THE CRIME OF THE SERBS:
U.S. Foreign Policy In The Balkan War

As a classical scholar, I am in the habit of judging the present by the example of the past, and it is the absence of historical memory which, more than anything else, characterizes the public debate on the Balkan War. Failure to to remember what has gone on before, said Cicero, condemns us to remain forever children. One fictional child, the famous Alice who went through the looking glass. A simple girl, Alice was puzzled by the creativity of the Queen's memory: "It's a poor sort of memory that only works backwards,' the Oueen remarked." For many people in this room, I suspect, the story of the Balkan War, as it has been reported in the press, is a nightmarish trip through the looking glass where every fact is converted to fiction, and even the fictions are so fantastic as to give up all pretense to credibility.

The Serbs, victims of an oppression that has gone on for 600 gears, are now described as savage monsters; the desire for a so-called Greater Serbia -- not a term that is typically used by Serbs -- is stigmatized as a drive to empire, when it is only the same demand for self-government made by Americans in 1776; finally, we are presented with news reports of UN "peace- keepers" -- who are actuallg co-belligerents and of a UN/NATO peace-keeping plan that is nothing better than the same humanitarian violence inflicted on other small nations whose independence is inconvenient for the Great Powers. To complete this unreal picture, the memories of our own modern queens and kings also work forward, in already setting up war crimes tribunals before any of the facts are in, and their prophecies work backwards in rewriting the entire history of the region as the story of Greater Serbian imperialism. Any attempt at rational discussion on behalf of the Serbs or in the interest of neutrality is greeted by the Red Queen's "Off With their Heads."

Scholars and journalists, in trying to explain the reality of the Balkans, are inevitably confronted by this question: "If what you say is true, what is the motive? Is it really possible that the entire American media establishment and evergone in the U.S. State department is lying and that only a handful of cranks are telling the truth? And if so, why?

The really easy and general answer to all such questions is that there is no reason we should ever believe either our government or the lapdog. Western press that has no more independence than "Pravda" in the 1950's. This is the same American press that, for the sake of advertising revenues, turned WINDOWS 95 into a news story and until very recently suppressed the evidence of FBI and BATF misconduct at Waco and Ruby Ridge. Those of us who lived through the Vietnam War remember that at every new level of military involvement the administrations of Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon categorically denied the truth. One of the speakers described the shell that exploded in Sarajevo as another Gulf of Tonkin incident, but according to Admiral James Stockdale, a navy pilot at the scene, there was no incident. In the Balkans, the U.S. government hints that perhaps we have osbervers but denies they are functioning as artillery spotters, advisors, trainers, and who knows what else, since credible sources have alleged US Air Force participation in the Croatian conquest of the Krajina, an operation that may well have been planned by "retired" American officers. Yes, in fact it is far more likely that a few cranks are telling the truth than that the government of the United States will ever come within spitting distance of it.

To address the question of motives in detail, we first have to be clear about the nature of the lie -- or to use a term that is au courant, the disinformation. The basic case against the Serbs goes something like this. Serbs are primitive supernationalists who will stop at nothing to accomplish their goal, which is the creation of a greater Serbia. While the rest of the post- Communist world is cheerfullg walking down the road to democracy, the Belgrade government is run by hardline communists who are secretly aiding the Serbs of Bosnia and Croatia who are carrying out campaigns of ethnic cleansing that includes mass rape, the destruction of historic sites and artistic treasures, torture and execution of POWs, and the murder of civilians.

For the moment, let's not quarrel with any of these items. Even if the entire indictment is more or less true, why should western countries like Britain, Germany, and the United States be concerned? Certainly not out of respect for international law. The break-up of Yugoslavia was, in the first place, a violation of international law, and, in the second, any argument used to defend the creation of Bosnia would have to apply to the creation of the Serbian Republic of Bosnia. And if Slobodan Milosevic is one of Tito's former henchmen, how does he differ from [Croat President] Franjo Tudjman?

Are the alleged crimes of the Bosnian Serbs somehow unique? In any ethnic and religious civil war, the various parties do terrible things to each other, and none of the parties to the war in Bosnia has entirely clean hands. Rapes, it can be shown, have been committed by all sides, but what is new in this? The US army in Germany and Italy was notorious for its crimes against women, and even today American soldiers stationed in peace-time Europe have a disgraceful record.

Mistreatment of POWs? Consider Eisenhower's infamous order against coddling German prisoners and consider the outrageously high death rate of American soldiers in Japanese prison camps. I should not even mention the Russians. Of the major powers in WW II only the the English (and in Western Europe perhaps the Germans) have anything like creditable records in their treatment of POW's. The worst charge against the Serbs is that they have made war on the civilian population. This is a strange accusation coming from Germans, whose atrocities in WW II are too well-known to need discussion, but it is equally strange coming from English and American journalists and politicians, whose countries deliberately bombed civilian centers as part of their overall strategy. The terror-bombings of Dresden, Hanover, Hiroshima, and Nagasaki, however much we want to argue that they were justified by the need to destroy Naziism, rival the slaughters perpetrated by the Nazis themselves. And let us not forget Operation Keelhaul at the end of WWII, by which the allies turned hundreds of thousands of Central and Eastern European refugees over the Soviet Union, where they were murdered as soon as the trains reached Russian soil.

As for the destruction of historic monuments, I do not think the United States, which deliberately and foolishly destroyed Monte Cassino, the home of Christian monasticism, without dislodging the Germans, and wantonly destroyed or damaged countless other historic sites in Italy, including most of the undefended city of Milan, to say nothing of what was done to the cities of Austria and Germany -- I say I do not think this is a subject we Americans ought to bring up.

Of course the most vehement accusations come from the the alleged victims, the Croats and Muslims themselves. With Edmund Burke, I can say that "I do not know the method of drawing up an indictment against an whole people," but the Croatian and Muslim records of inhumanity and butchery are so terrifying that even their very excuses constitute an indictment. I would have thought that the last subject a Croat or Bosnian Muslim would want to bring up is genocide. The crimes of the Croatian government allied with Nazi Germany are too well known to need retelling, but the government of Franjo Tudjman has done everything it can to recall them -- by adopting its old Ustasha symbols, by reopening the Croatian claims to be a purely Aryan race, by lavishing honours on the monsters of the Pavelic regime- -men like Mile Budak, the Joseph Goebbels and Julius Streicher of the Ustasha state, by the systematic bullying and harrassing of Serbs and half-Croats, by the wanton destruction of Orthodox churches and historic monuments (e.g. the Mostar bridge), by the countless atrocities committed in the course of the war, and -- more recently -- by the attacks on Serbian refugees fleeing the Krajina.

In light of all these indisputable facts, it seems incredible that Western countries -- even if the lies against the Serbs are taken at face value -- have not adopted, at the very least, a policy of strict neutrality. As the American proverb has it, "We don't have a dog in this fight." Our only possible interest would be as one Christian people defending another or as a democratic nation determined to prevent the emergence of Nazi states devoted to anti-Semtism and genocide. But on the contrary, we have not only given every kind of rhetorical comfort to the Croats and Bosnian Muslims, we have supplied them with advisors, technical assistance, and if we can believe the evidence, with actual arms and leadership. Why? I want to make it clear that I am not going to speak of the sort of causes that a political analyst would look for but for the underlying pressures and prejudices -- many of them contradictory -- that have made it easier to demonize the Serbs.

In the case of the Germans, we do not have to look far for an answer: German states have always sought hegemony in the Balkans, and they are trying to accomplish now by money and diplomacy, what they failed to accomplish by force of arms in two world wars. In the context of international affairs, the German motives are simple and even clean -- good, old-fashioned imperialism.

But what of my own country, the United States. Here the motives are many and complex. In some cases, there a very particular reasons why this or that group has embraced the Croats and Muslims. There is no need to explain the hysterical support from American Muslims and Croats. Similarly, many decent and humane Catholics are eager to support their co-religionists at any cost, and they are willing to turn a blind eye to injustice. There are also anti-Communists and Cold Warriors -- I am speaking now of old friends of mine -- who remember how the Serbs used to be darlings of the left in the good old days of self-management; Germans and German-Americans continue to blame the Serbs for "starting" World War I and bogging down the German advance in WW II; and anti-Semites (at least those who are writing me hostile letters) hate them for defending Jews when the parents and granparents of their antagonists were slaughtering them -- along with the Serbs.

For the average American -- and by average American I am including journalists and members of Congress, the simplest explanation for their Serbo-phobia is ignorance, pure, unselfconscious, unapologetic ignorance of everything that has ever happened anywhere in the world. Ignorance of the Balkans, ignorance of the Middle East, ignorance even of Western Europe. Americans are very easy to manipulate, because they simply do not know anything about the rest of the world. Since they know no foreign languages, they have no access to what is being said, for example, in France. Americans are generally suspicious of the opinions promoted by the liberal media, but it never enters into their minds to suspect that even the facts purveyed by Dan Rather and Tom Brokaw are as bogus as their opinions. By the way, it never occurs to the anchormen either, because if you pooled the general learning and higher education of Jennings, Brokaw, and Rather, they would not add up to liberal arts degree from a respectable college. I once asked a "Chicago Tribune" reporter who had covered the war, if it had been hard learning Serbo-Croatian. Oh, he said, he hadn't bothered to try. Working out of Zagreb primarily, he had been been given translators, which were apparently supplied to him by the Croatian government, and one prominent talk show host interviewing me repeatedly confused the Balkans with the Baltics -- what's the difference, they're all foreigners?

For politicians, the easiest motives to explain are partisan. The Democrats have been somewhat apprehensive about getting into a war, because their president was a draft-dodger, and as some would say, a quasi-traitor during the Vietnam War. Until the beginning of the 1996 presidential campaign, Bill Clinton was able to endure the sneers and mockery of the journalists who keep braging the call for attack on their bugles until the veins pop out on their foreheads, but in the end, true to his vacillating character, he caved in.

To date, President Clinton's most serious peace initiative in the Balkans has been to send in Jimmie Carter, whose honesty and and humanity outraged the American press, the State Department, and the Republican Party, and it is the leadership of the GOP, including most of the leading presidential candidates except Pat Buchanan, that is demanding aggressive American intervention. Why?

The simplest answer is Marxism -- not Karl Marxism but Groucho-Marxism: The Republican theme song under Bill Clinton has been Groucho's: "Whatever it is, I'm against it," so long as the "it" in question is a policy sponsored by the Democrats. In the case of some pundits and politicos, this sabre-rattling is mere partisanship, and when one hears politicans and journalists who criticized the Gulf War now promising to hang Slobodan Milosevic and Radovan Karadzic from a sour apple tree, it is a harmless, if hypocritical gesture.

The world becomes a very dangerous place every four years, when candidates must enter into macho-man patriotism contests -- my sabre's longer than your sabre. This Summer, the Clinton adminstration was steadily drawn into a more aggressive position, openly applauding the Croatian advance and probably conniving at it beforehand, backing up a new peace-plan with the threat of airstrikes and military aid to the Bosnian Muslims as well as an invitation to Muslim countries to replace withdrawing UN so-called peace-keepers, and now by a brutal bombing campaign that is causing incalculable "collateral damage" -- the polite military term for the murder of civilians. Why all this sudden activity? The NY TIMEs (Aug. 19, 1995) quotes one senior White House official as saying, "I don't think the President relishes going into the 1996 election hostage to fortune in the Balkans." Other officials point out that the President must pre-empt Bob Dole before Congresss returns from summer recess -- since Dole will work hard to override Clinton's veto of legislation lifting the arms embargo on the Muslims. The day after the United States -- NATO is only a figleaf, it is the United States that is responsible -- began the bombing, Senator Dole backed off on his threat.

Do not imagine for a minute that the Republicans will be content to be left behind. Their two foreign policy leaders -- Dole and Lugar -- are itching for a showdown, both with Clinton and with the Serbs. The leading Republican sabre-rattler is Senator Bob Dole, who has spent the several years denouncing President Clinton, former President Carter, and all the other appeasers who stand in the way of the crusade for democracy that Senator Dole would like to launch upon the Balkans. Perhaps a better word would be Jihad, since the Senate Mayority Leader wants to help the Albanian Muslims of Kosovo, the Serbian Muslims of Bosnia, and the Muslim rebels in Chechenya. There is only one part of the world where Mr. Dole does not defend Muslim dissidents, rebels, and terrorists, the same part of the world that is immune to the Republicans' promise to cut foreign aid. "A foolish consistency is the hobgogblin of little minds," and no one would accuse any American Senator of letting consistency get in the way of his fund-raising.

This brings us to the most difficult question: The Republican Party has always been a staunch ally of Israel and Israel's friends in the US have contributed handsomely to Republican campaigns. What seems very bizarre is the decision made by Israel and by many American Jews not only to back the Muslims but even to invite Franjo Trudjman, a notorious holocaust revisionist, to the Holocaust Memorial. (The only defense I have heard is that the decision to invite Tudjman was actually made by the State Department.) Many Jews know that Serbs have been their only protectors in the Balkans, and some -- both in Israel and the US, have heroically tried to put a stop to the propaganda, but why should there be any love between Israel and the sons of Nazis, on the one hand, and on the other an Islamic fundamentalist regime?

One answer lies in Israel's precarious position in the Middle East. It is highly convenient, for diplomatic and propaganda purposes, to support Muslims in Europe in order to defuse the charge that Israel is anti-Muslim and in order to establish some basis for collaboration with Arab states, and one must not discount the influence of the U.S. State Department upon the Labor government in Israel. There is also the seductive attraction offered by the Holocaust analogies that have been so shamelessly employed by the Muslims' American PR agents. Listen to Martin Peretz, publisher of the "New Republic" in a recent 100% fact-free editorial. Peretz knows about as much about the Balkans as I know about quantum mechanics, but he knows he is in favor of nuking the Serbs, because, as he says, "Jews recognize a genocide when there is one...."Never again" compels not facile mouthings by Bill Clinton but action by the United States. (4 Sep. 95) In other words, Mr. Peretz knew, approximately two weeks before the bombing, that he could count on Bill Clinton to "do something."

The importance of Israel's decision to back the Bosnian Muslims should not be understimated; it not only adds respectability to the Holocaust analogy, but it also offers incentives to political sabre-rattlers who count on support from American Jews. This is particularly clear in the case of certain conservative Republicans like Newt Gingrich, for example, whose wife is VP of an Israeli-owned company. The House Speaker has, perhaps coincidentally, become a strident supporter of air-strikes and armed intervention. From the perspective of American Jews, the terrible irony is that the Republican Party has a longstanding friendship with Croatian Nazis in the United States. In a recent book, The "Secret War Against the Jews," the authors present convincing evidence that the Republican Party in the Eisenhower Administration deliberately facilitated the immigration of Nazi refugees, particularly from Croatia, at the same time as the Party was forming a so-called ethnic division primarily devoted to creating an ex-fascist ethnic opposition to Jewish influence. The creator of this ethnic division was VP Richard Nixon, who in 1968 promised to establish a permanent ethnic council within the GOP and this promise was kept after the 1972 election when George Bush was chairman of the RNC. During Bush's tenure "The Croatian Ustashis became an integral part of the campaign structure of Republican politics, along with several other Fascist organizations."

Croatian Americans are not the only source of funds. Rumor has it that rich Muslim states have not been content with shipping money to Albania and arms to Bosnia, that they have also managed to make campaign contributions to American politicians. Not so long ago, this was difficult. Fritz Mondale actually had to give back a campaign contribution from an Arab-American group. What a nightmare. A politician who can't take money is like the proverbial Eunuch in a harem. But now, with Israel taking in Bosnian Muslim refugees and American Jewish groups comparing Mr. Karadzic to Hitler, it is completely safe to wallow, like Scrooge McDuck in his vault, in Arab oil money. These things are very difficult to track down -- and dangerous even to hint at. In addition to the persistent stories of the flow of Albanian money into the campaign chests of certain prominent Republicans. What is undeniable -- and otherwise inexplicable -- is the fact of Senator Dole's almost monomaniacal support for the Albanians in Kosovo, who have been practicing ethnic cleasning against the Serbs for 100 years, first with the help of the Turks, then of the Nazis, and most recently of Tito. When Senator Dole and his staff visit the region, I am told, he refuses to meet with any Kosovo Serbs. It is simpler, apparently, to hear only one side of the story. There are also sources of Albanian money closer to home. Albanian gangs have become expert in sophisticated burglary of jewelry stores and other high income businesses. One Albanian arrested in California said he was raising money for the Albanian lobby. To understand the seriousness of the committment of Muslim countries, you have only to note that the United Arab Emirates sponsored a telethon to raise money for the Bosnian Muslims, and that the Palestine Liberation Organization imposed a tax on its employees for the same purpose. Jerry Brown is absolutely right that the American government is bought and sold by interest groups, and the most dangerous sector of public venality is the foreign lobbying that goes on, not just in trade policy but even in matters of war and peace. So long as politicians are allowed to take bribes from foreign governments under the guise of campaign contributions from lobbyists and educational associations, American parents had better be prepared to send off their sons and daughters to die for the Emir of Kuwait or the Emir of Bosnia.

All bribery is not foreign. Domestic firms have obvious stakes in imperialist policies. The end of the Cold War was a disaster for the war industry -- I prefer to avoid euphemisms like defense, when we mean war. The Republican Contract with America calls for increases in war spending and a new committment to missile defense. In January Senate Repblicans called for end to defense cuts. A freeze in defense spending will be fatal to any attempt to cut the budget (and the GOP's electoral strategy is heavily dependent upon budget-cutting), hence the scare language about unpreparedness -- so reminiscent of JFK's nasty tactics in the 1960 election. This Spring the New York times ran a heart- rending story to arouse sympathy for lobbyists "Republicans Rule Lobbyists World With Iron Hand" using "strong-arm tactics that are blunt even by Washington standards." The poor dears. But as little as we sympathize with these victimized lobbyists, their current plight is a clear indication of what really drives Republican policies.

Let us add it up: bribery from foreign and domestic sources, abject ignorance of history and foreign languages, self-serving political gamesmanship: more simply -- greed, stupidity, and lust for power -- the basic elements of what George Bush called the New World Order. Here, in a nutshell, is the current foreign policy of the Republican Party.

There is nothing either very orderly or very new about the New World Order. It does not even deserve to be called a conspiracy. It is more like a combination of business interests. All merchants, if they can, form cartels by which they exclude competition. The biggest merchants today are the managers of multi-national business conglomerates, much of whose profits are based on their cozy relationships with national governments and international agencies. In the past the biggest players in this game have been oil companies like Occidental Petroleum and out- and-out rogue operations like ITT. (I have been told that Occidental Petroleum has payed $1 billion to Albania for drilling rights -- if there is oil under Albania and Kosovo, that whole question takes on a new dimension, particularly if some of that billion is returning to the United States in the form of political pay-offs.) All that oilman George Bush really meant to imply by his feckless phrase was that American power would be used to make the world safe for multi-national business corporations. Former CIA director Stansfield Turner almost said as much in an article Foregin Affairs (Fall 91), where he argues that "economic strength should now be recognized as a vital component of national security" and suggests that the American government should "provide economic intelligence to specific American corporations."

The tactics of the transnational business elites differ vastly in degree, but not in kind from the neighborhood mob's efforts to corner prostitution, gambling, and drugs. What does the local mob do, if some rival insists on acting independently? The friends of Bugs Moran found out one St. Valentine's Day here in Chicago, when they were gunned down by the Capone mob. So did Saddam Hussein. George Bush pretended it was a question of pride or honor between him and the Iraqi Hitler, but to borrow a phrase from from a Fictional Mafia Godfather, "It was nothing poisonal, just business." Republican Senator Richard Lugar not only vigorously supported the Gulf War and is urging a repeat performance, but he is one of many Republican senators who favors extension of NATO protection to most or even all of central and eastern Europe. What Lugar fears most is what he calls "renationalization" -- that is, the assertion of any national sovereignty that conflicts with American interests. (Aviation Week and Space Technology, Aug. 30, 93). This is now the primary role of NATO, according to Foregin minister of Belgium: "To prevent at all costs...the rekindling of nationalism as a result of a renaissance of the nation-state," and this statement is quoted by approval by our own asserted by Deputy Commander in chief US European Command. I quote these statements not because they are extraordinary but because they are so ordinary. Americans may think they pay taxes to support a huge defense establishment in order to defend the U.S, but our own political and military leaders say the opposite is true: our main goal, apparently, is to deprive every other people in Europe of their right to self-government and self-determination, on the grounds that it is dangerous to the global economy.

And the greatest crime of the Serbs is their inability to understand business. Anyone who loves his country and his people more than he loves money constitutes a threat to the international order. For the giant oil and computer companies and media conglomerates, nationalism is necessarily a dirty word, because nations like to have control of their own resources; some of them pass protectionist laws sheltering their own businesses from cut-throat international competition; they may even have health, safety, and environmental regulations that interfere with profits. The way around these national barriers is through gigantic scams like NAFTA, GATT, and European Union. The very idea of a people determined to go its own way is the internationalist's worst nightmare.

Internationalists like the idea of Bosnia, first because the break-up of Yugoslavia opens the region to penetration from German and American businesses, and second, because Bosnia itself is inherently weak and unstable, and because, third, a multi-ethnic multi-confessional state is the very opposite of a nation in any conventional sense. As Christopher Hitchens wrote in the NATION, Bosnia has to be preserved as an "experiment in multi- culturalism." In other words, political oppression of the Serb minority, war, and devastation are all justified for the sake of someone else's political dream that all the world will some day be just like Berkeley California.

This is the idealistic flip-side of corporate multi-nationalism. If the Republicans dream of having a world empire dominated by American businessmen and their foreign partners, leftist democrats dream of a world without nation-states, where the brotherhood of man would be enforced by blue-helmeted peace- keepers, and where every decision about daily life -- what books are read in school, what churches are tolerated, what parties are allowed onto the ballot, and how many screws are produced in Rockford Illinois, all would be decided by humanitarian bureaucrats in Geneva or Brussells. The Serbs, in wanting to have their own country, their own religion, their own culture are evil, because the greatest crime is the desire to be left alone. The Croats do not appear to realize that their own fragile nation will be next. The powers that be have barely been able to hold their breath, as Croatia has revived her own national fantasies, and so long as Croatia is useful against the Serbs, her pretensions will be tolerated. Once the war is over, they are next.

Sean Gervasi made an excellent point in speaking of German contributions European nationalist movements, but it is important to bear in mind that many of these movements have legitimate aspirations and would exist with or without foreign assistance. Scots nationalism was fostered for centuries by the "auld alliance" with France, and in the 1930's by the Germans, and during the Cold War by the Soviet Union; and yet, the Scots can make a good case that they have been colonized by England. Similarly, manU Croats have learned, throughout this century, for a country of their own, despite the many advantages Croatia enjoyed as part of the Yugoslav state. But what is sauce for the Croats is sauce for the Serbs who should not be compelled to live under alien and hostile rulers.

If the American people are not very careful, they will soon be sending their sons and daughters off to fight against people they have no reason to hate in a cause that no one will really understand -- and this will not be the first time. At least since the Spanish American War, the American ruling class has operated on the principle that there is no part of the world too remote, no country to small, no people too poor to be the object of our economic and political ambition. In the Pacific, Hawaii and the Phillipines, in Latin America Puerto Rico, Nicaragua, El Salvador, and Panama, in Asia--Vietnam, Korea, Cambodia, and in Africa Somalia, South Africa. From the halls of Montezuma to the shores of Tripoli, as the Marine Hymn has it.

But the fathers of our American Republic were wiser men, and the first two generations of the Republic heeded the warnings of Washington and Jefferson against entangling alliances and military establishments. Put simply, this was a policy of minding our own business, of setting an example to the world instead of stamping our impress on every country and culture that differed from us. Wars, on this understanding, were undertaken only in the nation's defense -- as we went to war after Pearl Harbor -- not for such lofty humanitarian goals as the protection of human rights and the imposition of democracy, nor on the more seductive basis of "the national interest." In the early l9th century Americans easily resisted the temptation to aid the revolutions in Greece and Latin America. Thomas Jefferson, perhaps more than any American, was a firm believer in democratic revolutions, but his response to lands liberated from Spain was cautious: "What will become of them?" he asked, in a letter to Lafayette in May of 1817. "Ignorance and bigotry, like other insanities, are incapable of self-government," he warned, and predicted "They will fall under military despotism, and become the murderous tools of the ambition of their respective Bonapartes....No one, I hope, can doubt my wish to see them and all mankind exercising self-government....But the question is not what we wish, but what is practicable?" It was not until the 20th century that wars of naked aggression could be cloaked with the choir-robes of human rights, of wars to end all wars and crusades to save democracy, of "waging perpetual war for perpetual peace." It is time for sober and patriotic Americans to call a halt before it is too late, before we write ourselves into the history books along with the Turks and the Germans, as a mighty empire who oppressed the brave and honorable Serbs.

Dr. Thomas Fleming

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