13, 2019 | www.globalresearch.ca
Region: Europe , USA Theme: History , US NATO War Agenda
Twenty years have passed since the U.S.-orchestrated NATO attack on Yugoslavia. As the United States readied its forces for war in 1999, it organized a peace conference that was ostensibly intended to resolve differences between the Yugoslav government and secessionist ethnic Albanians in Kosovo on the future status of the province. A different scenario was being played out behind the scenes, however. U.S. officials wanted war and deliberately set up the process to fail, which they planned to use as a pretext for war.
The talks opened on February 6, 1999, in Rambouillet, France. Officially, the negotiations were led by a Contact Group comprised of U.S. Ambassador to Macedonia Christopher Hill , European Union envoy Wolfgang Petritsch , and Russian diplomat Boris Mayorsky . All decisions were supposed to be jointly agreed upon by all three members of the Contact Group. In actual practice, the U.S. ran the show all the way and routinely bypassed Petritsch and Mayorsky on essential matters.
Ibrahim Rugova , an ethnic Albanian activist who advocated nonviolence, was expected to play a major role in the Albanian secessionist delegation. Joining him at Rambouillet was Fehmi Agani , a fellow member of Rugova's Democratic League of Kosovo.
U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright regularly sidelined Rugova, however, preferring to rely on delegation members from the hardline Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA), which had routinely murdered Serbs, Roma, and Albanians in Kosovo who worked for the government or opposed separatism. Only a few months before the conference, KLA spokesman Bardhyl Mahmuti spelled out his organization's vision of a future Kosovo as separate and ethnically pure:
"The independence of Kosovo is the only solution We cannot live together. That is excluded." [i]
Rugova had at one time engaged in fairly productive talks with Yugoslav officials, and his willingness to negotiate was no doubt precisely the reason Albright relegated him to a background role. Yugoslav Minister of Information Milan Komnenić accompanied the Yugoslav delegation to Rambouillet. He recalls,
"With Rugova and Fehmi Agani it was possible to talk; they were flexible. In Rambouillet, [KLA leader Hashim] Thaçi appears instead of Rugova. A beast." [ii]
There was no love between Thaçi and Rugova, whose party members were the targets of threats and assassination attempts at the hands of the KLA. Rugova himself would survive an assassination attempt six years later.
The composition of the Yugoslav delegation reflected its position that many ethnic groups resided in Kosovo, and any agreement arrived at should take into account the interests of all parties. All of Kosovo's major ethnic groups were represented in the delegation. Faik Jashari , one of the Albanian members in the Yugoslav delegation, was president of the Kosovo Democratic Initiative and an official in the Provisional Executive Council, which was Yugoslavia's government in Kosovo. Jashari observed that Albright was startled when she saw the composition of the Yugoslav delegation, apparently because it went against the U.S. propaganda narrative. [iii] Throughout the talks, Albright displayed a dismissive attitude towards the delegation's Albanian, Roma, Egyptian, Goran, Turkish, and Slavic Muslim members.
U.S. mediators habitually referred to the Yugoslav delegation as "the Serbs," even though they constituted a minority of the members. The Americans persisted in trying to cast events in Kosovo as a simplistic binary relationship of Serb versus Albanian, disregarding the presence of other ethnic groups in the province, and ignoring the fact that while some ethnic Albanians favored separation, others wished to remain in multiethnic Yugoslavia.
After arriving at Rambouillet, the secessionist Albanian delegation informed U.S. diplomats that it did not want to meet with the Yugoslav side. Aside from a brief ceremonial meeting, there was no direct contact between the two groups. The Yugoslav and Albanian delegations were placed on two different floors to eliminate nearly all contact. U.S. mediators Richard Holbrooke and Christopher Hill ran from one delegation to the other, conveying notes and verbal messages between the two sides but mostly trying to coerce the Yugoslav delegation. [iv]
Luan Koka, a Roma member of the Yugoslav delegation, noted that the U.S. was operating an electronic jamming device.
"We knew exactly when Madeleine Albright was coming. Connections on our mobile phones were breaking up and going crazy." [v]
It is probable that the U.S. was also operating electronic listening equipment and that U.S. mediators knew everything the delegations were saying in private.
Albright, Jashari said, would not listen to anyone.
"She had her task, and she saw only that task. You couldn't say anything to her. She didn't want to talk with us and didn't want to listen to our arguments." [vi]
One day it was Koka's birthday, and the Yugoslav delegation wanted to encourage a more relaxed atmosphere with U.S. mediators, inviting them to a cocktail party to mark the occasion.
"It was a slightly more pleasant atmosphere, and I was singing," Koka recalled. "I remember Madeleine Albright saying: 'I really like partisan songs. But if you don't accept this, the bombs will fall.'" [vii]
According to delegation member Nikola Šainović ,
"Madeleine Albright told us all the time: 'If the Yugoslav delegation does not accept what we offer, you will be bombed.'" Šainović added, "We agreed in Rambouillet to any form of autonomy for Kosovo," but sovereignty remained the red line. [viii]
From the beginning of the conference, U.S. mediator Christopher Hill "decided that what we really needed was an Albanian approval of a document, and a Serb refusal. If both refused, there could be no further action by NATO or any other organization for that matter." [ix] It was not peace that the U.S. team was seeking, but war.
As the conference progressed, U.S. negotiators were faced with an alarming problem, in that the Yugoslav delegation had accepted all of the Contact Group's fundamental political principles for an agreement, balking only at a NATO presence in Kosovo. On the other hand, the secessionist delegation rejected the Contact Group's political principles. Something had to be done to reverse this pattern.
On the second day of the conference, U.S. officials presented the Yugoslav delegation with the framework text of a provisional agreement for peace and self-rule in Kosovo, but it was missing some of the annexes. The Yugoslavs requested a copy of the complete document. As delegation head Ratko Marković pointed out,
"Any objections to the text of the agreement could be made only after an insight into the text as a whole had been obtained."
Nearly one week passed before the group received one of the missing annexes. That came on the day the conference had originally been set to end. The deadline was extended, and two days later a second missing annex was provided to the Yugoslav delegation.[x]
When the Yugoslavs next met with the Contact Group, they were assured that all elements of the text had now been given to them. Several more days passed and at 7:00 PM on February 22, the penultimate day of the conference, the Contact Group presented three new annexes, which the Yugoslavs had never seen before. According to Marković, "Russian Ambassador Boris Mayorsky informed our delegation that Annexes 2 and 7 had not been discussed or approved by the Contact Group and that they were not the texts drafted by the Contact Group but by certain Contact Group members, while Annex 5 was discussed, but no decision was made on it at the Contact Group meeting." The Yugoslav delegation refused to accept the new annexes, as their introduction had violated the process whereby all proposals had to be agreed upon by the three Contact Group members. [xi]
At 9:30 AM on February 23, the final day of the conference, U.S. officials presented the full text of the proposal, containing yet more provisions that were being communicated for the first time. The accompanying note identified the package as the definitive text while adding that Russia did not support two of the articles. The letter demanded the Yugoslav delegation's decision by 1:00 PM that same day.[xii] There was barely time enough to carefully read the text, let alone negotiate. In essence, it was an ultimatum.
Quite intentionally, U.S. mediators included provisions in the final version of the text that no sovereign nation could be expected to accept. Neoliberal economic interests are always front and center when U.S. officials are involved, and they surely were not unaware of Kosovo's abundant reserves of mineral resources, ripe for exploitation. The first point in Article 1 of the Economic Issues section of the text states:
"The economy of Kosovo shall function in accordance with free market principles."
Western investors were favored with a provision stating that authorities shall "ensure the free movement of persons, goods, services, and capital to Kosovo, including from international sources." [xiii] One may wonder what these stipulations had to do with peace negotiations, but then the talks had far more to do with U.S. interests than anything to do with the needs of the people in the region.
Twitter and the Smearing of Corbyn and Assange: A Research Note on the "Integrity Initiative"The document called for a Western-led Joint Commission including local representatives to monitor and coordinate the implementation of the plan. However, if commission members failed to reach consensus on a matter, the Western-appointed Chair would have the power to impose his decision unilaterally. [xiv] Local representatives would serve as little more than window-dressing for Western dictate, as they could adopt no measure that went against the Chair's wishes.
The Chair of the Implementation Mission was authorized to "recommend" the "removal and appointment of officials and the curtailment of operations of existing institutions in Kosovo." If the Chair's command was not obeyed "in the time requested, the Joint Commission may decide to take the recommended action," and since the Chair had the authority to impose his will on the Joint Commission, there was no check on his power. He could remove elected and appointed officials at will and replace them with handpicked lackeys. The Chair was also authorized to order the "curtailment of operations of existing institutions." [xv]Any organization that failed to bend to U.S. demands could be shut down.
Chapter 7 of the plan called for the parties to "invite NATO to constitute and lead a military force" in Kosovo. [xvi]The choice of words was interesting. In language reminiscent of gangsters, Yugoslavia was told to "invite" NATO to take over the province of Kosovo or suffer the consequences.
Yugoslavia was required "to provide, at no cost, the use of all facilities and services required" by NATO. [xvii]Within six months, Yugoslavia would have to withdraw all of its military forces from Kosovo, other than a small number of border guards. [xviii]
The plan granted NATO "unrestricted use of the entire electromagnetic spectrum" to "communicate." Although the document indicated NATO would make "reasonable efforts to coordinate," there were no constraints on its power. [xix] Yugoslav officials, "upon simple request," would be required to grant NATO "all telecommunication services, including broadcast services free of cost." [xx]NATO could take over any radio and television facilities and transmission wavelengths it chose, knocking local stations off the air.
The plan did not restrict NATO's presence to Kosovo. It granted NATO, with its "vehicles, vessels, aircraft, and equipment, free and unrestricted passage and unimpeded access throughout the FRY [Federal Republic of Yugoslavia]." [xxi] NATO would be "granted the use of airports, roads, rails, and ports without payment of fees, duties, dues, tools, or charges." [xxii]
The agreement guaranteed that NATO would have "complete and unimpeded freedom of movement by ground, air, and water into and throughout Kosovo." Furthermore, NATO personnel could not be held "liable for any damages to public or private property." [xxiii] NATO as a whole would also be "immune from all legal process, whether civil, administrative, or criminal," regardless of its actions anywhere on the territory of Yugoslavia. [xxiv]Nor could NATO personnel be arrested, detained, or investigated. [xxv]
Acceptance of the plan would have brought NATO troops swarming throughout Yugoslavia and interfering in every institution.
There were several other objectionable elements in the plan, but one that stood out was the call for an "international" (meaning, Western-led) meeting to be held after three years "to determine a mechanism for a final settlement for Kosovo."[xxvi] It was no mystery to the Yugoslav delegation what conclusion Western officials would arrive at in that meeting. The intent was clearly to redraw Yugoslavia's borders to further break apart the nation.
U.S. officials knew the Yugoslav delegation could not possibly accept such a plan.
"We deliberately set the bar higher than the Serbs could accept," Madeleine Albright confided to a group of journalists, "because they needed a little bombing." [xxvii]
At a meeting in Belgrade on March 5, the Yugoslav delegation issued a statement which declared:
"A great deceit was looming, orchestrated by the United States. They demanded that the agreement be signed, even though much of this agreement, that is, over 56 pages, had never been discussed, either within the Contact Group or during the negotiations." [xxviii]
Serbian President Milan Milutinović announced at a press conference that in Rambouillet the Yugoslav delegation had "proposed solutions meeting the demands of the Contact Group for broad autonomy within Serbia, advocating full equality of all national communities." But "agreement was not what they were after." Instead, Western officials engaged in "open aggression," and this was a game "about troops and troops alone." [xxix]
While U.S. officials were working assiduously to avoid a peaceful resolution, they needed the Albanians to agree to the plan so that they could accuse the Yugoslav delegation of being the stumbling block to peace. U.S. mainstream media could be counted on to unquestioningly repeat the government's line and overlook who the real architects of failure were. U.S. officials knew the media would act in their customary role as cheerleaders for war, which indeed, they did.
British Foreign Secretary Robin Cook revealed the nature of the message Western officials were conveying to the Albanian delegation when he said,
"We are certainly saying to the Kosovo Albanians that if you don't sign up to these texts, it's extremely difficult to see how NATO could then take action against Belgrade." [xxx]
Western officials were practically begging the secessionists to sign the plan. According to inside sources, the Americans assured the Albanian delegation that disarmament of the KLA would be merely symbolic and that it could keep the bulk of its weaponry so long as it was concealed. [xxxi]
Albright spent hours trying to convince Thaçi to change his mind, telling him:
"If you say yes and the Serbs say no, NATO will strike and go on striking until the Serb forces are out and NATO can go in. You will have security. And you will be able to govern yourselves." [xxxii]
That was a clear enough signal that the intent was to rip the province away from Yugoslavia and create an artificial state. Despite such assurances, Thaçi feared the wrath of fellow KLA members if he were to sign a document that did not explicitly call for separation. When U.S. negotiators asked Thaçi why he would not sign, he responded:
"If I agree to this, I will go home and they will kill me." [xxxiii]
This was not hyperbole. The KLA had threatened and murdered a great many Albanians who in its eyes fell short of full-throated support for its policy of violent secession and ethnic exclusion.
Even NATO Commander Wesley Clark , who flew in from Belgium, was unable to change Thaçi's mind. [xxxiv] U.S. officials were exasperated with the Albanian delegation, and its recalcitrance threatened to capsize plans for war.
"Rambouillet was supposed to be about putting the screws to Belgrade," a senior U.S. official said. "But it went off the rails because of the miscalculation we made about the Albanians." [xxxv]
On the last day at Rambouillet, it was agreed that the Albanian delegation would return to Kosovo for discussions with fellow KLA leaders on the need to sign the document. In the days that followed, Western officials paid repeated visits to Kosovo to encourage the Albanians to sign.
So-called "negotiations" reconvened in Paris on March 15. Upon its arrival, the Yugoslav delegation objected that it was "incomprehensible" that "no direct talks between the two delegations had been facilitated." In response to the Yugoslavs' proposal for modifications to the plan, the Contact Group informed them that no changes would be accepted. The document must be accepted as a whole. [xxxvi]
The Yugoslav position, delegation head Ratko Marković maintained, was that "first one needs to determine what is to be implemented, and only then to determine the methods of implementation." [xxxvii]The delegation asked the Americans what there was to talk about regarding implementation "when there was no agreement because the Albanians did not accept anything." U.S. officials responded that the Yugoslav delegation "cannot negotiate," adding that it would only be allowed to make grammatical changes to the text. [xxxviii]
From the U.S. perspective, the presence of the Yugoslav delegation in Paris was irrelevant other than to maintain the pretense that negotiations were taking place. Not permitted to negotiate, there was little the Yugoslavs could do but await the inevitable result, which soon came. The moment U.S. officials obtained the Albanian delegation's signatures to the plan on March 18, they aborted the Paris Conference. There was no reason to continue engaging with the Yugoslav delegation, as the U.S. had what it needed: a pretext for war.
On the day after the U.S. pulled the plug on the Paris talks, Milan Milutinović held a press conference in the Yugoslav embassy, condemning the Paris meeting as "a kind of show," which was meant "to deceive public opinion in the whole world." [xxxix]
While the United States and its NATO allies prepared for war, Yugoslavia was making last-ditch efforts to stave off attack, including reaching out to intermediaries. Greek Foreign Minister Theodoros Pangalos contacted Madeleine Albright and told her that Yugoslav President Slobodan Milošević had offered to engage in further negotiations. But Albright told him that the decision to bomb had already been made. "In fact," Pangalos reported, "she told me to 'desist, you're just being a nuisance.'" [xl] In a final act of desperation to save the people from bombing, Milutinović contacted Christopher Hill and made an extraordinary offer: Yugoslavia would join NATO if the United States would allow Yugoslavia to remain whole, including the province of Kosovo. Hill responded that this was not a topic for discussion and he would not talk about it. [xli]
Madeleine Albright got her war, which brought death, destruction, and misery to Yugoslavia. But NATO had a new role, and the United States further extended its hegemony over the Balkans.
In the years following the demise of the Warsaw Pact and the Soviet Union, NATO was intent on redefining its mission. The absence of the socialist bloc presented NATO not only with the need to construct a new rationale for existence but also with the opportunity to expand Western domination over other nations.
Bosnia offered the first opportunity for NATO to begin its transformation, as it took part in a war that presented no threat to member nations.
Bombing Yugoslavia was meant to solidify the new role for NATO as an offensive military force, acting on behalf of U.S. imperial interests. Since that time, NATO has attacked Libya, and engaged in military operations in Afghanistan, Iraq, and a variety of nations in Africa. Despite NATO's claim that it is "committed to the peaceful resolution of disputes," the record shows otherwise.
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Gregory Elich is a Korea Policy Institute associate and on the Board of Directors of the Jasenovac Research Institute. He is a member of the Solidarity Committee for Democracy and Peace in Korea, a columnist for Voice of the People , and one of the co-authors of Killing Democracy: CIA and Pentagon Operations in the Post-Soviet Period , published in the Russian language. He is also a member of the Task Force to Stop THAAD in Korea and Militarism in Asia and the Pacific. His website is https://gregoryelich.org . Follow him on Twitter at @GregoryElich
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Feb 22, 2019 | www.theamericanconservative.com
Andrew Bacevich recalls Madeleine Albright's infamous statement about American indispensability, and notes how poorly it has held up over the last twenty-one years:
Back then, it was Albright's claim to American indispensability that stuck in my craw. Yet as a testimony to ruling class hubris, the assertion of indispensability pales in comparison to Albright's insistence that "we see further into the future."
In fact, from February 1998 down to the present, events have time and again caught Albright's "we" napping.
Albright's statement is even more damning for her and her fellow interventionists when we consider that the context of her remarks was a discussion of the supposed threat from Iraq. The full sentence went like this: "We stand tall and we see further than other countries into the future, and we see the danger here to all of us." Albright was making a general claim about our supposed superiority to other nations when it came to looking into the future, but she was also specifically warning against a "danger" from Iraq that she claimed threatened "all of us." She answered one of Matt Lauer's questions with this assertion:
I think that we know what we have to do, and that is help enforce the UN Security Council resolutions, which demand that Saddam Hussein abide by those resolutions, and get rid of his weapons of mass destruction, and allow the inspectors to have unfettered and unconditional access.
Albright's rhetoric from 1998 is a grim reminder that policymakers from both parties accepted the existence of Iraq's "weapons of mass destruction" as a given and never seriously questioned a policy aimed at eliminating something that did not exist. American hawks couldn't see further in the future. They weren't even perceiving the present correctly, and tens of thousands of Americans and millions of Iraqis would suffer because they insisted that they saw something that wasn't there.
A little more than five years after she uttered these words, the same wild threat inflation that Albright was engaged in led to the invasion of Iraq, the greatest blunder and one of the worst crimes in the history of modern U.S. foreign policy . Not only did Albright and other later war supporters not see what was coming, but their deluded belief in being able to anticipate future threats caused them to buy into and promote a bogus case for a war that was completely unnecessary and should never have been fought.
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Feb 10, 2019 | www.unz.com
follyofwar , says: February 9, 2019 at 2:42 am GMT
@Asagirian Clinton wasn't a lunatic? I wonder what Fred thinks about his deranged Jewish Secretary of State Madeline Albright.She famously told Leslie Stahl on "60 Minutes" that the death of 500,000 Iraqi children, due to Clinton's years of punative sanctions, was "worth it."
Doesn't seem like those preventable deaths of innocent children bothered Billy Boy too much. With the Clinton's, we get two lunatics for the price of one.
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Feb 06, 2019 | www.zerohedge.com
istt , 3 minutes ago link
istt , 8 minutes ago linkThis is one of the things I find so disingenuous about the Jews. On the one hand, they claim they are always the victims. On the other, they claim they are superior intellectually. They are a money cult and they promote one another shamelessly. And yet they have the balls to talk about white privilege. Talk about a red herring. My God.
But I digress...
And to think this woman writes for one of the most prestigious papers in the world. Or at least it was... What a total crap the NYT has become.
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Jan 22, 2019 | www.theguardian.com
Haigin88 -> Tom J. Davis Clinton's Iraq war vote. She was always dealing with the inverse Nixon In China rule. Just as only Nixon could speak with China, she probably perceived that only males could be doves. That's an explanation not an excuse. Again, a total lack of integrity from Clinton.
Also, much of Clinton's later foulness was attempted to be offset by her early opinions and actions - her speeches at college; her working for children. Gabbard is around the other way: her record got better, offsetting much of her earlier nonsense. Clinton and Gabbard are apples and oranges, I think ,
Clinton's Iraq war vote. She was always dealing with the inverse Nixon In China rule. Just as only Nixon could speak with China, she probably perceived that only males could be doves. That's an explanation not an excuse. Again, a total lack of integrity from Clinton.Also, much of Clinton's later foulness was attempted to be offset by her early opinions and actions - her speeches at college; her working for children. Gabbard is around the other way: her record got better, offsetting much of her earlier nonsense. Clinton and Gabbard are apples and oranges, I think
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Jan 09, 2019 | www.unz.com
Taras77 says: January 7, 2019 at 4:49 am GMT 100 Words
What is absolutely remarkable to me in a very bad way is that this piece of trash received 681 reviews on Amazon, only 21 with one star and the balance above that for an overall rating of 4.8 out of 5.
Absolutely remarkable, again, but it is reflective of the brain dead sheeple currently doing any reading at all of books by the rabid neo cons. I hesitate to guess what some extreme alarm sounding diatribe by Wolfowitz or the current "main man," max boot would register. Maybe Romney can lead us out of the wilderness (sarc)>
I know that this is Amazon and when it comes to the standards of what passes as accurate reporting and journalistic standards,"wapo and bezos leads the pack into the sewer. REPLY AGREE/DISAGREE/ETC. THIS COMMENTER
Sean , says: January 7, 2019 at 5:15 am GMT
@eahSean , says: January 7, 2019 at 5:35 am GMTWhile secretary of state Hillary actually compared Putin to Hitler.
@El Dato an American puppet inasmuch as he had Americans masterminding his political PR campaigns) start giving ground that the situation becomes fluid.nickels , says: January 7, 2019 at 4:48 pm GMTAlbright (and Nuland) had no idea what Russia as a normal nation state could be expected to put up with, because all they had to go on was Yelstyn who was drunk most days. So the US was slowly but surely drawn into the power vacuum in the territories the USSR withdrew from and Albright thought that was the way things were going to continue to be. The domestic situation in America was also one where the elite had things their own way to an unsustainable extent. What Albright does not like is the facts of life.
Andrei Martyanov , says: Website January 7, 2019 at 6:00 pm GMTThe whole discussion is so asinine.
Facism is not a form of government that can just be inserted or deleted.
It is a very specific reaction to the communist takeover of a nation.
At that point, other forms of government are no longer viable: totalitarianism of one kind of another becomes an absolute necessity to rule.
We see western governments coming to this point-the moral law is lost, corruption reigns, and only pure force has currency.
So at this point you only have one of two choices, there simply are no alternatives:
communism or facism.
And it is quite clear that facism is a more reasonable and less murderous choice.@Taras77for as long as neo con history is a subject for study (she has plenty of competition for that recognition).
Most "history" taught in the US (and combined West) is one or another iteration (sometimes extreme, sometimes less so) of US exceptionalism. Even American so called "realism" is built around exceptionalism. American military doctrines are written primarily on exceptionalism basis. Results are easily observable.
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Jan 06, 2019 | www.unz.com
Andrei Martyanov , says: Website January 5, 2019 at 7:02 pm GMT
Early on in her book, Albright says: My students remarked that the Fascist chiefs we remember best were charismatic
Marked in bold is the most terrifying thing about Albright's book and I am not even going to read her pseudo-intellectual excrement.
The fact that obviously deranged fanatic hack has students is a testimony to a sewer level of the US "elite-producing" machine and a pathetic sight contemporary US "elite" represents.
This is apart from the fact that "political science" is not a science but pseudo-academic field for losers who do not want to study real history or take courses which actually develop intellect and provide fundamental knowledge.
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Jan 05, 2019 | www.unz.com
It is always gratifying when one's intuition is confirmed. I had the impression, picking up Madeleine Albright's book Fascism: A Warning , that I would be treated to an exercise of "Fascism is bad. And everything I don't like is Fascism!" The former secretary of State, a Jewish liberal originally hailing from Czechoslovakia, did not disappoint.
The book is essentially a set of portraits of various movements and leaders Albright considers to be "Fascist" ( contra convention, she capitalizes even when not referring to Mussolini's National Fascist Party) and/or vaguely fascistic.
Albright warns early on that people use "fascism" as a catch-all derogatory term for just about any exercise of authority people don't like. She proposes a somewhat reasonable definition of fascism and then goes on to do exactly what she warned against, covering not only Mussolini and Hitler, but also Vladimir Putin, Viktor Orbán, and communist Czechoslovakia in her Fascist(ish) portraits.
To be fair, these vignettes are often quite informative. The chapters on Hugo Chávez, Recep Erdoğan, and the Kims of North Korea in particular showcase a diplomat's sensitivity and nuance, making an effort to understand the motivations and appeal of these men (and the movements and/or systems they represent), as well as their considerable failings.
However, to lump all of these under the broad heading "quasi-fascist" only makes sense in terms of branding. Since World War II, people have been taught to consider authoritarianism, fascism, "Nazism," nationalism, racism, and eugenics as the supreme evils. In fact, these things are quite different (there were democratic countries systematically practicing eugenics and racism, while Fascist Italy if anything was quite slow to adopt such policies). These things are not really distinguished in people's minds however but form a kind of hideous potpourri of sadistic bullying [1] Albright even quotes Orwell claiming that fascism is nothing more than "bullying." and senseless suffering, basically a Hieronymus Bosch painting come to life, embodying their deepest fears as human beings. Emotionally it is very powerful and it is understandable that Albright would want to misleadingly brand all her opponents as (quasi-)Fascists.
Opponents of American imperialism will observe that Albright's list of quasi-Fascist states corresponds quite closely with those who have opposed U.S. foreign policies in recent decades. There is barely a word about America's authoritarian allies Saudi Arabia and the Gulf States.
Nor is there much mention of China and Singapore, two countries which as capitalist one-party [2] I know Singapore allows some minor parties to exist notionally, but power is dominated by the People's Action Party. states actually are much closer to historic fascism than any of her candidates. Perhaps she ignores them so that people do not get the idea that fascistic government can actually be quite competent and public-spirited, and not necessarily lead to constant warfare.
Strikingly, the word "Netanyahu" does not appear in the book's Index at all. The existence of a democratic ethno-nationalist state goes against her whole narrative. For what it's worth, I suspect most people in European nationalist parties and in the Alt-Right would be happy to preserve democracy if they could have their own Netanyahus, with the establishment of Western ethnostates dedicated to their own people, with the explicit goal of preserving or restoring ethnic European demographic supermajorities.
This selectivity will encourage the impression that the State Department's talk of "human rights" has less to do with upholding universal moral principles than with demonizing the United States' geopolitical opponents du jour . The American Establishment does not bully China as much as Russia, despite being obviously more authoritarian. I suspect this is because China is already too big to bully, while Russia can still be pushed around and serve as a useful bogeyman (always useful to the Military-Industrial Complex, the National Security State, and for all the Establishmentarians who need a scapegoat for the rise of populism). On that note, I suspect most diplomatic conflicts today have less to do with "realist" international power dynamics than with the utility of foreign enemies for governments domestically.
Personally I prefer a republican government under the rule of law. But it would be dishonest to deny that authoritarian governments present certain advantages. In times of crisis, all governments tend to revert to authoritarianism to get the job done (e.g.: Lincoln, De Gaulle . . .). In the future, I'll write something on the merits and demerits of liberty and authority, and on the liberal claims of being "non-authoritarian."
In the meantime, I'll just ask: "What have the Romans ever done for us?"
Where would you rather be born:
In semi-democratic Venezuela or authoritarian Cuba? In democratic India or authoritarian China? In Atatürk's secular dictatorship or Erdoğan's Islamist democracy? In authoritarian Yugoslavia or democratic Bosnia? In democratic Jamaica or authoritarian Singapore?
Try to be honest (with yourself).
I will not quibble about the book's one-sided point of view, sometimes questionable assertions, and various hypocrisies typical of U.S. foreign policy (on which see the book review already up by Morris V. de Camp on Counter-Currents ). I'd rather take the subject head-on: the merits and demerits of fascism, which I think are an interesting subject.
The biggest and really inexcusable intellectual weakness of Albright's book is in lazily equating or associating the various illiberal democratic regimes (meaning nothing more than democratic regimes liberals don't agree with) with fascist ones. It fails to recognize that democracy causes populism . If you have democracy – with real freedom of speech and not a dictatorship of the money-men and of the mainstream media which the postwar American generations were used to – you will get Trumps and Bolsonaros and Corbyns and Erdoğans. This kind of mess is a feature, not a bug, of real democracy.
The governments of illiberal democracies, it seems to me, also behave more badly because they have to worry about getting reelected. Unlike dictatorships, these governments are insecure, if they lose one election, they risk losing everything. As a result, they seem to me to be more erratic and have more of a taste for (often damaging) spectacle and demagogic measures than does the average dictatorship. (Again: compare the peace and orderliness of Cuba with the violence and chaos of Venezuela.)
Fascism entails a one-party state under the authority of a charismatic dictator, typically with a commitment to national independence and power. The fascist claims that the right people, in practice the men willing to go out there and risk their lives to beat up communists, ought to be in charge. The biggest risk, as in all personal dictatorships, is that the country's development is put at the mercy of the wisdom and the stability of the leader. There have been plenty of competent dictators: Franco, Chiang Kai-shek, Lee Kuan Yew, etc. Hitler's personal contempt for the Slavs, more than anything else, caused his downfall – if he'd toned that back, and just that might have been enough – I'd probably be typing in German today.
The Belgian fascist Léon Degrelle signed up to the Waffen-SS because he wanted Europe to be a mighty empire rather than a glorified supermarket.
In a dictatorship, the elimination of political and ideological pluralism means that the country can enjoy political stability. This, by the way, is crucial in multiethnic countries such as Yugoslavia or Iraq, for which the fall of the dictatorship and democratization led to atrocious ethno-religious civil war. As Lee Kuan Yew , my favorite antidote to the political childishness that prevails in the West today, said concerning his multiracial state of Singapore: "We had to lock up people, without trial, whether they are communists, whether they are language chauvinists, or religious extremists. If you don't do that the country would be in ruins today!" Few things have been as murderous as the promotion of "democracy" in Iraq, Libya, and Syria, a policy which, not coincidentally, has destroyed several geopolitical opponents of Israel.
The government can furthermore take decisive actions where necessary. Fascism rose in Italy because veterans and others could see that the parliamentary democracy was unable to stop communist-inspired chaos and was generally ineffectual. The Germans voted for Hitler so as to free Germany from the chaos of Western financial capitalism and to overturn the injustices of the Treaty of Versailles. Does anyone think the divided, social-democratic Weimar Republic could have overturned Versailles as quickly as the Third Reich did?
The lack of elections means political leaders have no need to pander to the 51% every couple of years. The rulers can adopt far-sighted and sustainable policies without worrying about electoral change or unpopularity (the European Union follows this line anti-democratic line of argument concerning macroeconomics, a field in which it is attempting to eliminate the influence of elected politicians altogether, so as to ensure only "responsible" budgetary and monetary decisions are taken). The government can furthermore promote a uniform set of values, in the case of fascism, this tends to be things like national power, independence, and individual self-sacrifice for the community – but in principle these can be anything, such as equality, eugenics, or ecology.
Fascism does not necessarily mean racism, eugenics, anti-Semitism, or perpetual warfare. Italian Fascism really should set the bar in this area. As Albright admits, if Mussolini had chosen to join the winning side in World War II, fascism would not be a swear word today. Mussolini only sided with Hitler because of the Anglo-French's opposition to his invasion of Ethiopia, which he thought quite hypocritical, given that Britain and France already had vast colonial empires of their own.
Fascism is often quite inclusive: involving the masses, educating them, giving them access to culture, economic welfare, tourism, and healthcare. In general, these systems try to be meritocratic (like any honest bureaucracy really), letting all apply and, if found competent and appropriate, hired and promoted through the ranks. In short, a degree of socialism, but without slaughtering your upper-classes, starving your Kulaks, or waging war against your own population.
Saddam Hussein's long-time foreign minister and deputy prime minister, Tariq Aziz, was a non-Arab Christian. It is also also notorious that the Baathist regimes in Iraq and Syria were/are more tolerant of ethnic and religious minorities than have been the various Islamist rebel groups – specializing in enslaving Yazidis and destroying priceless Greco-Roman architecture.
Fascism, in short, is a nation making an effort , according to whatever goals have been set (e.g. having more babies, training a powerful army, reducing dependence on foreign imports . . .). Democracy is the pursuit of comfiness. An eco-fascism probably could have prevented climate change.
It goes without saying that fascist and authoritarian countries in general pose a greater threat to U.S. hegemony than do democratic ones who value above all money-making, individual choice, and the pretense of equality, rather than the well-being and power of the community as a whole.
Personally, I think ancient republican theory is distinctly superior to the modern (I can barely read Locke and Rousseau). I am an Aristotelian: I favor whatever promotes the collective flourishing of the community and of the species. e.g.: I support an individual right if and only if it promotes the common good. Wrap your head around that.
I can't say how a Fascist Italy would have evolved had it won besides the other Allies or remained neutral in World War II. Let us suppose a middling route: Italy would have maintained its colonial empire for far longer, it would have probably maintained a much higher birth rate, it would have worked much harder to maintain economic independence (and had some means, via the empire, to do so, especially in terms of oil), and would generally be a far more independent and powerful country than has been the supine and corrupt Italian Republic, good for nothing except getting milked for usurious interests rates by international financiers, a glorified museum and holiday resort. By way of comparison, look at how peaceful, healthy, and independent Cuba is compared to the average Latin American country – even managing to send 25,000 soldiers to Angola in the 1970s to fight Apartheid. Now imagine that, but a Fascist postwar Italy of 75 million.
Fascism certainly does not solve all problems. Even 20 years of fascism failed to turn Italy into a warrior nation, whereas 7 years was enough for Germany. Furthermore, there is no doubt that America's particular brand of individualist republicanism has been a great source of national power .
More generally, you still have your basic human capital (a nation of inbred idiots will remain a nation of inbred idiots unless you have an effective eugenics program). After colonial independence, most of the Third World was actually governed by kind-of-fascist nationalist and socialist dictatorships, who had the merit of trying to ensure some level of stability and wealth-sharing. Of course they tended to also be corrupt and incompetent, but regime type doesn't seem to matter much in that respect.
Ever since the French Revolution, liberals and democrats have sought to impose their ideological preferences on the entire world. Unless you adopt their ever-changing and quite arbitrary list of rights, you are "evil" as far as they are concerned. As Edmund Burke already saw back then, the imposition of such norms on other, vastly different societies is a recipe for chaos. Many millions of people have died in the demoliberals' quest to impose their ideology on the whole world and I have no doubt that many more millions will die in the future.
White liberals lack empathy for "fascists" and "racists" of their own race, although they are quite capable of considering the merits and demerits of such positions when these concern other nations or science fiction settings.
Given fascism's importance in the history of the twentieth century, people owe it to themselves to look at what the fascists themselves had to say about their values: Mussolini's Doctrine of Fascism (co-authored with philosopher Giovanni Gentile) is a concise and serious declaration of political principles.
The same goes for postwar white nationalism: How do George Lincoln Rockwell's words make you feel?
Taking the long view, the democratization of Europe coincided almost perfectly with the Continent's collapse into irrelevance. In 1914, Europeans and people of European descent – the people who had for all intents and purposes created modern civilization – dominated virtually the entire globe and made up a third of the world's population. Less than 150 years after the triumph of democracy, these same people will have not only lost their global empires but are set to even lose control of their own nations, by becoming minorities in North America, Australasia, and even their historic, millennia-old homelands in Western Europe. They will have dwindled to less than 5% of the world population and may well become under siege, like the Christians of Lebanon or the Serbs of Kosovo. Surely we deserve a Cosmic Darwin Award for this.
To nationalists, postwar "democracy" was the regime which persecutes nationalists and systematically ignores the will of the people on the critical issue of immigration. It appears no more than a sham to them. Albright acknowledges that Americans before agreed more because a narrower media class carefully curated what Americans were allowed to see and read and think. To address this, she wants to "put a saddle on the bucking bronco we call the Internet." So much for democracy and free speech.
Liberal-democracy means majority rule . . . except when liberals strongly disagree with the majority (then, they believe, the action should be unconstitutional and/or the media-political class have a solemn duty to shut down the issue). In reality, all regimes, including "democratic" ones, have official or unofficial Platonic Guardians enforcing certain values and ideas. The question is not whether something is "democratic" but whether the values and ideas promoted by the Guardians are true.
Early on in her book, Albright says:
My students remarked that the Fascist chiefs we remember best were charismatic. Through one method or another, each established an emotional link to the crowd and, like the central figure of a cult, brought deep and often ugly feelings to the surface. This is how the tentacles of Fascism spread inside a democracy.
I believe that is the fundamental issue: Albright fears an organized mass of people with a strong emotional connection with a charismatic leader, one who could actually shake up the system. This reminds me of that Jewish journalist who was offended because French President François Mitterrand seemed to care more about the millions of Frenchmen who died in World War I than the millions of his fellow Jews who died in the Shoah : "[Mitterrand] became again, in these movements, that Gaulish chieftain that I did not like very much."
No sir, they don't like European chieftains leading impassioned followers. That could lead to a pogrom . . . or worse. Certainly, the current absurdly skewed and unjust situation in the Ivy Leagues (see the graphs in particular) , the Democratic Party , and much of the elite and audiovisual media would probably be shut down. We can ask whether Albright's fears reflect universal morality – as she claims – or simply a natural desire to defend one's ethnic interests and privileges.
Albright's alarmism about every tepid manifestation of Western civic nationalism and her casual ignoring of Jewish ethnonationalism – funded at American taxpayers' expense and driving much of the murderous insanity of U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East, including under her tenure as secretary of State – is a hypocrisy sadly typical of many American liberal Jews. Influential Jewish groups like the ADL in America and the CRIF in France have promoted immigration and multiculturalism in the West all the while demanding support for Israel as a Jewish ethnostate. Growing awareness of this hypocrisy is contributing to the rise of anti-Jewish sentiment across the West today. Many liberals and/or Jews simply cannot comprehend that this is happening. But it is.
The sooner we can discuss all issues and acknowledge untruths and injustices on all sides, the sooner we will be able to find equitable and peaceful solutions to these problems. At least, that is my hope.
Notes
[1] Albright even quotes Orwell claiming that fascism is nothing more than "bullying."
[2] I know Singapore allows some minor parties to exist notionally, but power is dominated by the People's Action Party.
Bournite , says: January 5, 2019 at 8:24 pm GMT
Albright's relationship to fascism was broadly advertised for about 10 years. From 1999 until Obama's first midterm a photo of Albright and Hosni Mubarak in a warm embrace circulated on the internet. It's caption unironically feature "celebrating freedom to the Balkans" circa post Serbian bombing campaign. Freedom along the Nile never came up on the, apparently, defunct website. Just before the "Arab Spring" the photo disappeared from the internet. Here's what a google search turns up:
Showing results for madeleine albright Hosni mubarak image "celebrating freedom to the Balkans"
Search instead for madelin albright Hosni mubarak image "celebrating freedom to the Balkans"No results containing all your search terms were found.
The Alarmist says: January 5, 2019 at 9:37 pm GMT
Wouldn't you consider a woman unbelievably comfortable with using sanctions to snuff a half-million Iraqi children to achieve US policy objectives to be the poster-child of a facist regime?
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Oct 18, 2010 | Dissident Voice
"Could you have one of our U-2s shot down?"
Madeleine Albright is infamous for her reply to the question posed by 60 Minutes' Lesley Stahl about the sanctions against Iraq in May 1996."We have heard that a half million children have died," stated Stahl. "I mean, that's more children than died in Hiroshima. And, you know, is the price worth it?"
"I think this is a very hard choice," replied Albright, "but the price–we think the price is worth it."
Albright, who served as Bill Clinton's Secretary of State from 1997 to 2001, had a cruel disregard for the lives of Iraqis, Serbs, and others. But she apparently had a callous attitude towards the lives of U.S. servicemen and servicewomen too. In his new memoir, General Hugh Shelton, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff from 1997 to 2001, writes about a White House breakfast in late 1997. (The account is cited by Justin Elliott in Salon .)
Early on in my days as Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, we had small, weekly White House breakfasts in National Security Advisor Sandy Berger's office that included me, Sandy, Bill Cohen (Secretary of Defense), Madeleine Albright (Secretary of State), George Tenet (head of the CIA), Leon Firth (VP chief of staff for security), Bill Richardson (ambassador to the U.N.), and a few other senior administration officials. These were informal sessions where we would gather around Berger's table and talk about concerns over coffee and breakfast served by the White House dining facility. It was a comfortable setting that encouraged brainstorming of potential options on a variety of issues of the day.
During that time we had U-2 aircraft on reconnaissance sorties over Iraq. These planes were designed to fly at extremely high speeds and altitudes (over seventy thousand feet) both for pilot safety and to avoid detection.
At one of my very first breakfasts, while Berger and Cohen were engaged in a sidebar discussion down at one end of the table and Tenet and Richardson were preoccupied in another, one of the Cabinet members present leaned over to me and said, "Hugh, I know I shouldn't even be asking you this, but what we really need in order to go in and take out Saddam is a precipitous event - something that would make us look good in the eyes of the world. Could you have one of our U-2s fly low enough - and slow enough - so as to guarantee that Saddam could shoot it down?"
The hair on the back of my neck bristled, my teeth clenched, and my fists tightened. I was so mad I was about to explode. I looked across the table, thinking about the pilot in the U-2 and responded, "Of course we can …" which prompted a big smile on the official's face.
"You can?" was the excited reply.
"Why, of course we can," I countered. "Just as soon as we get your ass qualified to fly it, I will have it flown just as low and slow as you want to go."
The official reeled back and immediately the smile disappeared. "I knew I should not have asked that…."
"No, you should not have," I strongly agreed, still shocked at the disrespect and sheer audacity of the question. "Remember, there is one of our great Americans flying that U-2, and you are asking me to intentionally send him or her to their death for an opportunity to kick Saddam. The last time I checked, we don't operate like that here in America."
Imagine that! A Cabinet official suggesting a deliberate provocation endangering a military pilot's life in order to justify a war: "…but what we really need in order to go in and take out Saddam is a precipitous event - something that would make us look good in the eyes of the world." Is this mere amoral pragmatism? Machiavellianism? It is in any case evil.
(I'm reminded of how the key neocon text "Rebuilding America's Defenses" authored by Paul Wolfowitz for the Project for a New American Century (PNAC) "thinktank" in Sept. 2000, states that the "process of transformation" to the kind of super-militarized aggressive state the neocons hoped for "will be a long one absent some catastrophic event like a new Pearl Harbor." And as the Deputy Secretary of Defense he warned of another Pearl Harbor in his speech at West Point in June 2001. After 9-11, widely compared in the media to the Pearl Harbor attack of 1941, he immediately set about preparations for war with Iraq.)
On January 31, 2003 President George W. Bush in a meeting with British Prime Minister Tony Blair seriously proposed provoking Saddam to shoot down a U.S. aircraft. According to notes taken my Blair advisor David Manning (the accuracy of which has never been challenged), Bush suggested "flying U-2 reconnaissance aircraft with fighter cover over Iraq, painted with UN colors. If Saddam fired on them, he would be in breach" of UN resolutions. Maybe then the UN, which had refused to endorse the plan to attack Iraq and was sceptical about the justifications given by then-Secretary of State Colin Powell, would endorse war. (Perhaps the military brass opposed the plan, which was never carried out.)
At the Clinton White House breakfast described by Gen. Shelton, Berger, Cohen, Tenet and Richardson were involved in separate conversations. The other cabinet members were Robert E. Rubin (Treasury), Janet Reno (Attorney General), Bruce Babbit (Interior), Dan Glickman (Agriculture), Mickey Kantor (Commerce), Alexis Herman (Labor), Donna E. Shalala (Health and Human Services), Andrew M. Cuomo (Housing and Urban Development), Rodney Slater (Transportation), Richard W. Riley (Education), Jesse Brown (Veteran's Affairs), Federico F. Pena (Energy), and Albright.
Out the 14 members of the Cabinet, there were four women. The fact that Shelton deliberately avoids indicating the gender of his interlocutor may hint that it was one of them. It is hard to believe that Attorney General Reno would suggest sacrificing an airman to the head of the Joint Chiefs at a White House breakfast. Or the Secretary of Labor, or Secretary of Health and Human Services. It's hard to believe anyone on the above list would so–except Albright.
Albright in her memoirs expresses regret for her "it was worth it" statement in the 1996 interview. And she told Newsweek in 2006, "I'm afraid that Iraq is going to turn out to be the greatest disaster in American foreign policy-worse than Vietnam." But she bears partial responsibility for the December 1998 bombing of Iraq ("Operation Desert Fox"), a prelude to the 2003 invasion. She helped produce the disaster.
And she helped produce disaster in the former Yugoslavia. As violence rose in the Serbian province of Kosovo, between the Kosovo Liberation Army and security forces, she (and Cohen) deliberately exaggerated the Kosovar Albanian death toll and demanded the U.S. right to intervene. She arranged the de facto alliance with the KLA, earlier labelled "terrorist" by U.S. officials. In March 1999 at the Rambouillet talks between Serbia and the Kosovar rebels, along with the U.S., its European allies and Russia, the U.S. demanded that the whole of Serbia (and other states within what was left of Yugoslavia) submit to virtual occupation by NATO. Yugoslavia had proudly remained outside the Warsaw Pact and had prided itself on participation in the Non-Aligned Movement. No government in Belgrade could have complied with Albright's demands.
The so-called Rambouillet Agreement was rejected outright by the Serbs as well as their Russian allies. But Albright immediately stated, "We accept the agreement"–as though there was any agreement. The bullying was conducted in such a smug fashion that the French Foreign minister accused the U.S. of becoming a hyperpuissance–not a mere superpower but a "hyperpower."
John Pilger wrote , "Anyone scrutinizing the Rambouillet document is left with little doubt that the excuses given for the subsequent bombing were fabricated. The peace negotiations were stage managed and the Serbs were told: surrender and be occupied, or don't surrender and be destroyed."
This was indeed Albright's plan (and that of Bill Clinton, egged on by Hillary, who has confessed, "I urged him to bomb"), resulting in the deployment of NATO to bomb a European capital for the first time since 1945, killing at least 500 civilians (Human Rights Watch) and maybe ten times that number.
A Republican official later told a think tank that a certain "top official" had told him: " We intentionally set the bar too high for the Serbs to comply. They need some bombing, and that's what they are going to get." Don't we see a pattern here?
Throughout the last decade the neoconservatives have been the leading warmongers. But they have no monopoly on imperialist arrogance, contempt for truth and indifference to human life. Madeleine Albright is proof of that.
Gary Leupp is a Professor of History at Tufts University, and author of numerous works on Japanese history. He can be reached at: [email protected] . Read other articles by Gary .
This article was posted on Monday, October 18th, 2010 at 7:00am and is filed under Imperialism .
John Andrews said on October 19th, 2010 at 12:04am #
It's difficult to know whether this particular breakfast conversation ever took place – not that it would surprise me if it did – but what I found quite interesting was the good general's response, as apparently recorded by himself. His supposed outrage is wholly directed towards the welfare of the pilot – the morality of the request itself (to cynically provoke a sovereign country to commit an act of war) completely escapes his notice. Would that be because it's too common an occurrence to remark on?
Mulga Mumblebrain said on October 20th, 2010 at 4:33am #
I think John Andrews has it. The nabobs of the 'Real Evil Empire' couldn't give a stuff what happens to the losers who are imperial cannon fodder, or the untermenschen victims.. This story is probably some convoluted settling of accounts between two psychopaths.
Hue Longer said on October 20th, 2010 at 9:22am #
Good Point, John
If most of US Americans suffer from selective morality, I'm fairly sure most its leaders also suffer from it if not amorality.
I'm sure some top military do get selectively misty eyed regarding the deaths of US troops…I got the feeling (could be wrong)Westmoreland did when he said, "The Oriental doesn't put the value on human life that we do in the West". Shelton sounds like he's selling himself to troop loving US Americans but maybe he really is a quality guy like Westmoreland seemed to be.
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russia-insider.com
Madeleine Albright proves to the young, aspiring women of America that warmongering psychopathy has no glass ceiling.
Former U.S. Secretary of State under Bill Clinton Madeleine Albright thinks there is "a special place in hell" for young women if they don't vote for Hillary Clinton.
Despite overwhelming evidence that most young American women who still plan to remain involved in the electoral process would rather go to hell than vote for Hillary Clinton, Madeleine Albright, from her seat of war criminal wisdom, has informed the naive lasses that support for Bernie Sanders will land them in the VIP room in a superstitious underground torture chamber.
By repurposing her own original quote, Albright has proven yet once again that she is an expert on hell's admission standards because she's probably going there.
Of course it should come to no surprise that Albright is stumping for Hillary Clinton. After all, she was Bill Clinton's Secretary of State, the first female to hold the office. And sure, Albright has an interesting bio. She and her family, fleeing Czechoslovakia from approaching German army, escaped to Serbia, and she survived the Nazi Blitzkrieg of London.
Too bad she is a neocon monster.
Although she personally experienced the horrors of WWII, and had family members who died in the Nazi death camps, Albright doesn't have a whole lot of empathy for those who find themselves on the disadvantageous side of American foreign policy. She neither came down wholly for or wholly against the 2003 invasion of Iraq. But that might just have been silly partisan politics and not due to any actual concern for the lives of Iraqi civilians. In 1996, Albright stated that the deaths of 500,000 Iraqi children due to American sanctions was justified.
When is genocide justified? Or when does it simply not matter?
Although the Clinton Administration's stated purpose for intervening in the Balkans was to stop genocide, the Rwandan genocide in 1994 continued unabated. From Rwanda: The Preventable Genocide:
"Rather than respond with appropriate force, the opposite happened, spurred by the murders of the Belgian Blue Berets and Belgium's withdrawal of its remaining troops. Exactly two weeks after the genocide began – following strenuous lobbying for total withdrawal led by Belgium and Britain, and with American UN Ambassador Madeleine Albright advocating the most token of forces and the United States adamantly refusing to accept publicly that a full-fledged, Convention defined genocide was in fact taking place – the Security Council made the astonishing decision to reduce the already inadequate UNAMIR force to a derisory 270 men" (10.11)
"The lesson to be learned from the betrayal at ETO and other experiences was that the full potential of UNAMIR went unexplored and unused, and, as result, countless more Rwandans died than otherwise might have. If anyone in the international community learned this lesson at the time, it was not evident at the UN. For the next six weeks, as the carnage continued, the UN dithered in organizing any kind of response to the ongoing tragedy. The Americans, led by US Ambassador Madeleine Albright, played the key role in blocking more expeditious action by the UN.[18] On May 17, the Security Council finally authorized an expanded UNAMIR II to consist of 5,500 personnel.[19] But there is perhaps no distance greater on earth than the one between the Security Council chambers and the outside world. Once the decision to expand was finally made, as we will soon show in detail, the Pentagon somehow required an additional seven weeks just to negotiate a contract for delivering armed personnel carriers to the field; evidently it proved difficult to arrange the desired terms for "maintenance and spare parts."[20] When the genocide ended in mid-July with the final RPF victory, not a single additional UN soldier had landed in Kigali." 10.16
Unlike Rwanda, Albright was involved in every step of Clinton's Balkan policy, although she was not his Secretary of State until 1997. Before that, she was U.S. Ambassador to the UN, and served as president of the Center for National Policy. She is a former student of Zbigniew Brzezinski.
Not only did Albright support Clinton's bombing, she was a key figure in the conflict and in the ousting of Slobodan Milosevic. Time went so far as to call the Balkan campaign "Madeleine's War." Despite her assertions that the bombing of Yugoslavia was a humanitarian mission, it is irrefutable at this point in history that the U.S. pretext for military intervention was fabricated.
Albright actively advocated policies that led to American military action in 1999, and placed all of the blame for the situation on the Belgrade government. (Does that ring a bell?) Albright's contention was that "a little bombing" would encourage Milosevic to sign Rambouillet Peace Accords, which would allow for the NATO occupation of Kosovo.
The Clinton Administration demanded Milosevic's removal from power, and in 2000, Albright rejected Vladimir Putin's offer to try to use his influence to defuse the situation.
War may have been the American end game in the Balkans from the start. In 1992, the American ambassador torpedoed Bosnian secession peace negotiations by convincing Bosnian Muslim leader Alija Izetbegovic to refuse to sign the peace accords. The ensuing catastrophic civil war, which ended in 1995, was blamed on Bosnian Serbs and Milosevic. Colin Powell recalled, as Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, he was pressured by Albright in 1992 to use military force on Bosnia.
Albright has never wavered from her stance on the Balkans. In 2012, she got into a shouting match with pro-Serbian activists over her role in that conflict, calling the protesters "dirty Serbs."
Dirty Serbs, huh? And she wants to tell idealistic young American women, who still believe in the American democratic process, how to vote? Yay, feminism!
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The Atlantic
Video has emerged showing Madeleine Albright in a verbal altercation with a group of pro-Serbian activists in Prague. The former U.S. Secretary of State got involved in a heated exchange with the activists who remonstrated with her over her role in the American-led 1999 NATO bombing of Yugoslavia and her reported interest in a Kosovar communications firm. At a book-signing event, promoting her memoir "Prague Winter," in the Czech capital's Luxor bookstore on October 23, members of the civic group, "Friends of Serbs in Kosovo" entered into a verbal confrontation with Albright and her representatives. The two videos, which were uploaded to YouTube by the group were published by the Czech publication Parlamentni Listy on its website on October 25. The videos show the verbal jousting that ensued after one of the group's members, Czech film director Vaclav Dvorak who made the documentary "Stolen Kosovo," walked up to Albright and asked her to sign a DVD copy of his film.
... ... ...
Anton Dvorak told "Parlamentni Listy " that he had not expected such a feisty response from the septuagenarian former diplomat. "... I was surprised by her reaction," he said. "We politely came to give her the film we recorded in Kosovo, regardless of the fact that it concerns "stolen Kosovo" -- which was gifted to the narco mafia with the help of NATO bombings and aggression -- and the IPKO company that enabled Albright to line her pockets."
In September, Bloomberg reported that the bidding for Kosovo's state-owned post and telecoms company "...has attracted interest from European and Turkish phone operators, as well as from an investment company headed by former U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, who was a major backer of Kosovo in its war against Serbia."
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February 2001 | williamblum.org
1) "Asked if it is not hypocritical to punish Burma for human rights violations while refraining from sanctions on China for similar actions, Albright replied, 'We have consistent principles and flexible tactics'."
The same "flexible tactics" (English translation: hypocrisy) are evident in the policies embraced by Albright toward Cuba, Libya, Iraq, et al, as opposed to the policies toward Turkey, Indonesia, Mexico, Peru, and Colombia.
2) Television interview, "60 Minutes", May 12, 1996:
Lesley Stahl, speaking of US sanctions against Iraq: "We have heard that a half million children have died. I mean, that's more children than died in Hiroshima. And – and you know, is the price worth it?"
Madeleine Albright: "I think this is a very hard choice, but the price – we think the price is worth it."
At the Town Hall in Columbus, Ohio, Feb. 18, 1998, Ms. Albright was moved to declare: "I am willing to make a bet to anyone here that we care more about the Iraqi people than Saddam Hussein does."
Though her logic may escape us, she may yet have some DNA molecules for compassion. On May 21 she signed an agreement between the U.S. and six Latin American countries to protect dolphins, declaring: "This is one of the strongest agreements ever negotiated to conserve marine life."
3) Albright in Guatemala, talking to a group of impoverished children: "Why would [ I ] and the United States care about what is happening here? The reason is we are all one family and when one part of our family is not happy or suffers, we all suffer."
Thus speaketh the leading foreign policy officer of the country directly responsible for bringing more than 40 years of poverty, torture, death squads, massacres and disappeared people to Guatemala, without even a hint of apology or restitution, ever.
4) "To a student who asked [Albright] whether the United States was not spending too much of its resources on being the world's policeman and too little on more pressing domestic concerns, Albright asked him in return to estimate what share of the federal budget goes to foreign policy. When he guessed 15 or 20 percent, Albright pounced. 'It's 1 percent, 1 percent of the entire budget,' Albright said."
Her reply was conspicuously disingenuous. At best, she was referring to the budget of only the State Department, concealing what everyone knows, even the teenage student she browbeat – US foreign policy expenditures must include the Defense Department, the CIA, the National Security Agency, and a host of other government agencies. Together they consume more than 50 percent of the budget.
5) In February 1996, as UN ambassador, Albright reacted with righteous indignation against the Cuban pilots who expressed satisfaction after shooting down two planes of Cubans from Florida which were headed toward Cuba. "This one won't mess around any more," one of the pilots is reported to have exclaimed.
"I was struck by the joy of these pilots in committing cold-blooded murder," Albright said, accusing the Cuban pilots of "cowardice".
What, one may ask, does she think of the American pilots who, while bombing and strafing helpless retreating Iraqis in 1991, exclaimed: "we toasted him" … "we hit the jackpot" … "a turkey shoot" … "shooting fish in a barrel" … "basically just sitting ducks" … "There's just nothing like it. It's the biggest Fourth of July show you've ever seen, and to see those tanks just `boom', and more stuff just keeps spewing out of them … they just become white hot. It's wonderful."
6) On October 8, 1997, in announcing the designation of 18 additional foreign political organizations as terrorist-supporting groups, Secretary of State Albright declared that she wanted to help make the United States a "no support for terrorism zone". It could be suggested that if the Secretary were truly committed to this goal, instead of offering her usual lip service, she should begin at home – the anti-Castro community in Miami, collectively, is one of the longest-lasting and most prolific terrorist organizations in the world. Over the years they've carried out hundreds of bombings, shootings, and murders, blown up an airplane, killing 73 people, fired a bazooka at the United Nations, and much, much more. But Madame Albright will not lift a finger against them.
The State Department designates Cuba as one of the states which harbors terrorists. The United States can well be added to that list.
7) At the fabricated "Town Hall" meeting (in which the officials came not to listen, but to tell) held in Columbus, Ohio, February 18, 1998, concerning Iraq, Albright was heckled and asked critical, and perhaps uncomfortable, questions. At one point, her mind and her integrity could come up with no better response than to make something up: "I am really surprised," she declared, "that people feel that it is necessary to defend the rights of Saddam Hussein."
At another point, a besieged Albright was moved to yell: "We are the greatest country in the world!" Patriotism is indeed the last refuge of a scoundrel, though her words didn't quite have the ring of "Deutschland über alles" or "Rule Britannia".
Finally, unable to provide answers that satisfied or quieted the questioners, she stated that she would meet with them after the meeting to answer their questions. But as soon as the meeting ended, the Secretary of State was out of their, posthaste. Her offer, it would seem, had just been a tactic to try and pacify the hostile crowd.
8) And here is Madame Albright at her jingoist best, on TV the day after the Town Hall meeting, again in the context of Iraq:
"If we have to use force, it is because we are America! We are the indispensable nation. We stand tall, and we see further into the future."
9) Madeleine Albright, then UN Ambassador, informed the UN Security Council during a 1994 discussion about Iraq: "We recognize this area as vital to US national interests and we will behave, with others, multilaterally when we can and unilaterally when we must." Ms. Albright is thus stating that the United States recognizes no external constraints on its behavior, when it decides that a particular area of the world is "vital to US national interests". It would of course be difficult to locate a spot on the globe that Albright and the United States do not regard as "vital to US national interests.
10) On more than one occasion while U.N. ambassador, Albright yelled at U.N. Secretary-General Boutros-Ghali that he must not publish the report about Israel's bombing of the U.N.-run refugee camp in Qana, Lebanon, in April 1996, which killed more than 100 refugees. The U.N. report said that the attack was not a mistake, as Israel claimed. Albright – who has surrounded herself with alumni of Israeli and Jewish lobbies – warned the Secretary-General that if the report came out, the U.S. would veto him for his second term. The report came out, and so did Boutros Boutros-Ghali.
11) Madeleine the humanitarian: It is "not a good idea" to link human rights and trade issues. A philosophy that could have been used to justify trade with Nazi Germany … or anyone else … or anything.
12) To Colin Powell, who felt that the U.S. should not commit military forces to Bosnia until there was a clear political objective: "What's the point of having this superb military that you're always talking about if we can't use it?" "I thought I would have an aneurysm," Powell later wrote. "American GIs were not toy soldiers to be moved around on some sort of global game board."
Notes
- Washington Post, April 23, 1997, p.4
- "60 Minutes", May 12, 1996
- Washington Post, May 5, 1997, p.20
- Washington Post, May 14, 1997
- Washington Post, Feb. 28, 1996
- Los Angeles Times and Washington Post, both Feb. 27, 1991, page 1
- NBC "Today" show, February 19, 1998
- Middle East International (London), Oct. 21, 1994, p. 4
- New York Times, Jan. 1, 1997
- Washington Post, March 1, 1999, p. 13
- Colin Powell with Joseph Persico, My American Journey (NY, 1995), p. 576
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