The Progressive Response
Volume 8, Number 7
March 12, 2004
Editor: John Gershman, Interhemispheric Resource Center (IRC)
| Foreign Policy In Focus | |
The Progressive Response (PR) is produced weekly by the Interhemispheric Resource Center (IRC, online at www.irc-online.org) as part of its Foreign Policy in Focus (FPIF) project. FPIF, a "Think Tank Without Walls," is an international network of analysts and activists dedicated to "making the U.S. a more responsible global leader and partner by advancing citizen movements and agendas." FPIF is joint project of the Interhemispheric Resource Center and the Institute for Policy Studies. We encourage responses to the opinions expressed in the PR and may print them in the "Letters and Comments" section. For more information on FPIF and joining our network, please consider visiting the FPIF website at http://www.fpif.org/, or email <feedback@fpif.org> to share your thoughts with us.
John Gershman, editor of Progressive Response, is a senior analyst with the Interhemispheric Resource Center (IRC) (online at www.irc-online.org) and co-director of FPIF. He can be contacted at <john@irc-online.org>.
Table of Contents
I. Updates and Out-Takes
A UNIFIED SECURITY BUDGETFOR THE UNITED STATES
By a Foreign Policy in Focus/Center for Defense Information Task ForceSPENDING UNDER FIRE
By Colonel Daniel Smith, USA (Ret.)SORROWS OF EMPIRE
By Chalmers JohnsonIRAQ AND THE COSTS OF WAR
By William D. HartungARE THE TALIBAN REALLY “GONE”?
By Mark SedraIT’S TIME TO ENGAGE, NOT ISOLATE, SYRIA
By Ronald Bruce St John
II. Letters and Comments
I. Updates and Out-Takes
A UNIFIED SECURITY BUDGETFOR THE UNITED STATES
By a Foreign Policy in Focus/Center for Defense Information Task Force
(Editor’s Note: The following is the executive summary from the complete report which is available in full at http://www.fpif.org/protected/securitybudget.html .)
Since September 11, 2001, the question of how to provide for our security has loomed large over our national life. Many of the Bush administration’s answers to this question have come under intense challenge--from the doctrine of preventive war to the development of new designs for “usable” nuclear weapons to the choice of war with Iraq as the centerpiece of its war on terrorism. But until recently one aspect of the administration’s strategy has gone virtually unchallenged, namely its military budgets and the spending priorities contained within them. From 2000 to 2004, these budgets have increased by more than 50%. Congress has approved each of these budgets, and virtually the entire menu of programs specified in them, with hardly a whisper of debate.
Ever-increasing budget deficit projections have finally begun to make security budget priorities a permissible topic of conversation among lawmakers. In mid-February the House Speaker declared all parts of the budget “on the table” for cuts, including the military, and soon thereafter the administration abruptly canceled the Army’s long-running Comanche helicopter program.
The Task Force on A Unified Security Budget for the United States, drawing on the knowledge of analysts with expertise in different dimensions of the security challenge, welcomes the opening of this overdue debate, and offers this contribution to help point it in the right direction. Among its findings:
- Key finding: Despite promises of a comprehensive approach to fighting terrorism, the Bush administration has concentrated its resources overwhelmingly on its military forces, at the expense of other security tools. Bush’s 2005 budget would spend seven times as much on the military as on homeland security and all other forms of non-military security programs combined.
- Key finding: The Bush military budget is being spent on a force structure that does not match today’s security challenges, because it is designed for a cold-war-style large-scale conventional challenge that we no longer face.
- Key finding: Fixing the problem will require a unified approach to security that integrates nonmilitary tools into our security strategy and rebalances military forces for today’s security challenges.
This document provides a working model for how this could be done, without reducing overall spending levels on security, and without increasing the deficit. It shows how funding can be shifted within military accounts for an overall saving of $51 billion. And it outlines $52 billion in spending on non-military measures that could enhance U.S. security substantially.
- Key finding: The administration’s decision to cut the Comanche program was a good start. The report identifies ten other programs, including the F-22 fighter and DDX destroyer, which could be safely cut or reconfigured to free up $56 billion in resources for other neglected security priorities.
- Key finding: $5 billion should be added to military accounts to rectify military equipment shortfalls identified in Iraq, such as improved flak jackets, truck armor reinforcements and helicopter protection systems, and to restructure and retrain forces for small- and medium-scale peace and stability operations and counterterrorist missions.
- Key finding: The report recommends reallocating $6 billion to strengthen crucial nonmilitary dimensions of our security including diplomacy, nonproliferation programs, and support for international peace and stability operations.
- Key finding: In a 2002 speech President Bush identified development assistance as a security tool, linking the desperate resort to terrorism with the hopelessness of persistent poverty. This unified security budget recommends a $10 billion increase in US development assistance, and outlines key reforms in development policy.
- Key finding: The remainder of the report’s recommended savings are allocated to addressing key deficits in homeland security, including increased funding for “first responders” to a terrorist attack.
It’s possible to rebalance our national security budget, filling in its missing military and nonmilitary pieces, without increasing its overall bottom line. The result would be military forces better prepared for actual deployments, nonmilitary tools better deployed to address the sources of threat, and a net gain in security for our nation.
(The Task Force was co-chaired by Marcus Corbin of the Center for Defense Information (www.cdi.org) and Miriam Pemberton, military affairs editor for Foreign Policy In Focus (www.fpif.org).)
SPENDING UNDER FIRE
By Colonel Daniel Smith, USA (Ret.)
(Editor’s Note: Excerpted from a new global affairs commentary available in full at http://www.fpif.org/commentary/2004/0403budget.html .)
As part of normal government processes, the cabinet secretaries have been testifying before various budget, authorizations, and appropriations committees on their departments’ Fiscal Year (FY) 2005 budget requests. Almost as normal in past years have been cuts in the State Department’s funding and additions to the Pentagon’s allocation.
So it came as a mild shock when the Senate Budget Committee, on March 3, voted to cut seven billion dollars from the President’s request for the Defense Department. A second hit was delivered when Representative Jim Nussle (IA), chairperson of the House Budget Committee, announced he would cut half a percent (about two billion dollars) from the White House proposal for Pentagon and domestic security spending in FY2005. Both cuts were quickly reversed, but that they were even seriously proposed indicated the extent of collective unease in Congress over continuing high deficit spending, fueled by large increases in defense while funds for domestic programs are flat or falling.
A third mild jolt came on March 4 when the Gallup organization released the findings of a U.S. poll conducted February 9-12. For the second consecutive February, and the first statistically significant (beyond the margin of error) time since May 1999, more people (31 percent) say the government is spending too much rather than too little (22 percent) on Defense. In the same poll, 34 percent agreed (as they did in February 2003) that national defense is not strong enough. This suggests unease about both what defense dollars are buying and the division of fiscal resources between the military and non-military elements of national power.
So is spending on the military under fire, or will it continue as long as U.S. forces are “firing” (engaged) in the “war on terror”?
It’s hard for the average layman to judge just how much has been and is being spent to diplomatically and militarily fight this “global war.” Even those with great experience and vast amounts of time to study budget documents can miss entries or underestimate because some expenditures are listed as “classified.”
There are some clues that can get an observer in the ballpark. What follows attempts to do that, and nothing more.
General numbers are easy to find. For example, the FY2005 federal budget request is for $2.4 trillion, of which $818 billion is discretionary spending (what Congress will allocate or otherwise manipulate). Of this latter, $21.33 billion in the State Department’s request is for “foreign operations” designed to advance U.S. interests throughout the world. Secretary of State Colin Powell noted in his appearances on the Hill that 48 percent ($10.24 billion) of this amount is directed against the global “war on terrorism”:
- $1.2 billion for Afghanistan reconstruction, security and democracy building;
- $5.7 billion to assist other countries that are helping fight “the war on terrorism”;
- $3.5 billion to enhance responses to emergencies and conflict situations; and
- $190 million to expand democracy in the Greater Middle East and “attack…the roots of terrorism.”
(It is quite probable that some of these amounts would have been available to help countries emerging from civil strife. But with Congress reluctant to cut requests labeled “for the war on terror,” this has become the justification of choice.)
On the military side, in addition to cutting seven billion dollars from the $421 billion in the White House request, the Senate Budget Committee earmarked as a “war reserve” an additional $30 billion for military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan. This would seem to undercut reported plans by the administration to wait until calendar 2005 to submit a $50 billion supplemental request for these and other global war on terror activities. Indeed, there is concern in Congress that a funding gap will materialize if funds for Iraq and Afghanistan are not included in the regular FY2005 Defense Appropriation Bill. The monthly bill for military operations just in these two locales averages $4.6 billion, according to February 2004 testimony by the Army’s chief of staff.
(Dan Smith is a military affairs analyst for Foreign Policy in Focus (online at www.fpif.org), a retired U.S. army colonel and a senior fellow on Military Affairs at the Friends Committee on National Legislation.)
For more information:
Foreign Policy In Focus / Center for Defense Information
Task Force on A Unified Security Budget For the United States (March 2004)
http://www.fpif.org/pdf/defensereport/fulltext.pdf
SORROWS OF EMPIRE
By Chalmers Johnson
(Editor’s Note: The following is an excerpted from a special report (available in full at http://www.presentdanger.org/papers/sorrows2003.html) which is in turn an excerpt from Johnson’s new book, Sorrows of Empire (Metropolitan, 2004).)
With the fall of Baghdad, America's dutiful Anglophone allies--the British and Australians--are due for their just rewards: luncheons for Blair and Howard with the Boy Emperor at his "ranch" in Crawford, Texas. The Americans fielded an army of 255,000 in Iraq, the British 45,000, and the Australians 2,000. It was not much of a war--merely confirming the antiwar forces' contention that an unchallenged slaughter of Iraqis and a Mongol-like sacking of an ancient city were not necessary to deal with the menace of Saddam Hussein. But the war did leave the United States and its two Sepoy nations much weaker than they had been before the war--the Western democratic alliance was seemingly irretrievably fractured; a potentiality for British leadership of the European Union went up in smoke; Pentagon plans to make Iraq over into a client state sundered on Sunni, Shiite, and Kurdish realities; and "international law," including the Charter of the United Nations, was grievously weakened. Why the British and Australians went along with this fiasco when they could so easily have stood for something other than might makes right remains a mystery.
The United States has been inching toward imperialism and militarism for many years. Disguising the direction they were taking, American leaders cloaked their foreign policy in euphemisms such as "lone superpower," "indispensable nation," "reluctant sheriff," "humanitarian intervention," and "globalization." However, with the advent of the George Bush administration in 2001, these pretenses gave way to assertions of the Second Coming of the Roman Empire. "American imperialism used to be a fiction of the far-left imagination," writes the English journalist Madeleine Bunting, "now it is an uncomfortable fact of life."
On March 19, 2003, the Bush administration took the imperial step of invading Iraq, a sovereign nation one-twelfth the size of the U.S. in terms of population and virtually undefended in the face of the awesome array of weapons employed against it. The U.S. undertook its second war with Iraq with no legal justification and worldwide protests against its actions and motives, thereby bringing to an end the system of international order that existed throughout the cold war and that traces its roots back to seventeenth century doctrines of sovereignty, non-intervention in the affairs of other states, and the illegitimacy of aggressive war.
The sorrows of empire are the inescapable consequences of the national policies American elites chose after September 11, 2001. Militarism and imperialism always bring with them sorrows. The ubiquitous symbol of the Christian religion, the cross, is perhaps the world's most famous reminder of the sorrows that accompanied the Roman Empire--it represents the most atrocious death the Roman proconsuls could devise in order to keep subordinate peoples in line. From Cato to Cicero, the slogan of Roman leaders was "Let them hate us so long as they fear us."
Four sorrows, it seems to me, are certain to be visited on the United States. Their cumulative effect guarantees that the U.S. will cease to resemble the country outlined in the Constitution of 1787. First, there will be a state of perpetual war, leading to more terrorism against Americans wherever they may be and a spreading reliance on nuclear weapons among smaller nations as they try to ward off the imperial juggernaut. Second is a loss of democracy and Constitutional rights as the presidency eclipses Congress and is itself transformed from a co-equal "executive branch" of government into a military junta. Third is the replacement of truth by propaganda, disinformation, and the glorification of war, power, and the military legions. Lastly, there is bankruptcy, as the United States pours its economic resources into ever more grandiose military projects and shortchanges the education, health, and safety of its citizens. All I have space for here is to touch briefly on three of these: endless war, the loss of Constitutional liberties, and financial ruin.
(Chalmers Johnson is the president of the Japan Policy Research Institute in California and author of Blowback: The Costs and Consequences of American Empire. This essay is an excerpt from his forthcoming book The Sorrows of Empire: Militarism, Secrecy, and the End of the Republic (New York: Metropolitan Books; and London: Verso).)
IRAQ AND THE COSTS OF WAR
By William D. Hartung
(Editor’s Note: Excerpted from a new special report available in full at http://www.fpif.org/papers/2004cost.html .)
Halliburton's role in Iraq has been deeply scrutinized in the past few months but its implications go far beyond one company or one conflict. The real issue at hand is determining how to best provide effective support for our men and women in uniform, at a reasonable cost, with transparency and accountability. That's true in Iraq, or Afghanistan, or the Philippines, or Colombia, or Kosovo, or Liberia, or anywhere else American military personnel are sent on short notice to face down tyrants or keep the peace.
Wars are costly undertakings. They almost always cost more than government officials claim they will. Yale economist William D. Nordhaus has suggested that governments have an incentive to understate the costs of conflict because “If wars are thought to be short, cheap, and bloodless, then it is easier to persuade the populace and the Congress to defer to the President.”
Even conflicts that appear at first to be relatively “cheap,” like the 1991 Persian Gulf War, often end up having substantial, hidden, long-term costs. In that conflict, the bulk of the $76 billion in direct war costs were paid for by U.S. allies, and U.S. combat deaths were relatively low, at 148 personnel lost. But more than a decade later, U.S. taxpayers are absorbing billions of dollars in costs for treating the service-related injuries and disabilities of the veterans of that conflict. More than one-third of the veterans of the 1990/1991 Gulf War--over 206,000 in all--have filed for service-related disabilities, and as of early 2003, more than 159,000 of those claims had been approved. This extraordinary “postwar casualty rate” puts the lie to the idea that the first Gulf War was either a cheap or easy victory.
Likewise, when former White House economic adviser Lawrence Lindsey suggested to the Wall Street Journal in September of 2002 that a U.S. intervention in Iraq could cost about 2% of our Gross Domestic Product--roughly $200 billion--the White House quickly dismissed his estimate. A few months later, they also dismissed Lindsey from his post as White House economic adviser. Roughly a year and a half after Lindsey made his prediction, and less than a year into the war in Iraq, his rough guess is beginning to look like a gross underestimate of the cost of intervening in Iraq. To date, U.S. taxpayers have committed roughly $180 billion to the buildup to war, the overthrow of Saddam Hussein's regime, and the ongoing occupation and rebuilding effort in Iraq . That doesn't count the costs of “buying allies” through special aid and trade deals, or any projections forward of how long we may have “boots on the ground” in Iraq. And it is unlikely in an election year that this administration will be forthcoming about future costs. It will pretend they don't exist--as with the failure to budget for war costs in the FY 2005 budget documents--or let them out in dribs and drabs as with the recently floated $50 billion supplemental request.
The biggest source of the underestimate in the case of this war was the notion among some in this administration that the war would be a “cakewalk,” and that once Saddam Hussein's regime had crumbled, building a functioning democracy in Iraq would be a relatively straightforward, inexpensive affair. In fact, Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz and AID administrator Andrew Natsios cited figures as low as $1.5 billion for Iraqi rebuilding, on the theory that most of the funds could come from the sale of Iraqi oil. This is particularly ironic when we consider that some of the charges of fraud and abuse relating to Halliburton have to do with overcharges in the importation of fuel into Iraq.
As for hidden human costs of this war, we are already past 500 deaths of our military personnel, and combat injuries are occurring at a much higher rate than in the first Gulf War. In addition, because it is an occupation and not an air war, there is a need to keep an eye on trauma-related issues for veterans returning from Iraq--the impact of seeing friends and fellow unit members killed and maimed, of serving in close combat, of seeing the impacts of the years of brutality that Saddam Hussein imposed on his own people, and so forth. U.S. combat personnel should get all the support they need to process these experiences, which will undoubtedly include needs for traditional health care as well as psychological and emotional support services. This will cost money, and it is not something that we can in good conscience cut corners on now that our troops are in harm's way in a very difficult situation in Iraq . If contracts with companies like Halliburton are “indefinite cost, indefinite quantity,” our social contract to meet the ongoing needs of the men and women of our armed forces--and their families--needs to be firm, fixed, enduring, and non-negotiable.
(William D. Hartung is an advisory committee member of Foreign Policy in Focus (online at www.fpif.org), Senior Fellow at the World Policy Institute and Director of the Arms Trade Resource Center. www.worldpolicy.org/projects/arms. He is also the author of How Much Are You Making on the War, Daddy?--A Quick and Dirty Guide to War Profiteering in the Bush Administration (Nation Books/Avalon Group). This article is adapted from testimony presented before the Senate Democratic Policy Committee on February 13, 2004.)
ARE THE TALIBAN REALLY “GONE”?
By Mark Sedra
(Editor’s Note: Excerpted from a new special report available in full at http://www.fpif.org/papers/2004taliban.html .)
America's got the watches, but the Taliban has the time” (BBC, January 16, 2004). This telling statement, attributed to a Taliban spokesperson in early 2004, illustrates a fundamental truth about the present situation in Afghanistan: The longer it takes to consolidate the peace and deliver a peace dividend to the beleaguered population, the greater the likelihood that antigovernment spoiler groups, whether they are the Taliban, Gulbuddin Hekmatyar's Hizb-i-Islami, or al Qaeda, will be able to unravel the nascent state-building process. The Taliban are acutely aware that sustained donor interest and military support will not last forever; donor fatigue, shifting budgetary priorities, and waning donor attention are inevitable. With the world's eyes firmly fixed on Baghdad--not Kabul--maintaining high levels of donor support for Afghanistan is an arduous task. An historic window of opportunity exists to stabilize and reconstruct this war-torn country, but with each passing day that window closes ever more slightly. Once that window is closed, there is no guarantee that a similar opportunity will arise again, for the Taliban and other fundamentalist groups will be waiting to take advantage.
Undoubtedly, the above-mentioned assessment would be considered alarmist by many actors close to the state-building process, particularly members of President Hamid Karzai's inner circle and the U.S. Pentagon. It was Karzai who declared at a February 26, 2004 joint news conference, with U.S. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld on the occasion of his one-day visit to Kabul, that the Taliban were defeated and “as a movement [it] does not exist any more.” “They are gone,” he said, attributing continuing violence to “common criminals,” as opposed to politically driven insurgents (AP, February 26, 2004). These were the boldest public statements made by President Karzai about the Taliban since he took office. Similarly dismissive of the group's capabilities, Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld stated: “I'm not seeing any indication the Taliban pose any military threat to Afghanistan.” Only a week earlier, one of Rumsfeld's top aides at the Pentagon, U.S. Undersecretary of Defense Dov S. Zakheim, contemptuously spoke of the “cowardly” nature of Taliban operations (AFP, February 22, 2004).
Such proclamations would normally arouse feelings of unbridled relief and joy among most Afghans and internationals working in Afghanistan--that is, if they did not contrast so sharply with recent events on the ground. More than 550 people have been killed over the past six months, making it the most violent period in the two years that have elapsed since the fall of the Taliban regime. Within twelve days, between February 14 and February 26, 2004, nine Afghan aid workers and one U.S. soldier were killed in separate incidents across the country. Perhaps what is most alarming about this recent spate of attacks are the tactics that have been employed. Since December 28, 2003, there have been four suicide attacks in Afghanistan, resulting in the deaths of eight people--six Afghan intelligence agents and two International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) peacekeeping soldiers. The evidence does not support the notion of an overwhelmed and defeated enemy.
(Mark Sedra is a research associate at the Bonn International Center for Conversion. He recently returned from Afghanistan, where he spent two months assessing the needs of the Afghan security sector on behalf of the UN and the Afghan government. He writes regularly for Foreign Policy in Focus (www.fpif.org).)
IT’S TIME TO ENGAGE, NOT ISOLATE, SYRIA
By Ronald Bruce St John
(Editor’s Note: Excerpted from a new global affairs commentary available in full at http://www.presentdanger.org/commentary/2004/0403syria.html .)
The newly minted Syria Accountability and Lebanese Sovereignty Restoration Act is a sad reminder of lessons-not-learned, almost three years into the war on terrorism.
The Act calls for President Bush to impose commercial and diplomatic sanctions on Syria until certain conditions are met. These include an end to support for terrorism, withdrawal of Syrian forces from Lebanon, and a freeze on development of banned weapons. Reminiscent of the 1996 Iran-Libya Sanctions Act, the Syrian version is a step backwards toward the future.
There is no argument Syria needs to evaluate many of its policies. These include support for militant Palestinian and Lebanese groups, like Hamas, Hizbollah, and Islamic Jihad, anti-Israeli factions Washington labels terrorist organizations. It should also end the occupation of Lebanon begun in 1976 and follow Libya’s example and renounce unconventional weapons programs.
Charges Syria hid Iraqi weapons of mass destruction and facilitated the movement of “foreign fighters” into Iraq are more controversial. Absent hard evidence, both claims are highly debatable and must be substantiated to be believed.
Syria also needs to open its economic and political system, as recent street protests in Damascus demonstrated. But it is instructive here to remember Syria’s reformers see the Bush administration’s hard-line policies as counterproductive. They condemn U.S. pressure, in addition to its presence in Iraq and support for Israel, arguing they slow prospects for change at home. Spokesmen for the protestors told the Arabic television station al-Jazeera the reform campaign was a purely domestic issue in Syria.
President Bashar al-Assad took office in mid-2000 amid widespread expectations of rapid economic and political change after years of repression and stagnation. Early liberalization measures, known as the Damascus Spring, were soon curtailed as the old guard of Syrian politics reasserted itself. The question today is how to encourage the Assad government to restart internal reforms and play a more positive international role.
Many of the issues we face today in Syria are similar to those faced in Libya and Vietnam over the past three decades. At the same time, Syria remains central to the Middle East peace process and promotion of democratic reform in the region. Consequently, it makes absolutely no sense to sideline Damascus, applying the failed policies of the past.
Instead of isolating Syria internationally, the Libyan and Vietnamese experiences tell us the Bush administration should be doing the exact opposite. Washington needs to engage Damascus with a policy of inclusion, encouraging and rewarding exchange. The dispatch of veteran diplomat Margaret Scobey as the new U.S. ambassador to Syria, five months after her predecessor departed, is a welcome step. Syria’s decision to free 130 political prisoners in February 2004 is another positive move.
Syria has responded to Washington’s saber-rattling with a counteroffensive for peace, an initiative supported by the UN. Rebuffed by Israel and the U.S., a renewal of Israel-Syria talks, supported by key regional players, like France and the U.S., remains a promising initiative and should be thoroughly explored. A frank, constructive dialogue, which targets legitimate policies of concern, is the optimum path to the reforms clearly needed in Syria.
(Ronald Bruce St John, an analyst for Foreign Policy in Focus (www.fpif.org), has published widely on Middle Eastern issues. His latest book on the region is Libya and the United States: Two Centuries of Strife (Penn Press, 2002).)
II. Letters and Comments
Conn Hallinan writes that "there is no question that the 1994 intervention was good for Haiti," thereby reinforcing the standard mainstream myth (also peddled recently by Amy Wilentz in a Nation piece which refers to the "good will" of the Clinton administration re Aristide) that Bubba Bill felt Aristide's pain and thus just had to help get him back to his people.
In fact, as Allan Nairn showed in stellar investigative work in the January 8/15, 1996 issue of the Nation, the U.S. continued to support death squad leaders even after they engineered Aristide's return. The return itself was organized to staunch the flow of refugees to Florida and to force Aristide to knuckle under to IMF and World Bank fiscal austerity programs, not because Washington suddenly did an about face and abandoned its consistent support for the worst elements of the Haitian ruling class.
FRAPH death squad leader Emmanuel Constant made an observation to Nairn that nicely sums up why thinking Clinton had good intentions on Haiti is more than a bit naive: "People say the C.I.A. was opposed to Clinton, but I don't think so. Clinton knew everything concerning me." (Source: http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/Global_Secrets_Lies/HaitiJan96_Nairn.html).
- Ben Terrell
A useful commentary to which I generally subscribe (except for the suggestion that Aristide resigned on his own the presidency), but one seemingly somewhat naive insofar as it does not reflect the imperial ambitions of the current administration. It is fine to say what should be, and what should have been done, but that does not solve the problem that this nation’s leaders, with unsurpassed military and economic power in their sails, willfully subvert international norms which they feel inhibit their freedom to control and influence. What is needed is active resistance to this administration, not suggestions to their good sense about what they should do. We are at a critical point in history, and academic suggestions to a deaf government won’t turn things around.
- Morton K. Brussel <brussel@uiuc.edu>
I am a researcher of the Kosovo conflict, having spent approximately a decade focusing on the region. I have now discovered that you called president Milosevic a "thug." Perhaps you have information other than the typical State Department/White House lies and distortions that allows you to repeat the rhetoric. If so, I would appreciate learning your reasoning for such a statement.
- Robert Rodvik <rodrob@dccnet.com>
I just read your article on Liberal Interventionism with respect to Haiti and the Balkans. I agree with your article 100% and congratulate you for it.
May I introduce myself, so that you may understand where I come from. I became a naturalized American citizen 50 years ago. I received a Ph.D. in Physics from the University of Chicago in 1959. I taught at Northwestern, the University of Chicago, and at the University of Illinois. I was researcher at Fermilab for 30 years. It is the last decade of the last century which made me staunch opponent of U.S foreign intervention and policies.
After reading your article a question came to mind. Did our leadership--Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, President Clinton, Secretary of Defense Cohen, Sandy Berger, and the rest--not know anything about the history of the Balkans and Yugoslavia in particular? Did they know even a little bit of the recent history of WWII?
Was the aim of destroying a communist country so paramount in their minds that they forgot any element of decency and humane attitude? I do not believe it was purposefully humanitarian intervention. It was only declared to be. There was some other agenda and I am searching to find out what it was. You rightly say that Iraq is primarily motivated by our need for oil. Is the potential oil line going trough Bulgaria, Macedonia, and Albania a possible cause?
- Drasko Jovanovic <DRASKOJ@aol.com>
Ben Terrell: Was the 1994 invasion good for Haiti? Of course. Allan Nairn thought so too, he just had no illusions about why Clinton invaded. Bill Clinton never felt anyone’s pain. His policies, both foreign and domestic, were unrelentingly savage. The invasion--pushed for by every progressive force in Haiti and the rest of the world--succeeded in reducing the level of death squad violence and allowed Aristide to disband the Haitian Army. These were “good” things by any measure. I clearly pointed out that the Clinton administration started destabilizing Aristide through the National Endowment for Democracy in 1996. Mr. Terrell conveniently ignores my attack on the Clinton administration’s prosecution of the Yugoslav War. I have been called lots of things, but “naïve” vis-à-vis Bill Clinton is a new one.
Morton Brussel says I “suggest” Aristide resigned the presidency on his own. I never wrote that. He was forced out by an American-armed and -financed combination of death squads and the traditional Haitian elite (who in terms of greed and uselessness can only be compared to the old Russian aristocracy). I also have no illusions that I am appealing to the “good sense” of this administration.
This administration is the closest thing we have seen to fascism in quite some time. Not the German variety, mind you (although there are people in the White House who would feel quite at home with double thunderbolts on their collars), but the Italian brand. The parallels are disturbing: Chauvinism; the intertwining of finance, industry, and the military; and a strong authoritarian bent. I am not suggesting these people represent the fascism of the death camps and gas chambers, which in any case, were a very German phenomenon. But Germany was only one of several fascist states, from Japan to Spain. Are we headed in that direction? I wish I were more confident we were not.
To Robert Rodvik: The Serbs were maneuvered into a war and thoroughly demonized by the U.S. and NATO. That said, Milosevic called up the furies of Serbian nationalism, and was fully aware that his Serbian allies were committing war crimes in Bosnia. It is true that the Kosovo Liberation Army provoked the Serbs on numerous occasions, but that does not excuse the wholesale expulsion of Albanians from Kosovo once the war started. It was not a political approach to the problem of Kosovo; it was the actions of a thug. That is what he was, and still is.
To Drasko Jovanovic: There is a long-standing story about an oil pipeline through the Balkans, but I have never been able to run it down. I think there were a number of agendas at work, including re-establishing the old Western European domination of Croatia. Remember that it was the precipitous recognition of Slovenia and Croatia by the Vatican, Germany, and the U.S. that helped ignite the Balkan civil war. I think it was also an effort to extend U.S. influence into the region, and to prepare the groundwork for making NATO into an international police force. It worked on all counts.
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