war crimes
DRANG NACH OSTEN: YUGOSLAVIA, RUSSIA AND THE PENTAGON'S DRIVE TO THE EAST
By Bill Doares, International Action Center"
If we are going to have a strong relationship that includes our ability to sell around the world, Europe has got to be the key. ... That is what this Kosovo thing is all about." President Clinton, 1999"The hidden hand of the market will never work without a hidden fist--McDonald's cannot flourish without McDonnell Douglas, the designer of the F15. And the hidden fist that keeps the world safe for Silicon Valley's technologies is called the United States Army, Air Force, Navy and Marine Corps." Thomas Friedman, New York Times, March 1999
"I spent 33 years and 4 months in active military service as part of this country's most agile military force, the Marine Corps. I served in all commissioned ranks from Second Lieutenant to Major General. And during that period I spent most of my time being a high-class muscleman for Big Business, for Wall Street, for the bankers. In short, I was a racketeer, a gangster for capitalism.
"I helped make Mexico, especially Tampico, safe for American oil interests in 1914. I helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City Bank boys to collect revenues in. I helped in the raping of half a dozen Central America republics for the benefit of Wall Street. The record of racketeering is long. I helped purify Nicaragua for the international banking house of Brown Brothers in 1909-1912. I brought light to the Dominican Republic for American sugar interests in 1916. In China I helped to see that Standard Oil went its way unmolested.
"During those years I had, as the boys in the back room would say, a swell racket. Looking back on it, I feel I could have given Al Capone a few hints. The best he could do was to operate his racket in three districts. We Marines operated on three continents." Maj. Gen. Smedley Butler, USMC (ret.), November 1935
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An indictment of the US military and political establishment for war crimes would be incomplete without the following points. One is the laying waste to the economies of East Europe and the former USSR by the dictates of the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund and other Western institutions. This is the fate the Washington and Wall Street want to impose on the people of Yugoslavia. If they can't do it by economic fiat, they will do it with bombs and sanctions. But the capitulation of regimes in the former Soviet republics has not eased the fate of their people. If anything, their suffering is worse. Second is the plan to use the attack on Yugoslavia as a pretext to provoke an much wider war, a war whose prime motivation is corporate profit.
This spring's rain of death on the people of Yugoslavia showered benefits on Corporate America. Some are evident in the financial headlines. Oil prices are up. So is the Pentagon budget. Corporate profits are way up, especially at General Electric and Boeing, both big military contractors. When Wesley Clark retires next year, he'll probably be rewarded with a job at one of those companies. Generals usually are.
Banking profits are up to. The bombing drove the dollar up and the Euro down as capital fled from Europe to Wall Street. All these things are bound up with the war. On May 5 the Euro began to rise against the dollar as talk of a settlement was in the air. Two days later the US bombed the Chinese embassy, and the Euro plunged again.
On a political level the Primakov government was removed in Russia, and the Duma now appears eager to placate the International Monetary Fund. The people of the former Soviet republics have been warned not to challenge Western economic domination, either in the upcoming elections or in the streets.
Kosovo is under US-NATO occupation, and its rich mines will soon be Western-owned. Yugoslavian independence is in peril. The Pentagon has consolidated what is essentially a military occupation of Albania, which only four years ago was in the throes of an insurrection. Now US oil companies have confidently announced plans to build an oil pipeline from the Bulgarian Black Sea coast to the Adriatic coast of Albania. As in all wars this country wages, there were myriad corporate side benefits, like US drug companies getting tax write-offs for dumping expired and unsaleable drugs on Kosovar refugees. But like the restored youth of a vampire who has just gorged on human blood, these benefits are transitory. Soon the monster must kill again.
The Pentagon just waged the largest military campaign in Europe since World War II ended. It did not embark on this adventure to stop with the annexation of Kosovo. That territory of 11,000-square-kilometres means no more to the CEOs in uniform than did Sudetenland ("my last territorial demand") to Hitler. Nor will the overthrow of the Yugoslav government quench their thirst. They seek no less than the military conquest of all of East Europe and North Asia, the former Soviet bloc. The purpose of the hysteria about "Serbian war crimes" is not to justify what the Pentagon has already done. It is to set the stage for what they're going to do next. NATO's assault on Yugoslavia may someday be remembered as the opening battle of a new world war.
The Pentagon generals and their think tanks have planned and dreamed about such a war since 1945. They feared to actually launch it, for political as well as military reasons. The destruction of the Soviet Union did not sate their appetite for conquest--it whetted it. It has not lessened the danger of a new world war--it has made it more likely. The Russian military's recent maneuvers with nuclear weapons shows that it too understands that.
The Pentagon's drive to the east is aimed not only at the former socialist countries. It is also targets (indirectly, for now) the European Union. It is a war of the dollar against the Euro. The June 3 announcement of a West European military command outside of NATO shows that the West European ruling classes understand that. NATO was created as an anti-Soviet alliance but has long served as an instrument of US domination over Europe. That's its main role today.
The Pentagon's conduct of the war bears out the above scenario. Clinton now says that he expected Yugoslavia would capitulate in a couple of days. Whether he is lying or was misled by his military "advisers"--he doesn't actually seem that naïve--it is inconceivable that the Pentagon-State Department-CIA axis could have expected that would happen. They formulated the Rambouillet ultimatum in such a way that Belgrade could not possibly have accepted it. The war party did not think Yugoslavia would relinquish Kosovo quickly--nor did they want it to. Kosovo was targeted because of its historical and emotional importance to the Serbian people. The Yugoslav government could not possibly have surrendered it without a fight--not without putting itself in political jeopardy. The Pentagon knew that. (Every graduate of the US War College has studied how World War I began. The Central Powers made demands on Serbia that they knew it could not be accept. They did this full knowledge that Tsarist Russia would back Belgrade. The Borgias of the Beltway certainly considered that history when they set up the latest Balkan war.)
After the war began, the generals did everything in their power to escalate and prolong it. They bombed Belgrade on Orthodox Easter. (The US refrained from bombing Iraq in the month of Ramadan for fear of provoking the Muslim world.) They destroyed the Chinese embassy and arranged President Milosevic's indictment for war crimes. They repeatedly bombed civilians. They sabotaged negotiations on several occasions. They deliberately humiliated Russia after Moscow persuaded Belgrade to withdraw from Kosovo. Then they escalated the Pristina airport confrontation and carried it to Russia's doorstep.
The Yugoslav Army was not defeated militarily. Its losses appear to have been less than the Pentagon claimed (unless this is a military lie to help justify future attacks). Milosevic was cajoled into withdrawal by Russia because the latter feared NATO would widen the war, with grave domestic consequences for the Yeltsin regime. The Pentagon rewarded the Kremlin's appeasement by spitting on it. No sooner had Russia delivered a Yugoslav withdrawal than the Pentagon proclaimed a military victory and denied Russian troops "peacekeepers" an equal role in Kosovo. When 200 Russian troops then occupied Pristina airport, the Pentagon maneuvered a major geopolitical provocation. It cut Russian supply lines by getting Ukraine as well as NATO Hungary to deny Russia the use of their airspace. That the Pentagon could prevail upon the second-largest former Soviet republic to side with NATO against Russia sent shock waves through the Russian state apparatus. It has to be seen in the context of the growing right-wing nationalist movement in Ukraine that threatens the many Russians living there. The breakup of Yugoslavia is the blueprint of a strategy NATO will use in former Soviet republics.
On the July 4 weekend, the US engineered another confrontation with Russia. This time they used Bulgaria, once Russia's closest ally, to block Russian overflights. The same day NATO brought Turkish troops into Kosovo for the first time since 1912. The 1,500-strong Turkish contingent will add little to NATO's forces militarily. It is there as a calculated affront to the Serbian people, who suffered 500 years of Ottoman Turkish occupation. We can also assume the Pentagon and CIA had a hand in the KLA-organized protests against Russian troops in Orahovac.
With Kosovo under NATO occupation, the Pentagon can conjure up as much "war crimes" evidence as it needs if it wants to justify an invasion of Serbia to "arrest" President Milosevic. It is also scheming to provoke civil war in Yugoslavia. In a July 1 press conference at the Pentagon, Gen. Wesley Clark claimed that Belgrade was threatening the government of Montenegro. (No one in the media questioned why it was the business of the military to raise this political concern, rather than that of the White House or the diplomatic corps. Ten days later the New York Times ran a front-page feature article on Montenegro's possible secession. A New York Times feature in 1998 heralded the start of the KLA's military operations.) On June 25, NATO Hungary's prime minister Viktor Orban met with an alleged leader of the Hungarian community in northern Serbia (Vojvodina) to support "autonomy" for that region. (Ethnic Hungarians from Vojvodina have joined in our antiwar actions and expressed firm support for Yugoslavia.)
Washington's war plans do not stop at Yugoslavia. The CIA is already working to "destabilize" the Lukashenko government in Belarus. And the Pentagon is preparing to extend its operations directly to the Caspian and Caucasus oil and gas fields in the former Soviet Middle East. It has organized a military alliance called GUUAM, comprising Georgia, Ukraine, Uzbekistan, Azerbaijan and Moldova. These former Soviet republics have withdrawn from the Russia-led CIS Collective Security Agreement and joined NATO's Partnership for Peace. The linchpin of this alliance is the bloody pro-US Shevardnadze regime in Georgia, which is trying to suppress an independence movement in Abkhazia. Georgian security forces are trained by the CIA.
Recently Azerbaijan asked for NATO aid in its long-standing war with Armenia over Nagorno-Karabakh. (In this struggle, NATO Turkey supports Azerbaijan while Iran and Russia are aligned with Armenia.) Armenian president Robert Kocharyan responded by warning NATO to stay out. A British imperial "statesman" once said, "We have no permanent allies, only permanent interests." In World War I, the US and Britain claimed to be defending the rights of oppressed Serbs and Armenians. It would be ironic if both these nationalities are cast as demons in a new world conflagration.
There are many possible scenarios, but the overall direction of the US military planners seems clear. Hitler called it Drang Nach Osten, march to the east.
Among the masses of people in the former Soviet Union there is a keen awareness of Washington's plans. During the war, mass demonstrations closed the US embassy in Moscow. It was also hit by rocket-propelled grenades. The May 1 workers' demonstrations and the May 9 rallies marking the Soviet victory over Nazi Germany turned into mass demonstrations in support of Yugoslavia. In Moscow, Leningrad, Kiev, Minsk, Volgograd and other former Soviet cities, tens of thousands wore NATO Target signs and carried Yugoslav flags. On May 9 in Leningrad a human blockade was organized to stop delegations from NATO countries from visiting the burial site of over 400,000 Leningraders who died during the Nazi siege. The common sentiment expressed by participants in these rallies was, "We know these bombs will fall next on us."
The Western media ascribed this mass solidarity to Slavic and Eastern Orthodox solidarity. That was a factor. But there is also a shared history of struggle against the Nazis. And people of all nationalities in the former Soviet Union know that the military destruction visited on Yugoslavia by NATO is an extension of the economic scorched-earth policy imposed on the former Soviet republics by the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund. In Yugoslavia, industry was destroyed by NATO bombs; in the former USSR they are shut down by IMF diktat.
An investigation into war crimes by the US state apparatus and its institutions should include the virtual forced deindustrialization that has been imposed on the people of all the former socialist countries by US-controlled financial institutions. That includes Albania. Yugoslavia's failure to completely accede to such a program earned it the tender attention of the US Air Force.
Over the past decade industrial production in the former Soviet republics has dropped by 50 to 75 percent. Since last August, unemployment in Russia alone rose by 26 percent while imports fell by 46 percent. The human toll behind these statistics is gruesome. Thirty-three percent of the working-age population--673,000 people a year--die before retirement. Male life expectancy has dropped to 55 for men--135th in the world--and 60 for women. The population of Russia is falling by 800,000 a year. Homelessness, once virtually unknown, is now common place. Suicides among workers who haven't been paid are more and more common. Conditions in most other former Soviet republics are still worse.
The toll is most apparent in the medium-size industrial cities and towns of the former USSR. There, in the shadows of mighty plants that once produced a considerable share of the world's industrial production, workers have been reduced to a subsistence-level existence, eating only the potatoes they grow themselves and living by barter. Some enterprises pay their workers in food, some in clothing or other items the workers try and exchange for food. In some towns there are no more pets; they have all been eaten. It resembles the fate that Nazi economic planners had in mind for the Soviet people. But the forced impoverishment of the former Soviet republics cannot be indefinitely maintained by the bankers' fiat. It can only be ensured by force of arms.
Which raises the question, Why would those who enjoy wealth and power in the United States want to do that? It is fairly obvious why the Pentagon brass and their prospective employers at Boeing and McDonnell-Douglas would lean toward military adventurism. But what about the rest of Corporate America? After all, the Soviet Union has been destroyed. Wall Street is swimming in profits. The Fortune 500 are on top of the world.
But like alpinists on a mountain peak, the Wall Street moneymen are keenly aware of the danger they might fall. It is the job of their political and military servitors in Washington to stop that from happening-by any means necessary.
The intensity of the Cold War (which wasn't cold everywhere) made it easy to think of the Pentagon's war drive as a product of its struggle against the USSR. But before the Soviet Union existed, the US Marine Corps had, in the words of Maj. Gen. Smedley Butler, its most decorated member, "helped in the raping of half a dozen central American republics on behalf of Wall Street." When the Bolsheviks stormed the Winter Palace in 1917, the "great powers" of West Europe had already colonized most of Africa, Asia and Latin America and were battling each other in World War I. They were driven to war and conquest by the needs and greed of the giant corporations that dominated their economies. As Us president Woodrow Wilson asked at the time, "Is there any man or woman among us, is there even any child, who does not know that the cause of war is commercial and industrial rivalry."
As far back as February 1997, an article in the International Herald Tribune warned of "an accumulating crisis of surpluses in the global marketplace" and of "too many factories chasing too few buyers." It predicted that in 2000 the world auto industry will be able to produce 79 million cars but will only be able to sell 58 million. "Similar conditions confront aircraft, steel, consumer electronics and other sectors," the article said. "Vulnerabilities building up in the global economy are systemic, not national or regional. If nothing fundamental changes, they threaten to bring down the entire system."
Four months after the IHT article was written, the booming "tiger" economies of East Asia ground to a halt. By August 1998 the collapse had spread to East Europe. The ruble plummeted and Russia defaulted on its debt. US investors like BankAmerica and Bankers Trust lost a bundle. (Bankers Trust's was hurt badly that it was soon taken over by Deutsche Bank.) Western trade with the former Soviet republics all but collapsed. Clinton called it the "worst financial crisis in half a century."
The crisis left a political wake. Workers seized plants in several regions of Russia. Ukrainian miners marched on Kiev. In Romania coal miners revolted and battled police. In Moscow the Yeltsin government was forced to fire IMF stooge Sergei Kiriyenko and accept the duma's nomination of Communist Party-backed former Soviet foreign minister Yevgenny Primakov as prime minister. Earlier, labor protests rocked south Korea and Thailand and mass demonstrations forced the resignation of Indonesian dictator Suharto.
An important factor in last August's crash was the oversupply of oil. The price of oil is crucial to Corporate America. The most obvious reason for that is the huge profits of the oil companies. But there are others. Oil is traded in dollars and high oil prices strengthen the dollar against the Euro and other currencies. This is crucial. Furthermore, when US banks make loans to oppressed countries they hold their resources as collateral. For Mexico, Venezuela, Ecuador, Nigeria and now Russia, Azerbaijan and Kazakhstan, among others, that means oil. Of course the funds they loan are often on deposit from the oil-rich royal families of the Arabian Gulf. An oversupply of oil threatens the whole banking system.
Is it a coincidence that but four months later the US launched a new air war against Iraq? And this spring it launched bombing campaigns against both Iraq and Yugoslavia, blocking the Danube river road from the Black Sea to Germany? Both attacks drove up the price of oil and drove capital form Europe and the Middle East to Wall Street. The cost of the destruction wreaked on Yugoslavia has been estimated at $8 billion. That's $8 billion worth of factories, homes, bridges, schools, that will have to be reconstructed. That's exceeds the total value of all US exports to East Europe in 1997. Was the bombing of Yugoslavia and Iraq Washington's response to last August's economic crisis. And is it a coincidence that the most profitable seven years in Wall Street's history coincided with the economic devastation of East Europe and North Asia in the wake of the fall of the USSR? That was a huge drop in worldwide industrial production.
The 1997 International Herald Tribune article warned that by the year 2000 "someone, somewhere will have to close down an awful lot of factories." The Fortune 500 can do that, of course. But they'd rather blow up somebody else's.
To Corporate America, war is a panacea. The two world wars killed perhaps 70 million people and laid waste to much of the planet. But as far as Wall Street is concerned, they are the best thing that ever happened. That's not only because of the sea of profits from arms sales, war contracts and government giveaways that surged through the economy, creating the military-industrial complex. Nor was it only the vast interest on the bank loans that financed all of the above, which the federal government is still paying to this day. The real prize was the massive destruction of industries and infrastructure in Europe and Japan, not to mention the Soviet Union, that left the Fortune 500 dominating the planet. In 1945 US corporations produced at least two-thirds of the world's production. Many on Wall Street welcomed Hitler's rise to power not only because they hoped he would crush the German labor movement and destroy the Soviet Union. They also knew that the rise of the Third Reich would lead to a new war, and World War I had brought nothing but good things to US Big Business.
But rich and powerful as the world wars made them, the bankers and generals saw them as unfinished business. The Soviet Union and East Europe were basically closed off to US investment, as China was shortly afterward. And Washington felt compelled to rebuild the economies of Germany, Italy and Japan because it needed anti-Soviet allies. There was a faction in the US government that wanted to deindustrialize Germany after World War II. That was basically what the victors had tried to do after the First World War with the Treaty of Versailles. But the needs of the Cold War prevailed. Washington not only poured money into West Europe; it opened the US market to German, Japanese and Italian corporations.
The fall of the Soviet bloc put an end to this "abnormal" period in relations between states whose policies are guided by corporate interests. World War I began a s a struggle over which of the "great powers" would take over East Europe. Hitler launched World War II in a bid to build a new colonial empire in that part of the world. Now that struggle has resumed. Gorbachev, Yeltsin and others in the Soviet political establishment thought that surrender in the Cold War would bring them access to US markets and a new Marshall Plan. Instead they got a new Versailles.
In 1992 the Pentagon announced a new "doctrine" for the "post-Soviet" era. It pledged to not allow any state or bloc of states to arise that could challenge US power. The paper was couched in military terms, but its actual meaning was economic. US corporations don't want any competitors, big or small. The US military operations of the past decade can be understood in this context. Iraq, with its nationalized oil resources, could have become an economic center and source of capital for the Indian Ocean region. Panama was a banking center for Latin America. Even the thought of Sudan having a large pharmaceutical plant that wasn't owned by Merck or Bristol-Meyers was intolerable to Corporate America. In the heyday of the Roman Empire, it was said that you didn't have to ask where any highway led, because all roads led to Rome. Today the Pentagon appears to have assumed the task of destroying any avenues of economic life on the sun's third planet that don't lead to Wall Street. Which raises the question, if the Pentagon will go to the lengths it did to devastate Iraq and Panama, what will it do to destroy the economic potential of the European Union or a possible trade bloc between the EU and Russia and/or between Russia and China.
I cannot end without saying something about the growing resistance movement in East Europe and the former Soviet Union. Like the people of Yugoslavia, the people of the former Soviet Union have begun to fight back against IMF domination. This resistance is not coming from the halls of the Kremlin or the State Duma. It is rising from the ranks of the huge, multinational working class, which has suffered the most from the events of the past decade. From the miners and ore processors and other workers in the Siberian Kuzbass who shut down the railroads and highways for two months in last year's railway war. It comes from paper mill workers in Vyborg in the Karelian forest and from machine-builders in Yasnogorsk near Tula who have seized their plants to stop them from being shut down by Western investors. It comes from the miners in the Ukrainian Donbass who marched on Kiev in June and from the members of the Kazakhstan Workers Movement who have been imprisoned for leading strikes. And don't forget the miners' revolt last winter in Romania. You won't read about these battles too much in the Western media, but that doesn't mean Washington and Wall Street aren't aware of them. They are heroic struggles and they demand our solidarity.
APPENDIX: MOTIVATIONS FOR WAR
Here are some excerpts from the latest "500" issue of Fortune magazine:
"Despite a booming business cycle and a surging stock market, America's largest companies struggled to keep their momentum going in 1998, as revenue growth sank into the low single digits and profits actually dipped for the first time in seven years. Total revenues edged up by a decidedly anemic 4.0 percent, well below 1997's 8.7 rate. And excluding a onetime gain at No. 2 Ford, overall profits fell 1.8 percent." A chart in the magazine shows that in 1997 revenues grew 8.7 percent, to $5,519 billion, while profits grew 7.8 percent to $324 billion. In 1998, revenues grew 4.0 percent, to $5,741 billion, while profits fell 1.8 percent, to $318 billion. Railroad profits were down -15.5 percent, metals -35.5 percent and petroleum refining fell -49.0. "Manufacturing and commodities took it on the chin last year because of weakness in Asia and other global difficulties," Fortune says.
Continues the article, "The combination of a strong economy and weak profits might seem to be a paradox until you recall one of the biggest business stories in 1998--the spread of global deflation. Oil and chemical giants may have been the most obvious victims, but companies in other industries struggled with the soft pricing trend last year. ... Despite overall strength, even a few well-known tech companies found they weren't immune to revenue and profit drops. Sales at Texas Instruments (No. 191) dropped 19.9 percent, while profits plunged 77.5 percent.
"'There's a lot of downward pressure on prices,' notes BankAmerica chairman Hugh McColl. 'Sales can be up, demand can be up, but it's just hard to raise prices.' Deflation didn't just slow revenue growth--it also put the squeeze on profit margins. For the third year in a row, Fortune 500 profit margins shrank, falling from 4.9 percent to 4.4 percent." From personal knowledge I can add that overproduction now grips US agriculture, driving down farm prices and the profits of Caterpillar, John Deere and other farm-equipment makers.
Commission of Inquiry
c/o International Action Center
39 West 14th Street, Room 206
New York, NY 10011
email: iacenter@iacenter.org
http://www.iacenter.org
phone: 212 633-6646
fax: 212 633-2889
