It seems so strange, twenty-seven years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, to be living through a new Cold War with (as it happens, capitalist) Russia.
The Russian president is attacked by the U.S. political class and media as they never attacked Soviet leaders; he is personally vilified as a corrupt, venal dictator, who arrests or assassinates political opponents and dissident journalists, and is hell-bent on the restoration of the USSR.
Once again as almost twenty seven years ago, NATO is faced with a deep-seated, soul searching existential issue or an internal threat. That’s right, not from an invasion by foes. It faces losing its very relevance or purpose as an organisation in the world.
Its survival is at stake in the present and uncertainty hovers over the military pact in the future. Here’s why. The Atlantic alliance was meant to in the words General Lord Ismay, NATO’s first Secretary General, “to keep the Russians out, the Americans in, and the Germans down.”
The word peacekeeping is like the word terrorism: it is meaningless on its own and able to be molded to serve the interests of a political clique. Like Alex P. Schmidt’s description of terrorism in The Routledge Handbook of Terrorism Research, peacekeeping “is usually an instrument for the attempted realization of a political…project that perpetrators lacking mass support are seeking.”1
US President Barak Obama took to three former enemy targets in Asia this year.
His mission in Vietnam was to sell “lethal weapons”. This comes after a 50 year embargo of selling it weapons, and after the US weapons industry had scored billions selling death tools to its government so that it could conduct the un-provoked war (1960-75). The cost in human lives: between 1.5 and 3.9 three million Vietnamese and 58,000 US aggressors.
Weapon sales are conditioned, naturally, on Vietnam respecting US-defined human rights.
The exoneration of a man accused of the worst of crimes, genocide, made no headlines. Neither the BBC nor CNN covered it. The Guardian allowed a brief commentary. Such a rare official admission was buried or suppressed, understandably. It would explain too much about how the rulers of the world rule.
The International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) in The Hague has quietly cleared the late Serbian president, Slobodan Milosevic, of war crimes committed during the 1992-95 Bosnian war, including the massacre at Srebrenica.
Donald Trump wants to keep us out of the country altogether. But Bill Clinton, former president and husband of a Democratic presidential nominee, does not mind us staying, as long as we, Muslims, behave ourselves.
Welcome to America where racial profiling is the country’s most popular idea, and where citizenship is now conditioned on blind obedience.
After having stoked the civil wars and violent dismantling of Yugoslavia of 1991-1995, the United States—with the help of the ICTY—stoked a crisis in Kosovo which it used to force a war against Serbia, a war which enabled the U.S.-led NATO bloc to occupy Kosovo and later separate it from Serbia, and left Serbia a crushed and subservient state. The construction and use of the ICTY to demonize Serbs was part of the war-making plan, as the ICTY called for refusing to negotiate a settlement with, and pursuing as criminals, Serb targets.
[H]istory is past politics, and politics is present history.
— Edward A. Freeman (November 18, 1880)
The uneven distribution of justice is the bane of any system that purports to be fair. The problems are made even more problematic when it comes to the issue of war crimes trials conducted by international tribunals.
Last Thursday, Radovan Karadžić, the Bosnian Serb leader of Republika Srpska during the Yugoslavian Civil Wars of the early 1990s, was convicted on all but one of 11 charges and sentenced to 40 years in prison. These comprised two counts of genocide; five counts of crimes against humanity, and four counts of violations of the laws or customs of war.
Diana Johnstone recently published a very good book on Hillary Clinton entitled Queen of Chaos (Counterpunch Books, 2015). Johnstone justifies the title through her convincing critical examination of Clinton’s performance as Secretary of State as well as her broader record of opinions and actions. But Clinton served under President Barack Obama, and the policies which she pushed while in office were of necessity approved by her superior, who worked with her in “a credible partnership”.1
