This book began as a small pamphlet in October 1995 entitled Bosnia Tragedy: The unknown role of the U.S. government and Pentagon. It was published by the International Action Center. The pamphlet received a great deal of attention among a current of anti-war activists who suspect U.S. government motives and from Serbian people and others from the region who were shocked at being demonized.
Many people caught up in the war in Bosnia had assumed the U.S. government would be their friend and protector. In Europe there was greater understanding of Germany’s historic role in the Balkans and in the breakup of Yugoslavia. A perspective on the complex U.S. role met with great interest. The pamphlet was reprinted in whole or in part in French, Italian, Dutch, German, Serbian, and Bulgarian.
As the Pentagon role in the Balkans expanded, so has the need for information to challenge its military occupation. Over the past five years the International Action Center in New York and San Francisco has produced videos, fact sheets, leaflets, and press releases. Rallies, picket lines, teach-ins, and meetings were organized to counter a barrage of media propaganda clamoring for U.S. intervention. Extensive use of the Internet, videos for cable-access programs, and many radio talk shows helped disseminate this information.
Most of the chapters in the present collection, NATO in the Balkans, were written over the past two to three years as the Pentagon blueprint for control of the Balkans unfolded. The authors write from various perspectives. Each contributor to the book is known as outspoken and has developed a consistent position. All share a history of opposition to U.S. intervention. From their vantage points, they describe the real U.S. aims in the region and the rivalries among competing major powers.
Several chapters focus on the role of the media in providing sophisticated "Big Lie" war propaganda. It serves to cloak the real motives for military intervention and suppress popular debate and opposition. Other chapters deal with the economic leverage exerted by the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank and the strangling effect of sanctions.
This book is produced with the confidence that it will help to arm a new generation of anti-war militants who will surely emerge as the full implications of this pernicious policy sink in. All the king’s horses and all the king’s men can’t control every aspect of life in Bosnia—even though these outside forces take charge of the parliamentary elections and physically seize radio and TV stations.
The occupation of Bosnia by U.S.-led NATO forces takes its toll not only on the peoples who are subjugated militarily. It also exacts a silent price here in the U.S. The Pentagon is soaking up every available dollar that could feed or heal or educate or provide employment. And with every dollar it absorbs, this military monstrosity grows ever more powerful, arrogant, and aggressive.
This is the danger inherent in the military-industrial complex. Its goal is to control the destiny of the planet—militarily, politically, and economically. It is driven by a ravenous appetite for profits.
The first person to name it and warn how perilous its growth could be was not a radical or a leftist. He was the architect of the fusion of industrial production with the military, one who nurtured its rise with war profits.
In 1946 Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower, Chief of Staff of the U.S. Army, drafted a policy statement to the heads of the armed forces. It laid the basis for linking together the military, industry, science, technology, universities, and virtually all other spheres of economic and social life. But he was not unaware of the dangers lurking in what he had helped to shape.
Eisenhower went on to become president of the United States. In his last speech before leaving office, he issued a warning: "In the councils of government we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will exist."
Today the gargantuan proportions to which the military-industrial complex has swelled might shock even Eisenhower. In a time of "peace," half of all the tax monies in the federal budget are earmarked to feed the military machine. The expenses of preparing for and making war are funded at the cost of every needed social program. Like the sorcerer’s appentice, forces have been conjured up that cannot be controlled and now have a life of their own.
Dreams of global mastery
Not only the unchecked size of the Pentagon is menacing. Equally fearful are its stated goals—goals that are treated as an acceptable cost of "stability."
Its aims were articulated unabashedly and arrogantly in a Pentagon document entitled "The Defense Planning Guide." The forty-six-page policy statement was excerpted in a prominent New York Times article on March 8, 1992. This major policy document asserts that the only possible course for the U.S. to pursue is complete world domination—militarily and politically. And it adds that no other country has the right to aspire to a role of leadership, even as a regional power. While this document was quoted extensively, no U.S. official denied or denounced the report. None even distanced themselves from it. This Pentagon policy paper states:
Our first objective is to prevent the re-emergence of a new rival. . . . First, the U.S. must show the leadership necessary to establish and protect a new order that holds the promise of convincing potential competitors that they need not aspire to a greater role or pursue a more aggressive posture to protect their legitimate interests.
We must account sufficiently for the interests of the advanced industrial nations to discourage them from challenging our leadership or seeking to overturn the established political and economic order. Finally, we must maintain the mechanism for deterring potential competitors from even aspiring to a larger regional or global role.
The document then specifically addresses the Pentagon’s designs on Europe:
It is of fundamental importance to preserve NATO as the primary instrument of Western defense and security as well as the channel for U.S. influence and participation in European security affairs. . . . We must seek to prevent the emergence of European-only security arrangements which would undermine NATO.
What is most important to maintain is:
. . . the sense that the world order is ultimately backed by the U.S. . . . The U.S. should be postured to act independently when collective action cannot be orchestrated.
The wording of this policy directive for world domination could not be clearer or more threatening. But the U.S. conduct in the civil war in Bosnia brings that language to life.
Dayton—Pax Americana
Several chapters in this book were written before the "peace" accords were signed at Wright Patterson Air Force Base near Dayton, Ohio, on November 21, 1995. They predicted that the intense but covert U.S. involvement in Bosnia was inexorably headed toward a larger military and political commitment.
The Dayton Accords exposed how far Washington had been willing to go to sabotage peace in order to maintain decisive military control. The documents signed were almost identical to two previous "peace" agreements that the U.S. had opposed. But what presumably made the Dayton Accords different was that they were to be implemented by NATO—a U.S.-led military force.
The first accord that the U.S. government openly sabotaged had been signed by all the same parties in Lisbon, Portugal, in March 1992. The problem was that this agreement was brokered by the European Union. Had this agreement, signed before the civil war began, been allowed to be implemented, how many lives, homes, and futures would have been saved?
Nor are the Dayton Accords much different than the Vance-Owen plan signed in May 1993. That plan was negotiated by former U.S. Secretary of State Cyrus Vance and former British Foreign Secretary Lord David Owen, the latter representing the European Union and the United Nations. Owen has publicly stated that Washington undermined the agreement after it was negotiated. The words of the Defense Planning Guide haunt these efforts to forestall war: "We must seek to prevent the emergence of European-only security arrangements which would undermine NATO."
As the ink dried on the Dayton Accords, Newsweek magazine of December 4, 1995, described the agreement as "less a peace agreement than a declaration of surrender." The U.S.-led NATO forces, Newsweek continued, "will have nearly colonial powers."
Indeed, the Dayton Accords explicitly defined the colonial administration of Bosnia. At its head sits an appointed High Representative with full executive powers in all civilian affairs. The International Monetary Fund is empowered to appoint and run the Bosnian Central Bank in this artificially fabricated state. The European Bank for Reconstruction and Development directs the restructuring of the public sector as it sells off assets of the state and society.
The Pentagon is currently engaged in a "train and equip" program based in the Bosnian-Croat federation. This army will be equipped with U.S. tanks, armored vehicles, artillery, laser sights, trucks, and small arms. No European NATO country is involved in this project, according to an Agence France-Presse report of September 5, 1997. The "train and equip" program comes with a price tag of $100 million.
As this book goes to press, the U.S.—through its leading role in the NATO occupation—is still exerting its military prowess in an attempt to control Bosnia and the Balkans as a whole. Its troops are intervening in municipal elections and threatening to destroy any radio or television station or newspaper that criticizes NATO’s presence in Bosnia. NATO commanders have overruled decisions by Serbia’s High Court and have overturned the very parliament whose election they presided over.
Now NATO Commander General Wesley K. Clark has announced that U.S. "peace-keepers" will use lethal force against Serbians who throw stones at the occupying troops.
Slipping into the Vietnam quagmire
In 1995, President Clinton promised that U.S. soldiers stationed in Bosnia would be home by December 1996. Now they are slated to stay in place until at least July 1998. And, in a carefully crafted campaign with letters and ads, pro-Pentagon organizations, think tanks, and so-called humanitarian groups are pressuring for a military presence in Bosnia far past that date.
How reminiscent these hollow promises to "bring the troops home" are of another president and another war. Three decades ago, then-U.S. President Lyndon Johnson swore the troops would be back from Vietnam by Christmas. His empty assurances were followed by a decade of bloody war, the devastation of all Indochina, casualties totaling three million Vietnamese and fifty-eight thousand U.S. soldiers, and countless injuries.
U.S. troops in Bosnia mean a large new NATO base in Hungary, just over the border. The price tag for building and maintaining this base is in addition to the $5.5 billion cost of maintaining troops in Bosnia. NATO troops are now based in Croatia, Macedonia, and Albania. Tens of thousands of U.S. troops remain in Germany. An "Air Expeditionary Force" of eighteen F-16 fighter bombers is stationed at the NATO base in Aviano, Italy. The bombers are positioned to resume the 4,400 bombing sorties that forced the Serbs to accept the Dayton Accords.
The cost of joining the club
The overall cost of the expansion of NATO is estimated to cost $60 to $100 billion. A bonanza for the military contractors. Who will pay? Old Warsaw Pact weapons are considered obsolete. Tanks, aircraft, and communications systems must be interchangeable with NATO equipment. The new NATO members—Poland, Hungary, and the Czech Republic—will fork over half of their annual national budgets for the next decade for weapons procurement.
No other regional powers will be tolerated. That was the message delivered by NATO war "games" held in the Black Sea in July 1996. The ships, marine units, and assault helicopters used in the Kazakhstan war "games" on September 15, 1997, underlined the point. "The message I would leave is that there is no nation on the face of the earth that we cannot get to," blustered NATO Commander General John Sheehan.
Who are the war criminals?
But U.S. finance capital doesn’t expect to rule the region with guns and troops alone. Along with the military occupation, the U.S. is establishing a new legal framework that bolsters its moves to dominate the globe: the War Crimes Tribunal.
Several chapters in this book deal with the issue of war crimes. The authors discuss how the charge of war crimes served to justify U.S. intervention.
The UN Security Council, acting for the prosecution, can now arrest and kidnap anyone in any country. It can decide who can run for office, and even remove government officials. Individuals facing charges have no right to block their extradition, to cross-examine their accusers—or even know their identity. The tribunal is empowered to demand of any country that it hand over any one of its citizens—even heads of state.
This tribunal was established as a subcommittee of the United Nations Security Council, in which the U.S. rules the roost. It is not under the aegis of the General Assembly, the World Court, or any other more representative body.
The Security Council now claims the right to decide in which countries it will set up tribunals, to define the charges, and to select the judges. This enormous power eclipses the sovereign rights of nations, tramples international law, and overrides any standard of civil rights.
Because of their veto power on the Security Council, the very imperialist powers most responsible for war crimes in the past fifty years since the creation of the United Nations will be immune to prosecution.
Any activist who took to the streets to oppose U.S. genocide in Vietnam, its massive bombardment of Iraq, and its invasions of Panama, Grenada, Lebanon, and Somalia will be outraged at the very idea of a court that places oppressed peoples in the dock for war crimes while granting immunity to the world’s most powerful aggressor.
The Pentagon generals insist they can fight two or three wars on different fronts at the same time. But they station U.S. troops and weapons in a hundred countries around the globe. They have no interest in substantially improving the lives of the people there. Instead, they expect to control the globe through repressive force and destabilization. Their objective is simply to secure the investments of U.S. corporations.
The NATO military presence will increasingly be a target of angry demonstrations, not only in Bosnia but throughout the whole region. The area is in an upheaval, experiencing the chaos of the capitalist market. Millions of dollars being spent on war games and military maneuvers may only enrage a population where millions of people have gone without a paycheck for months. For example, in August of 1997 thousands demonstrated in the Ukraine against NATO maneuvers.
The Pentagon generals should look at their history books to see how ineffective even a large and brutal military occupation can be. The massive Nazi occupation of the Balkans during World War II could not crush the resistance once it started. The experience of the Pentagon in Vietnam, Lebanon, and Somalia only confirms this. Today’s Pentagon generals will be taught the same historical lesson. They will reap the whirlwind of popular resistance.
We hope that NATO in the Balkans will help to fuel the imperative demand: "U.S. out of the Balkans—now!"
Sara Flounders
November 1997This chapter is adapted from a speech given at a teach-in on the U.S. role in Bosnia sponsored by the International Action Center and held in New York, October 1995.
This chapter is part of the book, NATO in the Balkans. Link here for order information.
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