The analogy to U.S. CIA advisers in Vietnam followed by 25,000 troops to prop up the U.S. puppet Ngo Dinh Diem comes to mind all too quickly.
The war that is unfolding will not be fought in a Hollywood fantasy in front of computer screens, as the rank-and-file soldiers of other U.S. wars know so well. The trauma for millions of refugees from Southeast Asia continues to this day. It will cost much more in "blood and treasure" than General Dugan so callously estimates. A further exposé of U.S. war plans and involvement in the Balkans is desperately needed in order to open a debate and build a powerful opposition to the latest espisode in the Pentagon’s plans for world domination.
Concerned people of every political persuasion when confronted with the gruesome images of the war ask, "Doesn’t the U.S. government have a responsibility to do something to stop the bloodshed?" Or the question is posed, "How can the U.S. bring peace?"
The U.S. economy today is completely dependent on and intertwined with militarism. U.S. military spending is larger than the military budgets of all the routher countries of the world combined. U.S. corporations are totally dependent on the profits of war and militarism. It literally keeps this system that is based on profits afloat. More than $250 billion a year is spent on militarism. This is the only area of the federal budget not facing drastic cuts.
The implications of greater and greater military involvement are not discussed with working and poor people here in the U.S. Yet the decisions will impact on the lives of every one in this country, in the form of further cutbacks in desperately needed social services.
All the many nationalities of the former Yugoslavia have shown from past experience that they are capable of resolving their differences. They lived together in peace and harmony for 45 years under a socialist federation. Although more than 1 million people died and millions were uprooted during World War II, driving out the imperialist invaders became a unifying force that galvanized all the many divided nationalities.
U.S. involvement in the Balkans is not about helping any of the people in the region—Muslims, Croats, Serbs or Albanians. The only interest of the Pentagon is in creating weak, dependent puppet regimes in order to dominate the entire region economically and politically. Only the giant multinational corporations will benefit.
The only demand for those genuinely concerned with peace is, "U.S. out, NATO out."
The involvement of the Pentagon can only bring wider war, more death and destruction, shattered lives and hundreds of thousands of additional refugees.
The same demand needs to be raised by the anti-war movements in each of the West European countries—Germany, France, Britain and Italy. They and the U.S are imperialist powers, meaning that the highest profits of the corporations of these capitalist countries come from their investments and economic control of other less developed countries.
It is not an easy task to build an anti-war movement. It must combat all the lies of the corporate media. But it has been done before. As the war widens and the cutbacks in education, healthcare and housing continue here in the U.S., this idea will take root.
The only way to end the Vietnam war was for the U.S. to get out. The years and years of negotiations were only an excuse to widen the war, continue the bombing and further the intervention. By the end of the war, all of South East Asia lay in ruins, the landscape pockmarked with bomb craters and poisoned with Agent Orange.
Getting the U.S. and the other imperialists out of the Balkans is the only way to keep this war from escalating into an even wider struggle that would engulf the whole region.
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