all about oil and expanding our empire. The more I read about this war, the sicker I get. Thanks for your open mind. War is a horrible thing and rich countries keep their place in the international pecking order. I can't white-wash this just because it happened under our watch- especially when you consider it was a DLC watch- they seem to have an awful lot in common with certain Republicans.
Peace
Check these out:
An article in the Jerusalem Post at the time of the Kosovo civil war had said, "Diplomats in the region say Bosnia was the first bastion of Islamic power. The autonomous Yugoslav region of Kosovo promises to be the second. During the current rebellion against the Yugoslav army, the ethnic Albanians in the province, most of whom are Moslem, have been provided with financial and military support from Islamic countries. They are being bolstered by hundreds of Iranian fighters, or Mujahadeen, who infiltrate from nearby Albania and call themselves the Kosovo Liberation Army. U.S. defense officials say the support includes that of Osama bin Laden, the Saudi terrorist accused of masterminding the bombings of the U.S. embassies" in Africa.
Another Democratic presidential candidate, Rep. Dennis Kucinich, has tried to prohibit funding for the Kosovo Protection Corps (KPC), the successor to the KLA now being protected by U.N. troops as a result of the outcome of the conflict. Kucinich said an internal United Nations Report found the KPC responsible for violence, extortion, murder and torture.
After the war, Milosevic was ousted and put on trial, where he has been making the case in his own defense that Serb troops in Kosovo were fighting Muslim terrorists associated with bin Laden. At a hearing before the U.N. court trying him, he brandished an FBI document concerning al Qaeda-backed Muslim fighters in Kosovo.
<snip>
Clark’s presidential decision suggests that he believes the media will not ask him about supporting the same extremist Muslim forces in Kosovo that militarily attacked us on 9/11. He’s right: during interviews on ABC’s Good Morning America and the NBC Today show on September 17, the subject didn’t come up. Clark did say that he would not have gone to war with Iraq, and that he would have turned the matter over to the U.N. There was no "imminent threat" from Iraq, he claimed.
So where was the "imminent threat" to the U.S. from Yugoslavia? And why did the Clinton administration bypass the U.N. on that illegal war? Clark is counting on not hearing those questions from the same media going after Bush on Iraq. They are all worse than hypocrites.
http://www.aim.org/publications/weekly_column/2003/09/17.htmlHere's a 1999 Egyptian article of interest that shows a few striking parallels between Iraq and Yugoslavia,
Al-Ahram Weekly
22 - 28 April 1999
Oiling the wheels of Pax Americana
By Gamal Nkrumah
As NATO's punishing air raids against Serbia enter their fourth week, Washington continues to insist that there is no imminent plan to deploy ground forces. Such assertions, however, should by now be taken with more than a pinch of salt. The Americans are clearly planning to tighten the screws even further on an already badly battered Yugoslav economy, and plans are afoot to strengthen the economic blockade. International oil prices may be lower than at any time in living memory, but the strategic nature of the present conflict should never be forgotten.
At the heart of the war against Serbia lies the struggle to control black gold, and the principal routes along which the region's oil pipelines run hold the key to understanding the present Balkan crisis. Washington wants to block deliveries of oil by sea to Yugoslavia. The New York Times reported this week that NATO supreme commander US Gen. Wesley Clark wants all oil shipments halted. "We are talking with our NATO allies about taking stricter action in order to limit the amount of oil that goes in," US Secretary of State Madeleine Albright was quoted as saying in the Los Angeles Times.
<snip>
NATO this week announced that on Sunday it had destroyed the oil refinery at Pancevo. A petrochemical facility and nitrogen plant at the same site were also hit, and another refinery at Novi Sad was reportedly destroyed. But there are also signs of cracks in the Alliance over the strategy of hitting economic targets. American officials requested a plan to block sea shipments of oil at a closed meeting of allied delegates last week, but their French counterparts questioned the legal basis of the move, submitting that it would not be possible to stop and search ships in the Adriatic Sea without a specific resolution from the United Nations Security Council.
<snip>
Like the second Gulf War against Iraq,
the latest NATO intervention is yet another military action undertaken to secure oil pipeline routes and oil profits, along with other miscellaneous strategic imperialist advantages connected with the Caspian Sea region.
Between them, the Caspian region and the Middle East contain some three-quarters of the world's known reserves of petroleum. Washington, not unnaturally, favours the construction of oil pipelines from the Caspian westward across Turkey to the Balkans and southeastern Europe, at the expense of Russian interests. This week, the US denounced the dispatching of Russian surveillance ships to the Mediterranean as "not helpful." The war for Kosovo is thus being played out with all the awesome logic of a spaghetti western.
<snip>
http://weekly.ahram.org.eg/1999/426/in1.htm====
===
Published on Wednesday, September 10, 2003 by CommonDreams.org
Was Gen. Clark Also "Unprepared" for the Postwar?
by Zoltan Grossman
<snip>
Second, the NATO bombing alienated Serbian civilians who had led the opposition to Milosevic. Cities that had voted heavily against Milosevic were among those targeted with bombing. U.S. jets dropped cluster bombs on a crowded marketplace in Nis. Civilian infrastructure, such as trains, busses, bridges, TV stations, civilian factories, hospitals and power plants, were repeatedly hit by NATO bombs. Depleted Uranium munitions left behind radioactive dust around targets, and bombed chemical plants released clouds of poisonous smoke. Estimates of civilian deaths in the bombing range from 500 to 2,000, with the Washington Post estimating 1,600 (a tally is at www.counterpunch.org/dead.html ) These civilian casualties are largely forgotten by those who feel that bombs dropped by a Democratic president are somehow more noble than those dropped by a Republican president.
The Serbian democratic opposition strongly condemned the bombing as undermining and delaying their efforts to oust President Milosevic, and as strengthening his police state. It was not the NATO bombing but Serbs' largely nonviolent revolution that overthrew Milosevic in October 2000, and replaced him with democratic leader Vojislav Kostunica, who had opposed NATO's war. In much the same way, many Iraqis who hated Saddam Hussein have criticized U.S. betrayals and sanctions--under both Bush and Clinton administrations--for strengthening Saddam's hand. Many of these same Sunnis and Shi'ites repressed by Saddam are today calling for the U.S. to withdraw from Iraq, in order to regain their sovereignty.
<snip>
Like in Iraq and Afghanistan, the U.S. interventions in ex-Yugoslavia left behind a new cluster of U.S. military bases, including the sprawling Camp Bondsteel in U.S. Sector Kosovo. Together, this string of permanent U.S. bases stretching from Hungary to Pakistan is creating a new U.S. "sphere of influence" in the strtegic region between the European Union and East Asia. General Clark was surely aware that the U.S. presence in Kosovo would not be temporary, and uses the prospect of ethnic instability to justify it, much as President Bush does to justify a long-term presence in Iraq. Earlier this year, as one of the slew of cable news "armchair generals" coldly assessed the advance of the Iraq invasion, Clark never challenged the underlying premise that the U.S. military should oust Saddam, rather than the Iraqi people, or that the U.S. should have a permanent presence in the Gulf region.
The 1999 Kosovo War had similar origins and outcomes as the 2003 Iraq War. In the 2004 election, do we face the hideous prospect of voting for one flawed war over another? Far from posing a "pragmatic" alternative to President Bush, Clark's ascendancy would be a failure for the peace movement that has made such advances in community organizing over the past year. In order not to alienate the large segment of the electorate energized by the movement, Democrats are well advised not to nominate a leader with blood on his hands. http://www.commondreams.org/views03/0910-07.htm
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