by George Saunders

What was the real purpose of the U.S.-led NATO bombing campaign against the remnant of Yugoslavia, in Serbia, Kosovo, and Montenegro?

It was to assert and demonstrate the U.S. government’s almost unlimited power to intimidate and destroy — even without using nuclear bombs — to show that the one and only superpower in today’s world is determined to have its way, dragging its Western European and Canadian allies along with it.

In fact the U.S. started this attack, knowing it would accelerate the ethnic cleansing. That in turn provided further “justification” for the massive bombing campaign. (This was a set-up similar to the situation in 1990, when U.S. envoy April Glaspie let the Iraqi government know the U.S. would not object if Iraq entered Kuwait. That provided the pretext for the massive “Desert Storm” operation and the bludgeoning of Iraq ever since.) In Kosovo, the U.S. and NATO helped set the stage for the “crimes against humanity” that they then used as justification to “pulverize” what’s left of Yugoslavia.

There is only one force in the world that, in the long run, can counter the awesome power of the U.S. military machine, which basically serves the capitalist corporations. That force is a united international working class, with an independent policy based on solidarity among workers in all countries. The North American working class, which has the strength to challenge and counter the capitalist owners and rulers, will have to be a key component of any such conscious and organized international working class movement.

Before looking at some of the facts supporting the assertions we have just made, let us examine the alleged purpose of the air war over Kosovo. (In this article we will use the spelling “Kosovo,” although for Albanians the spelling is “Kosova.” Unfortunately for the Albanians, an independent Kosova is a long way away. The U.S.-led UN/NATO occupation force has the stated aim of maintaining “Kosovo” as a province of Serbia. In fact, it will be a U.S./UN/ NATO protectorate, but formally it is still called an “autonomous” province of Serbia — this “autonomy” being controlled by the U.S.-dominated UN/ NATO occupation authorities.)

Not a “Humanitarian” War

The alleged “humanitarian” aims of this war were a hypocritical fraud. They fall apart under the slightest critical examination.

The official war aim, as stated by U.S. Commander in Chief Bill Clinton, was to stop the ethnic cleansing of Kosovo Albanians by the Serbian chauvinist Milosevic regime. But the bombing of former Yugoslavia triggered a massive, horrendous increase of the ethnic cleansing. The “humanitarian” effort wasn’t helping the Kosovo Albanian part of humanity. Hundreds of thousands were driven from their homes by military, police, and paramilitary units of the Milosevic regime, with the use of force, including murder, rape, robbery, the destruction of the Kosovars’ homes and property, and general brutalization. The self-designated policeman of the world, the U.S. government, seemed unable to do anything about it.

Far from stopping this crime against humanity, the U.S./NATO air war only intensified it. In fact, NATO planes themselves on several occasions struck Kosovo Albanian refugee convoys and/or villages, killing and maiming hundreds of those they were pretending to help. And in one instance, U.S./NATO planes bombed a training camp of the Kosova Albanian guerrilla movement, the Kosova Liberation Army (KLA). Some reports said that Kosovar refugees were fleeing to escape from NATO bombing and strafing as much as from Milosevic’s Serb-chauvinist police, troops, and paramilitary gangs.

Also, cluster bombs were dropped all over Kosovo as well as Serbia. Made by Honeywell Corp. and only about as big as your fist, they flutter down from the sky on little purple parachutes. Near ground level they explode and send pieces of wire and knife-edge strips of metal whizzing in all directions. These are designed to maim human beings (or animals), not necessarily to kill. Their purpose is to put an added strain on the medical infrastructure of the target country, to create havoc and induce horror, to terrorize and intimidate

Returning the Refugees — Under Big Brother’s Control

After the massive bombing had triggered ethnic cleansing, a new war aim was officially stated — to return the refugees to their homes in Kosovo. And rebuild. But why start a war that intensifies such a nightmare of violence with the aim of patching it all up later? Isn’t there some more rational, less destructive way of dealing with the problem?

For example, what about letting the Kosovars arm and defend themselves? In 1994–96, the people of Chechnya in the Caucasus Mountains on the south edge of Russia, who number only 600,000 or so (compared to the nearly 2 million Kosovars), fought the enormous army of Russia to a standstill and gained their independence. On their own. Without any U.S. or NATO intervention. But with solidarity from people within Russia, who had no sympathy with the Yeltsin government’s imperial aims in that war. There are indications that the anti-Milosevic movement in Serbia includes many who would resist and oppose any long-term effort by the Milosevic regime to wage a war in Kosovo against a mobilized and well-armed Kosovar population.

But U.S./NATO policy all along has been, and still is, to prevent the Kosovars from obtaining arms, fighting their own battle, and determining their own destiny.

Clinton’s June 10 “victory” speech specifies that “the United Nations will organize an administration [not the Kosovar people themselves] while preparing [!] the Kosovars to govern and police themselves.” In other words, Big Brother — that is, the imperialist powers that dominate NATO and dominate the UN Security Council — will decide how and when the Kosovars are to have self-government. (The same way, back in the 1920s, the U.S. Marines “prepared” the Nicaraguan people to be ruled by Somoza’s police, whose chief loyalty of course was to the big money in the U.S.)

The UN representative temporarily in charge of civilian administration in Kosovo, Sergio Vieira de Mello, said

there would be an international police force set up with 3,000 foreigners [emphasis added], who would recruit and train a multiethnic force. That force would, at least initially, put Serbian police in Serbian areas and Albanians and other Muslims as police in their own areas. [New York Times, June 18.]

Vieira de Mello said that Kosovo Albanian guerrilla fighters “who wish to apply for the new Kosovo police force [which] we will set up and train will be welcome to apply” (emphasis added).

The June 18 New York Times news story elaborated further: “The presumption here [in Pristina, the Kosovo capital under U.S./UN/NATO occupation] is that the United Nations will opt for a stronger authority to keep order here while a local census, elections and institutions can be built over time to give Kosovo real self-government and autonomy within Yugoslavia.”

In other words, the occupying forces will “keep order” and assert their authority. They will take a census, “build institutions,” and organize elections — “over time.” They will do this in a way that serves the interests of the occupying powers. They will not allow the Kosovars to reestablish the autonomous institutions they had before 1989 or to draw on the mass-based, nonviolent parallel institutions the Kosovars organized during a decade of resistance to the Milosevic police dictatorship, which overturned the Kosovars’ previously existing autonomous institutions.

To the new occupiers none of that recent history matters. The U.S./UN/ NATO will organize everything and hand it to the local population as a fait accompli. That will be “real self-government and autonomy within Yugoslavia,” as the New York Times explains.

Hypocrisy

The U.S. government has shown no eagerness to intervene and stop genocidal military activities elsewhere in the world. For more than twenty years it has done nothing against the Indonesian military slaughter of the people of East Timor. Brutal, genocidal tactics have been used against the Kurds by the governments of Iran, Iraq, and Turkey. As long as those governments were U.S. allies, the U.S. government did nothing to help the Kurds. Even when the U.S. turned against its former ally, the Iraqi government of Saddam Hussein, it still stood by doing nothing during Saddam’s military operations against Kurds in northern Iraq involving massive civilian casualties and expulsion of civilian populations from some areas (i.e., “ethnic cleansing”).

In fact, a New York Times editorial on June 17 entitled “Lessons of the Balkan War” said that although this air war “is a powerful signal to other tyrants that the instigation of ethnic violence, even within their own borders, can reach a point that the world will not tolerate,” it suggested that this purported new principle of U.S. foreign policy should be limited mainly to Europe.

This principle, said the Times, “does not mean the West can or should intervene whenever ethnic conflict erupts.” The war, says the Times, “demonstrated that the United States and its allies can act decisively in defense of [so-called] democratic principles and against ethnic violence in Europe” (emphasis added).”

“As a practical matter,” says the Times, “intervention should be confined to cases where violence is extreme and threatens to engulf neighboring nations and where [so-called] democratic nations have the means, as in Kosovo, to respond. The combination will be rare outside Europe.” [Again, emphasis added.]

This same article on “Lessons of the Balkan War,” incidentally, gloated over one lesson: “the bombardment of Serbia and Iraq suggest that most air defense can be defeated by American weapons systems.” So awesome, almost insuperable, are their “weapons systems” that they almost scare themselves. That may be why Clinton announced earlier this year the construction of an elaborate new missile defense system for the United States.

Respect for Kosovar Self-Determination?

In 1997–98 the Kosovars began a mass-based guerrilla war, demonstrating that after more than a decade of abuse and apartheid-type treatment from the Milosevic regime, they had had their fill. They demanded independence from that regime. (Earlier, in 1990, in an unofficial election they organized among themselves, with participation by 90 percent of Kosovars, they voted for independence by 98 percent.)

Still the U.S.-led NATO force insists that Kosovo must remain a part of “Yugoslavia” (i.e., Serbia). The UN, it is announced, will “prepare” the Kosovars for autonomy, even though — as we have said — the Kosovars already administered themselves before 1989 and through their mass, nonviolent movement since 1989 maintained cultural, educational, and unofficial governmental institutions for ten years. Without UN, U.S., or NATO aid.

What hypocrisy! While supporting “autonomy” for Kosovo within Serbia, the U.S. government opposes the autonomy that indigenous people in Mexico are demanding, led by the Zapatistas of Chiapas. U.S support for the PRI regime in Mexico includes massive military aid, advisers, and intelligence operations that contribute significantly to militarization and “low-intensity warfare” against the Mayan Indian communities in Chiapas who are leading the fight for autonomy, against ethnic cleansing, and for the human rights of indigenous people throughout Mexico.

In fact, the U.S. government itself organized death squads and military operations by the Guatemalan army right next door to Chiapas that up until recently engaged in genocide and ethnic cleansing against Mayan communities in Guatemala. A “truth commission” in Guatemala recently cited evidence to that effect. Commander in Chief Bill Clinton also admitted this with his “apology” for U.S. actions on a recent trip to Guatemala. There’s no point in saying “sorry” if you keep doing it. And the U.S. government is continuing to back similar killer operations not only by the Mexican government against Mayan communities in Chiapas but by its Turkish NATO ally against the Kurdish communities in southeast Turkey.

So it is demonstrably true that for the U.S. government there is no general principle of support for autonomy, the national rights of oppressed minorities, or opposition to ethnic cleansing. (In fact, as has often been pointed out, the great “market economy” of the United States itself was largely built on the ethnic cleansing of territories to remove Native Americans, seize their lands, drive them westward, and/or restrict them to reservations.)

If the U.S. and NATO were really concerned to stop the brutality against the Kosovars, they had the forces and the intelligence to go in there and do it. The truth is they didn’t want to.

The U.S. government sent troops virtually overnight into the Dominican Republic in 1965, into Grenada in 1983, and into Panama in 1989 — not to mention that in a matter of months in 1965 they put 500,000 troops in South Vietnam, the first major escalation of the Vietnam war.

The Real War Aims: Terrorize and Destroy

If the claim of “humanitarian” aid to the Kosovars is a hypocritical and cynical sham, what is the real reason for this war?

Over the past year or two U.S. policy has been voiced, among other things, in the speeches written for the secretary of state, Madeleine Albright. “The United States is the indispensable country,” she has said. “We stand tall. Our reach is long. We do not forget, we do not forgive.”

These statements were made in connection with the cruise missile bombing of Sudan and Afghanistan and the continuing military assaults on Iraq.

Translated this means: What the Washington wants, it’s going to get. It’s the only superpower in the world today. It has the military power to enforce its will — and no one is going to stop it, not even its allies, Britain and France, or its former enemies, Japan, Germany, Italy, or its “good neighbor,” Canada.

(I have just named the six countries which, together with the U.S., constitute the so-called Group of Seven, or G-7, the wealthiest and most powerful industrial countries who dominate the world. We will return below to a historical discussion of dominant nations, empires, and imperialism. But for now, let’s examine further the real aims of the powers that be in the United States.)

The ruthless and wide-ranging bombing campaign was meant to terrorize and intimidate all sides. Why else were hospitals and residential neighborhoods repeatedly hit? The repeated occurrences showed that these were not just “errors,” as was claimed. The U.S. military planners targeted not just the police and military at the core of the Milosevic regime or the pro-Milosevic party headquarters but also anti-Milosevic forces in Serbia and Montenegro, and the Albanian people in Kosovo itself. All were meant to be intimidated.

(See the accompanying sidebar “Destruction of Economy Hits Anti-Milosevic Workers” — an excerpt from an excellent and informative article by Gerry Foley in the May 1999 Socialist Action newspaper, published in San Francisco.)

“Demolish, Destroy, Devastate, Degrade”

Another aim of the air war was to destroy the infrastructure, all the components going to make up a relatively self-sustaining modern industrial economy. Oil refining, motor vehicle production, the electric power system, and other utilities were particularly targeted. This was meant to set an example. No country can plan on developing its own independent economy in this “new world order” dominated by U.S. capitalism. The message is, “Keep your Yugos off the world market; in fact, stop making those damn Yugos altogether. You can buy our GM products, Chryslers, or Fords.” The same message is given in the bombing of the medicine factory in Sudan and in the decade-long destruction of Iraq.

Just as they promised in Vietnam to “bomb them back into the Stone Age,” so in this air war U.S. General Wesley Clark, the NATO officer in charge, promised to “demolish, destroy, devastate, degrade, and ultimately eliminate the essential infrastructure” of the country (quoted in the San Francisco Labor Council statement against the war; see p. 00). Or as Stephen F. Cohen described it in the May 24 Nation: “Nato’s sorties are literally demodernizing Serbia. Two or three decades of its economic development — the foundation of the elementary well-being of ordinary men, women and children — have already been destroyed.”

Cohen cited columnist Thomas Friedman in the April 23 New York Times, who outdid most other advocates of this “humanitarian” bombing campaign. Friedman wrote along these lines: “It should be lights out in Belgrade: every power grid, water pipe, bridge, road and war-related [or not “war-related”] factory has to be targeted.” “Give war a chance,” Friedman ranted. “Like it or not, we are at war with the Serbian nation.” Friedman’s blood lust was up. Addressing the Serbs, he gloated: “…we will set your country back by pulverizing you. You want 1950? We can do 1950. You want 1389? We can do 1389 too.”

Stephen F. Cohen rightly labeled this as advocacy of “what are legally defined as war crimes.” Yet this deliberate destruction of the civilian economy was U.S. policy.

Bombing of the Chinese Embassy

Likewise, the bombing of the Chinese embassy in Belgrade seems to have been a deliberate U.S. policy — a warning to the market-minded Stalinist bureaucrats who rule China to stop supporting Yugoslavia. And to remind the Chinese that in the “new world order” there is only one boss. The smart bombs found their target, a building which adjoined the embassy and which housed Chinese journalists who had been writing pro-Yugoslav news dispatches.

The claim that the bombing was an error resulting from the use of “old maps” was just a cover-up. Older maps would have shown no military targets at that location, because the embassy was built recently on land that had previously been vacant, reclaimed marshland. (See the article by Jared Israel elsewhere in this issue.)

A month after the bombing of the Chinese embassy, a new explanation was offered by Washington, according to the June 18 New York Times: “An American intelligence [?] officer…[had] preliminarily located the target by extrapolating from the ‘pattern and numbering system’ of parallel streets.” Supposedly he picked out the Chinese embassy by mistake, thinking it was the Yugoslav Federal Directorate for Supply and Procurement. The error was not detected because, supposedly, targeting databases had not been updated with the new address of the Chinese embassy. Chinese officials rejected this new explanation as “inadequate.”

Behind Today’s War, a History of Empires

Historically, with the exception of Canada, the “G-7” countries had colonial empires and still maintain neo-colonial ties with former colonies in Asia, Africa, and Latin America. It was the desire among these “great powers” — or to be more exact, these imperialist governments — to redivide the world’s territory that led them to test their military strength against one another in World War I and World War II.

Of course there were other empires and imperialist countries in the past century or two which lost out to these now dominant ones. The Dutch had an empire, especially Indonesia, which they lost to the anti-colonialist movement after World War II — not to mention their former ownership of Manhattan, which is now the capital of the U.S. imperialist empire of finance, headquartered on Wall Street. The same for Spain, which lost most of its colonies during the nineteenth century. And for Belgium, whose colony, the Congo, won independence in 1960–61 (only to come under U.S. domination as a result of UN intervention and CIA sponsorship of the Mobutu regime). The territories those former empires lost, though nominally independent, have mostly come under U.S. and British domination — mainly economic domination by or for the giant U.S or British multinational corporations, such as Shell or Standard Oil.

Even Portugal maintained an empire up until 1975, with financial, military, and political support from the U.S., Britain, and France, but a revolution in Portugal and anti-colonial guerrilla movements in Angola, Mozambique, and elsewhere brought that to an end.

There were three other empires which on the eve of World War I played a significant part in world politics: the tsarist Russian empire, the Austro-Hungarian empire, and the Ottoman empire. Today what is left of the power centers of those former empires?

Russia today, after going from tsarist empire to Soviet superpower to the great collapse after perestroika, is a huge country in the grip of economic devastation with hardly any influence left in the world — although it still has nuclear missiles and a substantial military apparatus. Until there is a revival of an independent workers movement in Russia, we are left with the remnants of a great experiment that failed, the result of the isolation and bureaucratization of the world’s first attempt at socialist revolution, history’s longest-lasting effort to institute working class rule.

Legacy of Austrian and Ottoman Empires

What’s left of the Ottoman empire is Turkey, now a minor member of NATO, whose only distinction, if you can call it that, is waging its own campaign of ethnic cleansing and genocide against the Kurdish people in the southeastern part of Turkey, northern Iraq, and western Iran. The Kurds are the only major population in the world, consisting of 12 million or more, who were denied their own national state after World War I, when the victorious “great powers” carved up the former Ottoman empire to create the borders of countries in today’s “Middle East” — Syria, Iraq, Lebanon, Jordan, Palestine/Israel, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, etc.

The former “imperial Austria” of Mozart’s day is now a minor “neutral” country, whose role in the world is not very great. Most of its former territories be came part of the “socialist” camp after World War II, in particular, Poland, Czecho slovakia, Hungary, and Yugoslavia.

It is in Yugoslavia, most of which before World War I had been divided between the Ottoman and Austro-Hungarian empires, that in the “post-Communist” 1990s terribly destructive wars of ethnic cleansing have occurred.

So in a certain sense the legacies of the Austrian and Ottoman empires still haunt us at the end of the century in which those empires disappeared.

Who Are the Yugoslavs?

The term “Yugoslav” literally means “southern Slav,” as distinct from the “western Slavs” of Poland and Czechoslovakia, and the “eastern Slavs” of Ukraine, Belarus, and Russia. From the 14th century to 1878 the Serbian group of “south Slavs” had been under Ottoman rule. The Serbs were Eastern Orthodox Christians, unlike the Croats who spoke the same language (Serbo-Croatian) but had adopted Catholicism. Back around the 10th century some of the Slavic tribes in the western Balkans were converted to Roman Catholicism. They ended up under Austro-Hungarian rule, evolving into the modern-day Slovenes and Croats. They became part of what was known in the Middle Ages as the Holy Roman Empire, which, as many schoolchildren learn, was neither holy nor Roman nor much of an empire. It was dominated by the Hapsburg ruling family based in Austria, and eventually became the Austro-Hungarian empire.

Within the population that spoke Serbo-Croatian another element, mostly in southern and eastern Bosnia-Herzegovina, a province under Ottoman rule, converted to Islam. These are the so-called Bosnian Muslims, or Bosniaks. Living near them were the Albanian-speaking people (non-Slavs), who also converted to Islam during the centuries of Ottoman rule. The Albanians are descendants of Illyrian tribes that had lived in the western Balkans since the times of ancient Greece (as far back as 1,000 B.C., or earlier), long before Slavic-speaking peoples entered the region. Albanians lived in what is now Kosovo as much as they did in what is now Albania. As Doug Lorimer points out (elsewhere in this issue), the Serbian claim to exclusive rights over this territory as the “cradle of Serbian civilization” is of dubious historical merit.

It was in fact the “great powers” (the victors in World War I — that is, the U.S, Britain, France, and Italy) who established the current border making Kosovo part of Serbia rather than part of Albania.

Woodrow Wilson and “the Boys” Redraw the Map to “Make the World Safe for Democracy”

The U.S. president, or chief executive officer for the American ruling class in the process of dividing up the world after World War I, was Woodrow Wilson. A June 12 New York Times article described his role:

At the Versailles peace conference following World War I, Wilson arrived after reviewing European history and then helped establish a new southern Slavic state to fill the vacuum created by the collapse of the Ottoman and Austrian empires.

“There is a famous moment,” the Times goes on, “in which Wilson, the idealist [sic], squatted on the floor with his experts over a gigantic map of places he had never been. His wife walked in and commented that they looked like boys playing a game.”

A line in Shakespeare says something like this: “To the gods we are as flies. They rend us for their sport.” To the “great powers,” the inhabitants of Kosovo and Serbia meant as little as the flies cruel boys tear wings from.

Woodrow Wilson’s wife was right: her husband, with his advisers, huddled over the maps of countries they knew little about, were behaving with the arrogance of thoughtless brats. They were deciding the fates of millions of people. Yet those people were not consulted. And Wilson, the “idealist,” claimed to stand for self-determination.

Why Did Kosovo Go to Serbia in 1920?

That was the way the “great powers” decided to grant Kosovo to Serbia. But why did the U.S., Britain, France and Italy — or more exactly, the capitalist rulers of those countries — give Kosovo to the Serbian ruling class in 1920? And why do they still insist on Kosovo remaining a province of Serbia?

The answer to that question could take us far into understanding the class dynamics that underlie the troubled history of the Balkans in the 20th century.

Undoubtedly there were influential officials who had important friends or connections with investments or other interests in Serbia, so that the grant of Kosovo, with its mineral wealth, to the Serbian ruling class benefited some ruling class elements in France, Britain, or the U.S., or in all of them.

Another consideration in the minds of those Western Christian statesmen was that most Albanians were Muslims. Better to put the good Christian Serbs in charge of the Muslims in Kosovo.

International Loans

Today the interests of Western financial circles (especially those in the U.S., Britain, France, Italy, Germany) in regard to Kosovo and Serbia are expressed through the International Monetary Fund, which oversees repayment of loans given by the Western powers to the Yugoslav government ever since the time of the Tito-Stalin split in the late 1940s (a matter of some $40–50 billion or more by now). There may even be financial obligations to Western banks and financial institutions dating back to the time of the independent Serbian monarchy (1878–1941).

There are significant mining operations in Kosovo, though not much else in the way of industry, aside from the kind of electric power and telephone systems found in most partly industrialized areas of the world. Still, as anyone who has played Monopoly knows, such “utilities” can be a source of income, as can the land, or real estate, in general. (The leader of the nonviolent Kosovar national movement, Ibrahim Rugova, is reported to be the head of the largest real-estate owning family in Kosovo.)

What becomes of material property in Kosovo — a factor that could add up to millions of dollars — and who will have the right to dispose of it? Above all, how will it contribute to repayment of IMF loans? Those are questions that go to the heart of imperial policy toward this minor, remote province. The same is true of the cruel and cold-blooded Greater Serbia chauvinist policy of the Milosevic regime, which wanted to hold onto the mining and other properties in Kosovo.

Considerations like these are what really lie behind the cold-blooded, cynical, and hypocritical policy of the U.S. government and the other imperialist powers in NATO.

“War Is Also Business”

The families of the super-rich in North America and Western Europe, who own financial empires, including giant multinational funds, banks, and corporations, are the chief beneficiaries of this war.

It is intended to serve their interests — and does so in many ways. As the founding editor of our magazine Frank Lovell pointed out (quoting Trotsky), shortly before he died little more than a year ago: “War is also business.” The expenditure of all kinds of ordnance, including cluster bombs, cruise missiles, and aircraft creates an armaments boom for corporations like Raytheon. Obviously the military-industrial complex which has thrived on military spending ever since World War II, and continues to do so, gets a jolt in the arm from this war.

And what is it to them if the flood of profits comes at the expense of the lives of “the little people,” the ordinary workers and farmers of Serbia, Montenegro, and Kosovo. (The U.S.-manufactured death falling from the sky made no distinction as to nationality.)

On June 11 the New York Times reported that on the previous night the U.S. Congress passed a $289 billion military-spending bill. Earlier, when the bombing campaign began, Congress had already approved “$5.5 billion in additional spending through Sept. 30, for the air war alone.” In a sense, then, the Kosovo war is just one more component tacked on to the elaborate boondoggle erected over the past many decades that bears the name “defense budget.”

And they tell us there’s no money for social security, health care, education…

Clinton: “Europe Is the Key…That’s What Kosovo Is All About”

There is another aspect to the business-economic aims of the war, which Clinton himself has voiced, as have other leading administration spokespeople and policy makers, though always in their roundabout way.

The following passage from an article in the June 19 Nation illustrates the point. “In his address to the nation Clinton… briefly invoked another, particularly disturbing argument for intervention. In a speech the previous day, he had discussed this rationale at greater length, declaring that ‘if we’re going to have a strong economic relationship that includes our ability to sell around the world, Europe has got to be a key…. That’s what this Kosovo thing is all about.’ ”

Making the World Safe for Investors

Clinton, according to the Nation article,

seems to argue that the United States is fighting a war in Kosovo to make the world safe for capitalism. [Emphasis added.] In fact, the President and other policy-makers have long been making similar arguments. In explaining its glo bal strategy, for instance, the Pentagon declared in 1993 that “a prosperous, largely democratic, market-oriented zone of peace and prosperity that encompasses more than two-thirds of the world’s economy” requires the “stability” that only American “leadership” can provide.

In the debate over US intervention in Bosnia, leading foreign policy figures, including the former head of the National Security Agency and Senator Richard Lugar, asserted that, left unchecked, the war there could lead to “national parochialism” in Europe, threatening global economic interdependence and US prosperity.

The air war against Serbia is just the latest installment in what appears to be Washington’s quest to make the world safe for America’s investors and exporters. Last year, speaking to the Boston Chamber of Commerce, Defense Secretary William Cohen justified NATO expansion as a way of “spreading the kind of security and stability that Western Europe has enjoyed since after World War II to Central and Eastern Europe.” And, in an observation certain to resonate with his audience, he noted: “And with that spread of stability, there is a prospect to attract investment.” No doubt the Administration is moved by the human tragedy of Kosovo. Clearly, however, its perception that US economic interests are indirectly at stake is at least as important. As Cohen has said, the Administration’s strategy seeks to “discourage violence and instability—instability which destroys lives and markets.” Clinton recently exhorted Americans to accept the “inevitable logic” of globalism and free trade.

“But,” The Nation article continued,

the Administration’s Balkan policy shows that globalization is not inevitable — it depends on America’s overseas military commitments and its willingness to wage war if necessary.

What is most frightening about this economic rationale (which amounts to an imperialist argument [emphasis added]) is its open-endedness. According to US policy-makers, the logic of global economic interdependence leads inevitably to a proliferation of US secur ity commitments: Instability and aggres sion, virtually wherever they occur, are regarded as a threat to America, because they would disrupt the global stability upon which the United States purportedly depends for its prosperity.

This thinking is, again, similar to the domino theory: Instability in even economically unimportant areas (like Kosovo) could “spill over” and infect other areas regarded as essential to global economic interdependence.

The Global Economy: A Zone of “Peace and Prosperity”?

Clinton, in his June 10 “victory” speech after the Milosevic regime agreed to withdraw from Kosovo, sounded a similar theme:

We must help give the democracies of Southeastern Europe a path to a prosperous shared future, a unifying magnet more powerful than the pull of hatred and destruction that has threatened to tear them apart.

(In other words, make them a part of globalization and free trade, part of that “prosperous, largely democratic, market-oriented zone of peace and prosperity that encompasses more than two-thirds of the world’s economy,” as the 1993 Pentagon strategists so rosily described the capitalist world market.)

But any trade unionist who’s been keeping her or his eyes and ears open lately knows what “globalization” and “free trade” really mean — the export of jobs to low-wage areas, where unions aren’t allowed, where workers are regimented and exploited under sweatshop conditions, especially child labor and female labor. It’s true that the “market-oriented zone” encompasses “more than two-thirds of the world’s economy.” But is it a zone of peace and prosperity? Ask the millions unemployed as a result of the Asian crisis of this world economy since 1997. Ask the Mexican and Central American workers whose choice is unemployment or slave wages in a maquiladora or the risk of trying to enter the U.S. as “illegal aliens.”

It’s a zone of prosperity for the relatively small minority who own and reap profits from the multinational corporations and big investment banks and funds. But it’s certainly not a zone of peace. It’s a zone of class struggle; for the most part, a zone of one-sided class war by the wealthy to increase their earnings by driving down wages, benefits, and working conditions for the vast majority.

But that is the system the Pentagon is designed to protect, promote, and expand. And service to that system is the purpose of the Kosovo war.

Who Will Profit from Kosovo Reconstruction?

Who is going to look after the “reconstruction” of Kosovo? The June 13 New York Times discreetly informed its business-minded readers about this with a small item headlined “Assessing Kosovo Renewal.”

It stated:

The Acting European Monetary Affairs Commissioner, Yves-Thibault de Silguy, said today that an international mission would be sent to Kosovo by the start of July as a first step to assessing its reconstruction needs.

Speaking here [in Frankfurt, Germany] at a meeting of finance ministers of the seven leading industrialized nations, he said the mission would comprise representatives of the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, the European Union, the European Investment Bank and the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development.

These are the post–World War II instruments of monopoly capitalism, or finance capitalism — that is to say, imperialism in the scientific socialist meaning of the term. (See Vladimir Lenin’s booklet on the subject, Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism, published during World War I but by no means outdated at the end of this century of imperialist wars, colonial uprisings, and proletarian revolutions.)

A hint of the “rosy prospects” in store for Kosovo came when the Clinton family visited a refugee camp in Macedonia after the air war. Clinton announced that a U.S. company was going to restart its operations in Macedonia, which had been shut down during the war. This was the Liz Claiborne company. So those lucky people will be able to work again in a garment-making sweatshop, so that American shoppers will find those cute “made in Macedonia” labels inside the collars of their Liz Claiborne outfits. Welcome to the new world back-order.

Restoring Capitalism in Former Workers’ States

Another aspect of this war used to be called “rollback” at the beginning of the Cold War. Instead of just “containing Communism,” some Cold War hawks wanted to “roll it back” — that is, to re-establish capitalism in countries where it had been overthrown and where bureaucratized postcapitalist states, like Tito’s Yugoslavia, had taken shape.

Defense Secretary William Cohen, quoted above, voiced the aim of “spreading the kind of security and stability that Western Europe has enjoyed since after World War II to Central and Eastern Europe.” What actually happened in Western Europe after World War II? There were mass movements seeking social change, especially in Italy and France but also in Labour Party England. The U.S. introduced the Marshall Plan in Western Europe and organized the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) fifty-some years ago to stabilize the capitalist system, to deflect those mass movements from taking the path of socialist revolution.

A couple of years earlier, out of the holocaust of World War II, the Yugoslav workers and peasants, led by Tito’s Communist guerrilla movement, established a socialist republic, as did the Communist guerrillas led by Enver Hoxha in neighboring Albania. By military and bureaucratic means the Stalinist bureaucracy of the Soviet Union prompted the Communist parties it controlled in Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Romania, and Bulgaria also to overturn capitalism and establish bureaucratized “socialist” regimes patterned after the Stalinist one. The designation “deformed workers states” is a more accurate term for these postcapitalist societies that lacked socialist democracy.

(We should note, incidentally, that Stalin and his fellow bureaucrats did not favor unity among the workers and peasants of these postcapitalist societies. They did not establish, or even advocate the idea of, a Socialist United States of Eastern Europe. In fact, the idea of a confederation among the “socialist” states of the Balkans, raised by Tito and his co-thinkers, became grounds for Stalin’s denunciation of Tito and witch-hunt trials against Stalinist leaders in Eastern Europe who Stalin thought were too independent-minded.)

In Western Europe in the late 1940s, the pro-NATO governments, often headed by Social Democrats, especially in France, Britain, and Italy, by introducing social reforms and promoting anti-Soviet Cold War propaganda (taking advantage of the real crimes of the Stalinist regimes in Eastern Europe and of the actually non-revolutionary policies of the Stalinized Communist parties in countries like France and Italy, where they led mass movements) did in fact prevent socialist revolution in Western Europe.

That was how Western Europe came to “enjoy” what Defense Secretary Cohen calls “security and stability after World War II.”

They Never Forgive, Never Forget

The capitalist ruling classes of North America and Western Europe do want to restore capitalism in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union, but in a form that would be amenable to Western capitalism. They don’t want to help create prosperous economies that might compete with their own.

Moreover, restoring the “market-oriented” system where it had been abolished is not so easy. The varicolored regimes in the former Soviet-bloc countries have not had much success so far. Industrial workers and working farmers did enjoy certain social benefits under the postcapitalist bureaucratized systems, such as guaranteed employment, education, medical care, etc., and they resist surrendering those advantages for the kind of Wild West “savage capitalism” that has arisen. Chaos and economic dislocation have been common, with a few getting rich quick while living standards for the majority have fallen drastically. Even though wages and benefits in these historically more backward countries were below the level in the historically more prosperous “West,” the masses in Eastern Europe have shown they will vote for political parties that promise to preserve or restore “socialistic” features of those postcapitalist systems.

Just before NATO’s air war started, Poland, Hungary, and the Czech Republic were brought into NATO. When the bombs began falling on the remnant of Yugoslavia, the pro-Western regimes in Bulgaria and Romania were reported clamoring to be let into NATO as well.

Over the past few years, as wars and upheavals took place in ex-Yugoslavia and Albania, the Western capitalist powers were able to establish a military presence in Macedonia, then Bosnia, then Albania. The war over Kosovo gave them the excuse to strengthen their military presence, then extend it (under a United Nations figleaf) into Kosovo. They want to bring “security and stability” to Central and Eastern Europe, and eventually to the former USSR (and China, too), in the interests of the ruling rich of Western Europe and North America, not for the benefit of the people of those former workers’ states.

The corrupt Milosevic regime of former Stalinist bureaucrats — party, police, military, and government officials — has in effect smoothed the way for this extension of Western imperialist military power. But the bureaucrats and officials will find some accommodation, make some deal with Western imperialism. Those who will suffer are the workers and peasants of the Balkan region. NATO’s air war was in a sense revenge against them, or against their older generations, for having dared to make a socialist revolution in 1945–46.

June 19, 1999