OPINION

Balkan Bill's sour legacy

Sunday, March 28, 2004

WASHINGTON: It is time for all good Democrats to come
to the aid of their party -- and avoid mentioning
certain countries of the world. They must defend the
political legacy of William Jefferson Clinton and,
with it, the legacies of Madeleine Albright (remember
Mad Halfwit?), Strobe Talbott and Hillary Rodham
Clinton.

No, it will not be necessary for these distinguished
folk to again step forward to defend their hero, Bill,
from charges of perjury, infidelity, theft and lying.
All that is required of them this March 2004 is to
avoid bringing up Serbia, Albania, Kosovo and
Macedonia. Better still, they can pretend that Bill
Clinton's legacy and policies for the region never
existed.

That legacy was of arson, looting and murder.

Last weekend, the United States, Britain, Finland and
Germany rushed a couple of thousand additional troops
to Kosovo's disoriented 17,000 U.N. peacekeepers. It's
the end of winter in Kosovo and the more than 2
million Albanian majority pitted itself for several
days against the handful of local Serbs. More than 30
Serbian churches and monasteries went up in flames as
some 40 Serbs were brutally killed, their homes looted
and the toll added to that of "Operation Matchstick."

But, why is the United States involved in the
political cesspit of Europe, the Balkins?

Diversions

It can't be because the Albanians once gave Hillary
Clinton their highest award for all she had done for
them in turning over Kosovo to their thugs. It can't
be because Mad Halfwit founded the Kosovo Liberation
Army to provide the drug and people smugglers with a
haven for war criminals. And it can't all be blamed on
Strobe Talbott because he was opening bottles of vodka
for Boris Yeltsin instead of settling the Croatian and
Bosnian wars.

No, it was merely part of Bill Clinton's legacy
building as a diversion from his dalliances with
Monica, Jennifer, Paula, Kathy, Juanita, Jilly, Tillie
and their aunties. He also rather fancied the title
"Bill of the Balkans," or even "Balkan Bill."

Balkan Bill's policies are now justified by him --
with Serbia treating Albanians in the same way as Nazi
Germany treated non-Aryans: "a vicious premeditated,
systematic oppression fueled by religious and ethnic
hatred." This has resulted in some 640,000 Serbians
becoming refugees and living in fear of pogroms for
five years, which continue to take place.

From the start, Balkan Bill got it wrong. He acted as
if each and every Serb were evil and any Albanian was
good. He kept complaining that Serbia was an
"aggressor," which implies the invasion or attack of
another country -- but remember its Kosovo -- or just
a province in Serbia. Maybe it was the Arkansian
language barrier.

Playing dominos

Next, Mad Halfwit and Bill of the Balkans developed
the domino theory: events in Kosovo might involve
Albania, Albania would bring in Bulgaria, then Greece
and then, and then. The very same domino theory that
Bill, Halfwit, Strobe and their buddies ridiculed when
it was uttered by Richard Nixon and Lyndon Baines
Johnson in relation to Southeast Asia. And we can
still remember the screams of disbelief when Ronald
Reagan used it regarding communist insurgencies in
Nicaragua, El Salvador and the Caribbean.

No matter. Balkin Bill planned for Kosovo, Albania and
Macedonia to become American protectorates, with money
initially coming through USAID and then from 40
percent of the royalties on the shipment of oil from
the Caspian Sea by way of the AMBO Pipeline which has
yet to be built. In the second stage, Kosovo would
merge with Albania creating a "Greater Albania,"
capable of also swallowing up Macedonia.

AMBO stands for the Albania, Bulgaria, Macedonia
Operating pipeline, which would be some 600 miles
long, running through mountains, earthquake zones and
serious natural risks like Albanian war lords, and
would eventually disgorge light crude shipped from the
Black Sea into tankers off the Albanian coast.

AMBO has two advantages for Washington. It makes
Bulgaria feel wanted as a very good friend and,
potentially, if it could get its act together, a full
member of NATO. The second feel-really-good factor is
that it would get oil out of the Caspian, totally
bypassing Iran.

During President George W. Bush's campaign for the
White House, responding to questions, he said that
American involvement in the Balkans was bad. Too bad
that he never had the chance to follow up and withdraw
troops before having to send military reinforcements
to Iraq. The very short shelf life of the Clinton
political legacy will not get much ink in the mass
media. The contrast between Democrat non-achievements
and George Bush's major achievement are truly
remarkable. The Bush team has shown that if this
country takes a blow it is willing to risk casualties
and fight back if necessary. No one can doubt that the
United States will fight back and ultimately prevail.

Dateline D.C. is written by a Washington D.C.-based
British journalist and political observer.

THE CLEVELAND PLAIN DEALER (OHIO, USA)

LETTERS

Absurd Kosovo policy has facilitated violence

03/26/04

I am still amazed by the idiocy of our foreign policy.
Five years ago, we launched a savage, 78-day bombing
campaign against the citizens of Yugoslavia (now
Serbia-Montenegro). This, despite the fact that our
own State Department had labeled the Kosovo Liberation
Army a terrorist organization. Yet we became their de
facto mercenary army. That blunder sent hundreds of
thousands of civilians fleeing NATO bombs.

Never mind that most of the Albanians living in Kosovo
were not even citizens, but emigres from Albania.
Ignore also that the KLA had been conducting
continuous, systematic terrorist raids on the Serb
civilians of that region. People whose birthright and
history in that region goes back more than 1,000 years
- five times longer than the United States has even
existed.

Now, five years later, more than 100 historic
Christian churches have been blown to bits by ethnic
Albanians, and thousands of civilians, mostly the
elderly and defenseless children, have been murdered
by Albanian Muslim extremists. Radical Albanians are
shooting at NATO troops, their "liberators," who are
trying to stop them from murdering Serbs. Yet we are
surprised at the level of violence happening today.
What, in God's name, were we thinking? We didn't stop
any "holocaust" or "ethnic cleansing"; we enabled it.

Stop the the bloodshed. Get the terrorists out of
Kosovo.

Nikola Djukich
Parma

New Kosovo Violence Worries Peacekeepers
March 28, 2004

By DANICA KIRKA, Associated Press Writer

PRISTINA, Serbia-Montenegro - Five years after
international forces took over Kosovo, a sudden and
sweeping spasm of violence has them worrying they are
being pushed back to square one.

The rampage by ethnic Albanian mobs through Serb areas
has dealt a stunning blow to the slow and painstaking
effort to reduce the presence of NATO (news - web
sites)-led peacekeepers and rebuild civilian
government.

Caught by surprise and stung by its failure to head
off the violence or quell it fast, the military is
overhauling operations.

It has taken back some powers it had ceded to the
United Nations (news - web sites) international police
force. Watchtowers, barbed wire and barricades are
going up again. Commanding officers across the
province are meeting ethnic Albanian leaders in
groups, demanding they exert their moral authority or
be held responsible for any further violence.

The two-day rampage in mid-March hit all the major
towns, leaving 28 dead, 600 wounded and hundreds of
homes and churches in ruins.

"We had started to trust them," Ljiljana Stajic, a
20-year-old Serb, said of the peacekeepers. "Now it's
back to 1999 - war."

Though the top U.N. official here, Harri Holkeri, has
said efforts to rebuild a multiethnic society are not
over, interviews with U.N. officials, diplomats and
other officials speaking on condition of anonymity
show a mission in uproar, shocked at the strength of
extremist elements of the ethnic Albanian population.

"In terms of Kosovo's prospects... (the violence) is
an absolute disaster," said Alex Anderson, the project
director in Kosovo for the International Crisis Group,
the Brussels, Belgium-based think tank.

Although the province has quieted down, attackers
ambushed U.N. police and killed two officers in
northern Kosovo last week, and NATO says it is
deploying 2,600 troops to augment the 18,500-strong
international peacekeeping force.

NATO and the United Nations took over in 1999 after
Slobodan Milosevic (news - web sites)'s crackdown, in
which an estimated 10,000 ethnic Albanians died. The
conflict ended when the Serbian leader accepted a
peace plan to stop NATO's 78-day bombing of his
country. Tens of thousands of Serbs fled Kosovo,
leaving about 100,000 in the midst of a population of
2 million ethnic Albanians.

But U.N. resolutions left the future of Kosovo
unresolved: although it's under U.N. control,
Serbia-Montenegro has sovereignty.

Ethnic Albanians have grown frustrated with this state
of limbo, and the failure of international officials
to deliver what they prize above all else -
independence. Now radical parties are tapping into
that anger.

Kosovo society "has lost hope that the international
bureaucrats can work out a serious plan," said Ylber
Hysa, head of Kosovo Action for Civic Initiative, a
think tank.

Swedish Brig. Gen. Anders Braennstroem's fury is
evident as he describes some of his soldiers narrowly
escaping death in the rampage, and he vows to meet any
further violence with force.

"I am going to protect the minorities that were nearly
killed and ethnically cleansed last week," he said.
"And I will use every means I have. I have 3,000
soldiers with weapons in their hands."

Weapons were used to stop the recent violence, but
both NATO and U.N. police sources suggest the response
next time will be more aggressive.

Although triggered by the deaths of two children who
were allegedly chased into a river by Serbs,
investigations show elements of organization in the
unrest. Buses ferried some rioters to staging points,
Western diplomats speaking on condition of anonymity
said, and Braennstroem said the way objects were
thrown at riot police smacked of prior training.

Some military officers, also speaking anonymously, say
they saw officers in the Kosovo Police Service - the
civilian police agency set up under international
guidance - standing by or sitting in their cars as
crowds burned homes.

Braennstroem wouldn't comment on that allegation. U.N.
mission spokeswoman Hua Jiang said any wrongdoing
would examined, but wouldn't spell out what
investigation, if any, was under way.

Stanka Kaliskic, 68, and her daughter Gordana, 42,
said at least one local policeman helped teenagers to
drag them from their home near Pristina, the capital.

The mother lifted her hospital gown to reveal breasts
and back blackened by the beating. "The entire world
took care of the ethnic Albanians. And for the Serbs?
Nothing," she said.

Mobs had already started fires when two Irish
officers, Capt. Ronan Dillon and Maj. David Hathaway,
arrived with seven other peacekeepers to evacuate
Serbs from their apartment complex in Pristina.

The rioters threw stones and fired small arms, but the
thinly stretched force went in anyway using directions
given by a Serb translator, Dillon said. Doors on most
of the apartments were open. People were screaming for
help.

Dillon said his force reclaimed eight buildings floor
by floor. A trail of red drops and a bloody handprint
led to a man whom they rescued and who survived to
thank them later.

The terrified Serbs, many of them elderly, got only a
few moments to collect their belongings. Then it was
down the stairs.

"If someone wasn't fast enough, I carried them," said
Dillon, 28.

He said the peacekeepers rescued 120 people that
night, 40 at a time in three trips in an armored
personnel carrier.

Days later, some of them returned home briefly under
escort. They scooped up teddy bears, dried soup -
whatever they could stuff in garbage bags in 15
minutes or less before being hurried away to an
evacuation center in a Serb enclave a few miles away.

It wasn't home. But it would for now, hopefully, be
safe.

THE DAILY TELEGRAPH (UK)

Albanians posed as Serbs to stoke ethnic fires in Kosovo

By Neil Barnett in Pristina
(Filed: 28/03/2004)

The murder of a United Nations policeman in Kosovo
last week was committed by ethnic Albanians who posed
as Serbs in an effort to cast their bitter rivals as
villains, the Telegraph has learned.

The UN policeman, from Ghana, and a local Albanian
police officer were killed when their car was sprayed
with bullets near the town of Podujevo, the centre of
Albanian resistance against the Belgrade government.

Kosovo, in which Serbs make up only about 10 per cent
of the population, is nominally part of Serbia and
Montenegro but has been administered by the local UN
mission since the war in 1999.

The ambush has heightened fears that the mob violence
against Serbs which recently broke out in the disputed
enclave will usher in a new campaign of attacks
against Nato Kosovo Force (Kfor) troops and the UN
mission by Albanian extremists impatient for Kosovo's
independence.

The UN car was hit after a man flagged it down at the
roadside. As the gunmen opened fire with Kalashnikovs,
they were heard speaking Serbian. According to a
senior security official, however, when one gunman was
shot by a survivor, he instinctively screamed in
Albanian: "I've been hit."

Afterwards the gunmen were forced to hijack a passing
Mercedes when their getaway car failed to start.
Security officials said that police officers gave
chase for several miles, exchanging fire with gang
members, but failed to capture them.

Soon after, however, Kfor troops raided a local
Albanian-owned farm where they found two Kalashnikovs
and a corpse with gunshot wounds, believed to be that
of the gunman hit in the attack. Four people were
arrested.

During the riots a fortnight ago in the towns of
Mitrovica and Pristina - the first serious unrest for
five years - 28 people died and 500 houses were
destroyed, as well as 42 Serbian Orthodox churches and
monasteries.

Major Tim Dunne, a Kfor spokesman, said that there was
evidence that the mob violence had been carefully
orchestrated. "We stopped numerous buses carrying men
aged 18 to 40 from going to Mitrovica," he said. The
troops believed that the men were being bussed in to
take part in the unrest.

The violence flared when three Albanian children
drowned after allegedly being chased into a river by
Serbs. Unrest quickly spread and, according to one UN
official, the "subsequent disturbances all over
Kosovo, and their prolonged nature, point to
widespread orchestration".

Doubts have also been cast over how the children came
to drown as suspicions grew that the blame had been
wrongly placed on Serbs. Allegations that they were
involved were made by a fourth child who survived, yet
during the violence a spokesman for the UN mission,
Derek Chapple, said that police had no conclusive
evidence. Last Wednesday, Mr Chapple was "moved to
other duties" on the orders of senior UN mission
officials, who are believed to think he had been too
frank.

Last week, after mainly British reinforcements
arrived, the streets of Kosovo were largely calm. With
more than 3,800 Serbs still displaced, however,
tensions remained. Major James Daniel, second in
command of the Royal Gloucestershire, Berkshire and
Wiltshire Regiment, said that his troops had been
"well received" by both communities.

HAARETZ (ISRAEL)

Last update - 02:16 29/03/2004
The chasers have become the chased
By Yossi Melman

Last Thursday, Dr. Krinka Vidakovic-Petrov was sitting in her office at
the Embassy of Serbia-Montenegro in Tel Aviv, trying to explain what has
been happening in Kosovo in the past few weeks. "There is ethnic
cleansing of the Serbs," she said. "Their Albanian neighbors are
threatening them, harming them and using methods of terror and
intimidation against them, and the world remains apathetic."

But even she was also aware of the ironic aspect of that day's events. A
few hours earlier, the Zeleznik Belgrade basketball team announced that
it was afraid to come to Israel for the second leg of the ULEB Cup
semi-final against Hapoel Jerusalem.

After making a few inquiries, Vidakovic-Petrov picked up her phone and
spoke with one of the team executives. She tried to persuade him that in
spite of security tensions in Israel following the assassination of
Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, the team should come for the game. It is unclear
just how much the conversation played a part, but this weekend Zeleznik
announced that it would be suiting up tomorrow for the game in
Jerusalem.

The brief phone call that interrupted a much longer interview drove home
the difficulty of classifying national conflicts, finding parallels
between them and defining terror and terrorists. A terrorist who
threatens one man is not necessarily a threat to his neighbor. When the
situation in Kosovo is examined, it is hard to ignore the parallels
between the conflict there and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Both
instances concern a national conflict that has religious elements. Both
are disputes over a common piece of land and have a long history of
violence, repression and dispossession, and an exaggerated sense of
self-righteousness.

And there are other analogies: here and there, international mediators
intrude, and here and there the communities live with the sense that the
world is hostile to them, and apathetic to their plight. Both here and
there, every little incident is liable to set off a large conflagration,
as happened two weeks ago in Kosovo.

There the recent flare-up began with the drowning of three Muslim
children in the Ibar River on March 17. A rumor quickly spread that the
children had fled from Serbians with dogs. No inquiry committee was able
to find any evidence of the claim. But the rumor generated an immense
outburst of rage, be it spontaneous or organized. In a single day, the
day after the children drowned, 20 Serbian churches and the homes of
about 400 Serbian families were destroyed. In the riots, at least 35
Serbs and several soldiers in the KFOR international peacekeeping force
were killed, and several hundred people were injured. The riots broke
out close to the fifth anniversary of the peace settlement in Kosovo.

"The incidents were neither spontaneous nor coincidental," says
Vidakovic-Petrov. "It is part of a systematic crusade by the Albanian
majority against the Serb minority in the province." She asserts that
this crusade has been underway for many months. "Four Serb children
drowned last summer in the Ibar - the same river that is now in the
headlines. But no one reported it. One of the aims of this organized
crusade is to put an end to the attempts at dialogue between my
government and the leaders of the Albanians in Kosovo."

Although the population of the province is predominantly
Muslim-Albanian, to Serbs, Kosovo merits the same sort of status that
Jerusalem has for Israelis - what Benjamin Netanyahu described as "the
bedrock of our existence." In the federated state of Yugoslavia, it was
an autonomous province within the Serbian Republic. Yugoslavia's
communist leaders tried to settle as many non-Muslims in Kosovo
(especially Serbs) as possible, in order to blur the province's Muslim
identity. But they failed at the task.

The venerated leader of Yugoslavia, Marshal Tito, paid a visit to Kosovo
in the 1970s, and instead of the enthusiastic welcome he was expecting,
he was met with hostility and demonstrations. Slobodan Milosevic, the
last leader of Yugoslavia before its breakup, chose Kosovo as a venue
for the Serbian nationalist speech that served as a prophecy of sorts of
the future Balkan wars. The event, on June 28, 1989, was held to mark
the 600th year since the Battle of Kosovo, in which the Serbs stopped
Ottoman forces, stemming their advance for several decades.

Not long after Milosevic's speech, Slovenia and Macedonia seceded from
the Yugoslav federation, practically without bloodshed. Once Croatia and
Bosnia-Herzegovina also withdrew, in a violent war, Yugoslavia continued
to exist in name only, aside from the republic of Serbia-Montenegro and
the province of Kosovo. Milosevic dispatched his soldiers and policemen
to Kosovo in order to put down - brutally - the uprising of the
Albanians. In 1999, NATO responded with aerial attacks on Belgrade that
went on for two and a half months, practically day and night. The
attacks caused the deaths of 2,500 Serbs and great destruction of
property, and forced Milosevic to remove his security forces from
Kosovo.

Liberators

The Kosovo multinational force (KFOR) entered the province in March
1999, with the objective of enforcing law and order. The force operates
under the aegis of the United Nations authority that was established in
the province. The KFOR troops were received as liberators by the two
million Albanian Muslims. One-quarter million Serbs fled and became
refugees. Only 100,000 Serbs remained in Kosovo. The province has its
own parliament, and a government that is headed by Ibrahim Rogova, who
is considered a relatively moderate leader. But the minimum demand of
all of the Muslim political forces in the country, moderates and
extremists alike, is that Kosovo will become an independent state. There
are also those who demand full unification between Kosovo and Albania,
in the hope of fulfilling the dream of a Greater Albania.

Over the years, the nationalist aspirations of Kosovo's Muslims have
strengthened. Whether locally initiated or as part of the systematic
activities of nationalist organizations, violence has increased.
Churches have been burned down. The Serbs have been forced to leave
their homes in cities, as they were subject to constant incitement and
vulnerable to attacks, and they are now concentrated in enclaves.

"We call them ghettoes," says Vidakovic-Petrov, flashing an ironic
smile. "The soldiers of the multinational force are protecting the
ghettoes, and until recently they escorted children to schools and
patients to hospitals. A few months ago, the UN authority decided that
the situation in Kosovo had calmed down and that there was no longer any
need for this sort of protection. This is obviously not true, and as
we've seen in the past few weeks, the situation has grown even worse."

Vidakovic-Petrov came to Israel in early 2002, after Milosevic was
thrown out of power in a quiet popular revolution in October 2000. Her
parents were diplomats, and she spent her childhood in Cuba during the
first years after Fidel Castro's revolution. She studied comparative
literature in university and wrote a doctoral thesis on the history of
the Judeo-Spanish community in Yugoslavia. After earning her Ph.D, she
taught at Belgrade's Institute for Literature and Arts. Her house in the
city was damaged in the NATO bombings. Since her arrival here,
Vidakovic-Petrov has tried to bring to the attention of the Israeli
public the complex situation in the Republic of Serbia-Montenegro, and
especially in Kosovo.

The most recent riots are undermining what's left of her optimism. "Five
years ago, when the current settlement was achieved, the international
community committed to contributing funding for rebuilding the homes of
the quarter-million refugees that fled Kosovo. But very few of these
promises have been kept, and the money is not coming. If the
international community doesn't come to its senses, not only will this
prevent the return of the Serb refugees that according to the agreement
would return to their homes, it would also cause the exodus of the
100,000 Serbs still remaining in the province. That would complete the
ethnic cleansing."

This is one of the ironic aspects in the gloomy history of the Balkan
wars. Early on, the international community accused Milosevic and his
henchmen of war crimes, including ethnic cleansing in Bosnia and Kosovo.
Now there is a risk that the Serbs in Kosovo might find themselves
facing a similar danger.

After the latest spate of riots, KFOR announced the reinforcement of its
forces by an additional 2,000 troops, to maintain order and calm
tensions. Javier Solana, the EU's top foreign policy official, visited
Kosovo last week and was astounded at the extent of the destruction and
the atmosphere of hatred.

Solana knows that the EU has to find a settlement for Kosovo. The
international community refuses to allow the province to gain
independent statehood, for fear that this might lead to a wave of
irredentist demands by Albanian minority groups in Macedonia and of
Macedonians in Belgrade and maybe by Hungarians in Romania. The problem
is that diplomats in Europe do not have a real solution to the
entanglement.

"My government's preferred solution," said Vidakovic-Petrov, "is to
decentralize the Albanian rule in Kosovo and grant autonomous
authorities to the Serb minority. In my opinion, this is the only way to
protect the lives of the Serbs and to guarantee then any sort of
security."

THE AUSTRALIAN

OPINION

Imre Salusinszky:

Balkans - the war that dares not pronounce its name

29mar04

POLJE, Monday - The renewed outbreak of violence between Kosovo's
Albanian Muslim majority and its ethnic Serb minority has shattered the
fragile peace of people who can't follow the politics of the Balkans.

The re-emergence after five years of Europe's main Christian-Muslim
conflict has also reignited fears of ethnic cleansing and of people in
English-speaking countries having to try and pronounce the names of
cities such as Srbica, Gorazde and Kragujevac.
But the biggest danger in a collapse of Kosovo's delicate ethnic balance
would a "domino effect" by which people in southern Kosovo would be
forced to leave their homes, and then people in London, New York and
even Sydney would be forced to pretend at dinner parties that they had
the faintest idea of what these primitive peoples were actually arguing
about.

Of immediate concern in diplomatic circles was the possible impact the
renewed fighting could have on the trial, at The Hague, of former
Serbian president Slobodan Milosevic, unless he was actually the guy who
beat Pat Rafter at Wimbledon three years ago. Serbian Prime Minister
Vojislav Kostunica was quick to warn the UN that the present formula for
running Kosovo cannot work, nor be understood by those who have not
devoted at least a decade of their lives to full-time study of the
ancient grudges of the Serbs and Albanians.

The international community has made repeated attempts to render the
Balkans conflict easier to follow. UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan said
last night the Security Council would convene in New York on Wednesday
to consider Kostunica's request and whether he was the same guy that
used to team up with Goran Ivanisevic in the doubles. However, it was
later confirmed that this was Slobodan Zivojinovic.

Previous solutions to the problems in the Balkans have included a propos
al to "cantonise" Kosovo and to make the conflict slightly less
confusing by banning the use of hyphens in the names of participating
countries, such as Bosnia-Herzegovina.

The history of conflict in the Balkans is long, bitter and less likely
to be understood by ordinary humans than the most advanced theorems of
interplanetary physics.

Kosovo has been under UN control since 1999, when a complete inability
to understand which countries supported which ethnic groups led NATO to
bomb Serbian strongholds such as Cevapcici, which later turned out to be
those miniature spicy sausages served as an entree with finely chopped
onions.

The fighting in Kosovo came about when the former communist federation
of Yugoslavia collapsed into a plethora of small irrelevant nations that
proceeded to swap names at will and be led by men with names such as
Milo Djukanovic, Momcilo Perisic and Zdravco Micevic - although the last
of these might be the bouncer charged in connection with the death of
cricket legend David Hookes.

International observers agree that a key condition of a comprehensive,
and remotely comprehensible, outcome would be the abandonment by Serbia
and Montenegro of one of its two names.

While the fact that this country has two names, joined by a conjunction,
is considered provocative enough, what makes the situation even more
inflammatory is that both Serbia and Montenegro continue to operate
under their individual names as well. Whether there also still exists a
country called "Yugoslavia", most recently observed as another
collective term for Serbia and Montenegro, is not be to be understood.

The new violence in Kosovo began last week when, for reasons nobody who
is not directly involved could possibly hope to understand, two ethnic
Albanian children drowned in the Ibar river, which cuts through the
divided city of Mitrovica and may be easily confused with the name of
the Macedonian national airline.

Meanwhile, experts were last night attempting to establish whether the
words "Republika Srpska" on an atlas of the region indicates a separate
country, or simply a region of Bosnia-Herzegovina bordering Croatia.
They were optimistic that, if it turned out to be a province, the
proliferation of tiny semi-fictitious countries that nobody has ever
heard of could be temporarily stayed.

Unfortunately, it appears that this issue, like everything else about
the conflict in the Balkans, will remain permanently mired in violence
and closed off to all human understanding.

SWANS, Monday, March 29, 2004

Safer, Stronger, More Democratic
Kosovo, Iraq, And The Heavens

by Gilles d'Aymery

    "Progress, far from consisting in change, depends on retentiveness. When
change is absolute there remains no being to improve and no direction is set
for possible improvement: and when experience is not retained, as among
savages, infancy is perpetual. Those who cannot remember the past are
condemned to repeat it. In the first stage of life the mind is frivolous and
easily distracted, it misses progress by failing in consecutiveness and
persistence. This is the condition of children and barbarians, in which
instinct has learned nothing from experience."
    -George Santayana, The Life of Reason, Volume 1, 1905

From one administration to the other, whether Democrat or Republican, the
same patterns repeat themselves ad nauseam. Similar tall tales, similar
triumphal statements in spite of failed and destructive policies, and
similar disastrous consequences keep recurring. If this looks like a
misguided statement, look again.

"There is not much left in this village [Svinjare, Kosovo], writes Nicholas
Wood in The New York Times ("Kosovo Smolders After Mob Violence," March 24,
2004, A8) "Every Serbian house has been burned -- all 136 of them. [...] The
village was among dozens of Serbian communities across Kosovo attacked by
ethnic Albanians over two days of violence last week, during which United
Nations officials now say 28 people died. More than 400 Serbian homes were
ruined, 30 churches were destroyed and 11 damaged..." [That's just an
addition to the Serb exodus of 250,000 just after the end of hostilities in
1999 and the destruction of over 100 churches and monasteries.]

These pogroms -- "Kristallnacht is under way in Kosovo," said a UNMIK
official -- received little coverage in the US main media. See the reports
written by Nebojsa Malic, "Kosovo Burning" (March 20, 2004) and "Rummaging
Through the Ashes" (March 25, 2004). They tell the story and review the
press coverage. No need to duplicate his work.

Sure enough, Officialdom promptly reminds us of the past -- the official
past, that is. Nicholas Wood again: "There were mirror-image scenes in
Kosovo just under five years ago. Then, hundreds of villages were burned as
Serbian security forces sought to expel the majority ethnic Albanians --
some 1.8 million people -- from the territory. The United States government
estimates that up to 10,000 Albanians were killed in massacres by the
Serbian police and paramilitaries."

All these assertions have long been debunked time and again for what they
really are and were: disinformation, propaganda to launch yet another
illegal war without UN authorization....You know, Iraq, yellow cake, nuclear
program, WMD, link to al Qaeda....Nothing new under the sky. Anything will
do to keep our "warfare economy" humming for the benefits of the few, paid
by the many.

It Was Then

Remember the field of the black bird? It was five years ago, in 1999. A
Democrat, Bill Clinton, was occupying the White house. A year earlier he had
ordered a military strike against Iraq. There was also a strike against the
Sudan and Afghanistan. Before that, it was Bosnia; and it was Somalia. It's
real hard to keep track of these things, even their chronology. Memory's
short; life goes on.

Still, remember Clinton's speech at the end of the conflict, after 78 days
of relentless bombing? It was June 10, 1999. Mr. Clinton was sitting in the
Oval Office, facing the camera. He said: "I can report to the American
people that we have achieved a victory for a safer world, for our democratic
values and for a stronger America."

A victory...for a safer world...for our democratic values...for a stronger
America...

I wrote at the time:

    A victory? One million refugees, unfathomable destruction of civilian
infrastructure, exorbitant cost for waging an undeclared war on a sovereign
country that pales with the future cost of reconstruction, thousands killed
and maimed, exacerbated hatreds, and a compromise that could have been
reached through diplomacy and in place of the now infamous Rambouillet
ultimatum. Victory when none of the initial objectives, except for the
destruction of an entire region, has been achieved? Now if destruction in
and of itself is a measure of victory, then we certainly can be proud of our
actions. It took almost 80 days for the mightiest armada in history, backed
by the taxes of 600 million Westerners, to bomb a country of 11 million
people, impoverished by close to a decade of harsh economic sanctions, into
negotiating a compromise relatively close to what its government had
initially offered. What a victory, indeed!

    For a safer world? To which world is Mr. Clinton referring? Our schools
patrolled by armed security guards? Our walled suburbs? Afghanistan?
Azerbaijan? Kashmir? Cyprus? Tibet? Angola? Sudan? Sierra Leone? Rwanda?
Palestine? Ethiopia? Kurdistan (part of Turkey, Syria and Iraq)? Should we
ask China, India, Russia and myriad smaller countries whether they feel
safer today, now that we have "prevailed" upon a sovereign democracy? In
what world are Mr. Clinton and his advisers living? Dreamland or bunkerland?
Or both? What is the next country to be invaded for our safer world to
perdure? Kazakstan, so that, in the name of humanitarianism, we can
appropriate the Caspian oil riches?

    For our democratic values? We have flouted practically all international
and national laws on the book (Geneva Convention, NATO's own charter, the
War Powers Act, the United Nations, etc.). We have attacked a sovereign
country, a parliamentarian democracy. We have intentionally bombed civilian
populations and civilian infrastructure (what do you think was the meaning
of NATO's statement, the morning after the tentative agreement was reached,
that the alliance would scale back its bombing to strictly military
targets?). Errand ordinance struck Macedonia, Albania, Bulgaria. We have
bombed diplomatic missions and an embassy. What kind of democracy do such
values reflect? Goliath? The Philistines?

    For a stronger America? Which America? The 1.4 million children in
poverty, the American Indians, the homeless, the famed middle-class that is
serenely indebting itself into oblivion? The country that spends more on
jails and prisoners than on education? The over 40 million inhabitants that
do not carry health insurance? The Black and Hispanic communities that are
constantly hounded by our police state? Or our military-industrial complex,
our corporate and financial robber-barons, for the 1 percent of the
population that largely controls the entire country? Which America, indeed?
(See, "Staggering Aftermath," June 13, 1999.)

It is Now

Five years later, March 2004, Serbia is in shambles, Kosovo mired in
violence, Bosnia more divided than ever, the Balkans a boiling cauldron,
their peoples ravaged by increasing poverty, international troops stuck
there for the foreseeable future...and Mr. Clinton and his acolytes enjoy
their millionaire lives thanks to book contracts, speaking fees, corporate
board memberships, and the like -- all impressive results, undoubtedly.

Meanwhile, another white man occupies the White House. He, too, launched
unnecessary wars against two small countries that had never attacked the
U.S. He, too, used disinformation and propaganda to rally the country, whose
thirst for vengeance after 9/11 rivaled the lynching mobs of yesteryears,
behind his aggressive and ruinous policies. He, too, talks about victory, a
safer world, democratic values, and a stronger America.

So, what is victory this time? NATO is bogged down in Afghanistan; American
forces, their morale run down, are bleeding in Iraq; the country itself is
on the verge of disintegration and civil war; its infrastructure is in
disrepair due to lack of funds and constant sabotage (aka resistance to the
occupiers); over 10,000 Iraqi civilians (and counting) are dead, all to
remove a non existent threat... A triumph, really!

A safer world? Perhaps we should ask the Spaniards, the Indonesians, the
Moroccans, the Turks, the Saudis, the Iraqis themselves, about their own
idea of a safer world... By the same token, perhaps we could also ask the
fear-laden, paranoid American people how they feel about their safety,
without even accounting for the economic part of the equation. At least, it
would seem that we have secured the Caspian oil riches and are in the
process of adding the Iraq loot to our treasure. Don't worry, be happy: our
SUVs are secure!

Oh yes, democratic values: Florida 2000, anyone? That was a truly remarkable
example of these cherished values, wasn't it? Once again, we have flouted
practically all international and national laws on the book; we attacked a
country that had never attacked us; we are occupying a nation without any
international mandate; we are looting its resources in all impunity (through
so-called privatizations); we are bribing "our SOBs" on a monthly basis
(Chalabi, et al.); the entire world, repeat, the entire world, but the USA,
knows that the current administration exaggerated, distorted, possibly
fabricated its rationale to attack Iraq... Democratic values, really?

Naturally, America is stronger, right? Here is a short quiz: A) Do we have
more or fewer children in poverty? B) Do we have more or fewer health-care
uninsured people? C) Do we have more or less ballooning deficits? D) Do we
have more or fewer unemployed workers? E) Do we have more or less police
interference in our daily lives? F) Do we have more or fewer social
services? G) Do we have more or less military expenditures? H) Do we have
more or less topsoil remaining in America; and forests; and any natural
resources you can think of (think of the aquifers)? I) Is Global warming
abating? And beside the center -- that is, us, us, us (after all, we are
always on the ready to impose our views to the world) -- J) is the 2/3 of
the world living in abject poverty with little or no health, education,
food, water, any better? K) Last but not least, are the wealthy poorer and
the poor wealthier?

[Answer: a) more; b) more; c) more; d) more; e) more; f) fewer; g) more; h)
less; i) no; j) no; k) no (actually senior executive compensation was higher
in 2003 than in 2000). After thought: Did you notice how your $300 federal
tax rebate went up in smoke at the gas pump in the past month or so? But,
hey, ExxonMobil announced a 63% jump in profit for the last quarter. The
company's profit in 2003 was a record $21.51 billion, compared to $11.46
billion in 2002 (source, dallas.bizjournals.com, January 26, 2004).]

Can't get better than that, can it?

There is Always a Tomorrow

We can always count on Long John K., the defender of the poor and the
orphans, for offering, if elected, his own take on a safer world, democratic
values, and a stronger America. After all, he is calling for 40,000
additional US military personnel to be deployed to Iraq (you know, the
"solemn obligation," the "we cannot fail" mantra), and is fully prepared, in
his own words, "to do what is necessary to defend the United States of
America, and that includes the unilateral deployment of troops if
necessary."

As I recall, Kerry voted for Bosnia, Kosovo, Afghanistan and Iraq. Better
ask which military intervention has not received his vote... (He voted
against Gulf War I.) And if his not-so-veiled threats against President Hugo
Chavez of Venezuela (see his March 19, 2004 Statement on Venezuela on his
Web site <http://www.johnkerry.com/pressroom/releases/pr_2004_0319d.html>)
are an indication of a future Kerry Administration we sure can expect a
victory speech in the offing.

As an old friend wrote in May 1999, "I feel that after this war things will
never be the same. We have opened Pandora's Box and no one knows what we
will end up finding." Sadly, "things" look very much alike. It was that war,
replaced today with this war, till tomorrow's war -- but there is no
intention and interest to put the lid back on Pandora's Box. This is Heaven
on Earth, after all, and war is good for business and the decision-makers!

Obviously, with such bi-partisan record of repeated "successes," who needs a
Ralph Nader?

Gilles d'Aymery is Swans' publisher and co-editor.

REUTERS ALERTNET

27 Mar 2004 12:01:03 GMT
U.N. envoy says Kosovo status not to be rushed

HELSINKI, March 27 (Reuters) - Rushing a decision on Kosovo's status
would be giving in to the violence which rocked the United Nations
protectorate last week, the U.N Kosovo governor told a newspaper on
Saturday.

"The vagueness of the national status of Kosovo is a strain on people.
Various nationalistic movements see this kind of a situation as
insulting," Harri Holkeri, the chief U.N. envoy in Kosovo, told Finnish
daily Helsingin Sanomat.

But a quick decision was not the answer. "That would equal to giving in
to this violence," Holkeri said.

Clashes between Kosovo Albanians and Serbs last week left 28 dead,
hundreds injured and forced some 3,600 Serbs to flee. The Albanians,
blamed for the anti-Serb violence, want independence for Kosovo from
Serbia.

Holkeri's comments were an apparent response to former U.S. ambassador
to the United Nations Richard Holbrooke who said this week the Kosovo
violence was predictable as the international community had been too
slow deciding its final status.

Holbrooke said he had told Holkeri as far back as October to take action
to accelerate the status talks and warned that if the delay continued,
violence would escalate.

The U.N., together with the United States and the European Union, will
decide whether Kosovo has met democratic standards before determining
its final status.

Holkeri told the paper the U.N. needed to change and renew its strategy,
but did not say how.

"This multi-ethnicity is not working as planned," he said.

Kosovo is legally a province of Serbia, but has been a U.N. protectorate
since June 1999 after 11 weeks of NATO bombing forced out Serb troops
and ended their repression of Albanians during an Albanian separatist
uprising.

Its unresolved final status is the subject of bitter dispute between
independence-seeking Albanians and Serbs who say the province could be
granted autonomy, but only under the sovereignty of Serbia and
Montegegro.

Monday, March 29, 2004 - Page A13

Don't liberate and leave

Security, time and serious resources, over the long haul, are the keys to
nation-building, say international specialists DAVID MALONE and SIMON
CHESTERMAN

By DAVID MALONE and SIMON CHESTERMAN

As Iraq prepares for self-government on June 30, the 10th anniversary of
Operation Uphold Democracy in Haiti -- which failed to lead to lasting
stability or prosperity -- is a sobering reminder that there are few
shortcuts in peace-building.

The current rush to transfer power in Iraq, and to stage elections in
Afghanistan seems geared more to the U.S. electoral schedule than to
political reality on the ground. President George W. Bush needs to
demonstrate tangible achievements soon in one or both countries if he is to
convince American voters that such military ventures are worth the human and
financial cost.

But nation-building takes longer than a U.S. election cycle. East Timor
achieved independence in a little more than two years, but it was relatively
stable and has a population about a 30th the size of Iraq's. It remains
desperately poor. The past week's violence in Kosovo shows that ethnic
strife has not disappeared from the Balkans, and this is five years after
NATO's intervention to protect Kosovars from the depredations of Slobodan
Milosevic. Bosnia has been under international administration for more than
eight years and there is still no clear exit strategy beyond vague hopes for
a stronger European Union role in the future. Indeed, political life in
Bosnia has been further polarized by the many elections foreseen in the
Dayton accord, with no multiethnic parties and little prospect of
reconciliation.

Canada, the United States, the European Union and several Latin American
countries made significant investments in democracy in Haiti, by restoring
President Jean-Bertrand Aristide to power in 1994, reversing the coup d'état
against him in 1991. The United Nations was charged with training a new
police force, and more than $2-billion (U.S.) was spent on various
international efforts in support of economic development and security --
until 1997, after which Haitian politics curdled. Ineffectual international
pressure on Haiti's political elites to compromise over policy and
power-sharing in the national interest got nowhere, and the police, though
more effective and less brutal than the forces they replaced, fell prey to
political manipulation and to the temptations of drug smuggling.

International commitment to progress in Haiti was undermined by short
attention spans in various capitals and by infighting in Washington, where
many Republicans saw Mr. Aristide as a leftist demagogue. They constrained
funding for Haiti, largely tying former U.S. president Bill Clinton's hands.
After the 2000 elections, Haiti fell off the radar screen altogether in
Washington (and consequently, in other capitals). Without political energy
from key member states, the UN and the Organization of American States could
achieve little. Does a similar regression into international indifference
beckon for Afghanistan and Iraq?

The desire for quick results in peace-building is understandable but
dangerous. It can lead to jerry-built administrative and political
compromises that prove unsustainable, even counterproductive, over time. It
took one of the younger, female delegates to Afghanistan's recent
constitutional loya jirga to point out that the Afghan peace process
initiated at Bonn in 2001 had put warlords into power.

In neither Afghanistan (outside Kabul) nor Iraq (outside the Kurdish
territories) is security on offer. Without security, it is hard to generate
or sustain economic development, and without economic development and the
jobs it provides for demobilized (but still heavily armed) soldiers, the
risks of a return to violence are great, as we have seen in Haiti. Foreign
military interveners soon tire of providing security because, as in Iraq, it
can involve serious risks and because soldiers do not like policing roles.
Serious disarmament is rarely pursued. Rhetoric about disarmament in Haiti
was stirring, but action feeble. In 1994, a U.S. force of nearly 14,000
declined to disarm thuggish local bands because of the risks involved. It
would be surprising if a much smaller international force now undertook
serious disarmament.

What we see is a disconnect between genuinely well-intentioned policy
statements by Western governments and the reality of building peace. This
rhetoric, often echoed in UN Security Council resolutions, sometimes bears
no relation to the actual needs of effective peace-building: security, time
and serious resources spent over a period of years, rather than the months
in which a crisis may dominate the news media.

Of the countries we discuss here, the medium-term prognosis for Iraq is the
most positive, if civil war can be avoided in months ahead -- a big if. Iraq
is oil-rich, had developed into an advanced society until Saddam Hussein
took over, has experience of technological progress and higher education and
was never a failed state. Afghanistan and Haiti, on the other hand, possess
none of the rudiments of successful economic and social development, or any
recent experience of responsible governance that might serve as fertile soil
for peace-building.

We often hear it argued that if only the UN were in charge in Iraq, the
situation would be better. We wonder. There's no doubt that the Coalition
Provisional Authority made some serious mistakes in administering Iraq.
Three of the most egregious errors -- failing to provide for emergency law
and order, disbanding the Iraqi army and blanket de-Baathification -- ran
counter to lessons from previous operations. But the greatest mistake by
U.S. planners may have been the assumption that previous UN nation-building
efforts achieved mixed results because of UN incompetence, rather than
because of the inherent contradictions in building democracy through foreign
military intervention and the difficulty of the tasks involved. This
knowledge inspires considerable humility in the higher reaches of the UN,
where there is no desire for lead roles on Iraq.

It is the United States that now wants the UN more heavily involved.
Legitimacy and success are what the United States has been seeking in Iraq,
but its nation-building project there has been driven excessively by its
national interests, by fantasies about what and how Iraqis think, and by
domestically driven U.S. timetables. That has been rough on its
international allies on the ground, and has not helped its global diplomacy.
The fight against terror has lost focus, with the world's most powerful
nation often also appearing the most frightened. Achievable military
objectives have sometimes been supplanted by politically ambitious ones (for
example, democracy throughout the Middle East), leading to policy confusion.

President Bush sounded a conciliatory note in addressing the need for better
co-ordination and consensus-building among allies last week. He has returned
to the UN for help in managing Iraq's fractious politics. The U.S. election
campaign and developments on the ground in Iraq have forced a focus on
results over ideology. All of this is to the good, and Washington's
disposition to work with its allies on Iran and North Korea suggests more
than just an overstretched U.S. military. It also may mean that the tensions
within U.S. foreign policy - between impulses at once isolationist,
exceptionalist, unilateralist and multilateralist - are yielding to a more
palatable and, hopefully, more productive mix. This is good for the United
States and its allies, but also for the nation-building projects that
require partnership as much as they need leadership.

David Malone, a former Canadian ambassador to the United Nations, is
president of the International Peace Academy. Simon Chesterman is executive
director of the Institute for International Law and Justice at New York
University.

ANTIWAR, Monday, March 29, 2004

Behind the Headlines
by Justin Raimondo
Antiwar.com

Against All Enemies
Read it, and weep

It isn't just politics that has driven Richard Clarke's Against All Enemies
to number one on the bestseller list: this is one rip-roaring story, and it
opens with a bang. It's September 11, 2001, and Richard A. Clarke,
counter-terror "czar," is right at the center of the action. While POTUS is
in flight from Washington, and the Vice President is secured in his bunker,
Clarke sits in session with his counter-terrorism team, directly managing
the crisis. Evacuate the White House. Ground air traffic. Secure landmarks:
Sears Tower, Disney World, the Golden Gate Bridge. Oh, and don't forget the
Liberty Bell. It is all the more gripping because we know it's real: and, in
reading this account, the reader relives those moments from inside the
kernel of power. It's quite a view.

Clarke gets to say stuff like "over and out," and his team of tough-talking
counter-terror experts is straight out of Central Casting: Bob Cressey, who
once "drove the darkened streets of Mogadishu at night in a pick-up truck
with a 9 mm strapped to his hip, listening to the gunfire rippling around
town"; Lisa Gordon-Hagerty, a stylish can-do blonde whose knowledge of WMD
and training with Navy Seals and Delta Force owes more to Hollywood than the
Department of Energy. Cofer Black is especially good as "a hard-charging,
get-it-done kind of CIA officer who had proved himself in the back alleys of
unsavory places." The tragic hero is played by John O'Neill, Clarke's
closest friend in the FBI: obsessed by Al Qaeda and driven out because he
didn't fit the "narrow little mold that Director Louis Freeh wanted for his
agents," O'Neill became security director of the World Trade Center and died
in the cataclysm he had long feared.

At the center of it all stands the somewhat alienated, slightly obsessive
Clarke, whose early interest in Osama bin Laden becomes a fixation. In the
events of the past decade, seen through the author's eyes, the pattern of
terror slowly materializes out of the intelligence mist. Clarke and his
colorful counter-terrorist crew begin to develop a comprehensive overview of
the threat posed by the Al Qaeda network long before the rest of the
government catches on.

It is shocking to read that, before 9/11, the counter-terrorist chief had
never been allowed to brief President George W. Bush on the threat posed by
Bin Laden. His proposed presidential directive to "eliminate" Al Qaeda had
been stuck in the labyrinthine halls of the national security bureaucracy,
disdained by neocons so focused on Iraq that even in the wake of 9/11 they
complained, as Paul Wolfowitz put it to Clarke, "I just don't understand why
we're beginning by talking about this one man bin Laden."

It didn't help when Clarke explained that these were the bad guys behind
9/11. Wolfowitz would have none of it. To Clarke's incredulous horror,
Wolfowitz gave a spiel touting the crackpot theories of Laurie Mylroie. A
writer, Ms. Mylroie maintains that Saddam Hussein was responsible for the
1993 attack on the World Trade Center, as well as the Oklahoma City bombing,
and - who knows? - maybe even global warming. 9/11 couldn't have occurred
without a state sponsor, averred Deputy Defense Secretary with his usual air
of smug certitude, and that would have to be Iraq.

We're in for another shock as Clarke relates how quickly the focus turned
away from Bin Laden and toward Saddam Hussein. By the morning of 9/12
Wolfowitz was arguing that Iraq, and not Al Qaeda, was the main enemy and
the probable perpetrator of the terrorist attacks, while all credible
intelligence pointed to Bin Laden.. "By the afternoon on Wednesday,
Secretary Rumsfeld was talking about broadening the objectives of our
response and 'getting Iraq.'" Shoot, Rummy bawled, "there's no decent
targets in Afghanistan!"

Surely he's joking, thought Clarke. But nobody was laughing, least of all
the President, who agreed that we needed "regime change" in Afghanistan as a
"first stage." The second stage, however, was conceived by Wolfowitz,
Rumsfeld, and in the presidential imagination at that same moment, shortly
after the second airliner hit the twin towers, and well before they both
collapsed. Iraq was next.

Clarke was incredulous. Such a course, he writes, "would be like our
invading Mexico after the Japanese attacked us at Pearl Harbor" - not merely
counterintuitive but downright nonsensical, and dangerously contrary to
American interests.

But by the time 9/11 rolled around, the already dispirited Clarke had long
since given up on convincing the Bush administration to take the fight
against terrorism seriously enough to home in on Bin Laden and his allies
worldwide. From that moment of incredulity, as he contemplated the
ideologically-driven blindness of Wolfowitz and Rumsfeld, the author flashes
back two decades to the real beginning of the story.

Clarke's chapter on the history of U.S. intervention in the Middle East,
from Reagan on, illustrates the principle of what Chalmers Johnson has
deemed foreign policy "blockback." He illustrates the unintended
consequences of blocking with Iraq against Iran, tilting toward Israel, and,
most fatally of all, creating and supporting the Mujahideen "freedom
fighters" in Afghanistan, who would later evolve into Al Qaeda. Although
Clarke says that he thinks Reagan was right to intervene, he refutes himself
in his subsequent analysis of the massive problems created by our strategy
of "rollback"

Clarke traces the trail of terror through the 1993 World Trade Center
bombing, the Oklahoma City terror attack, the Khobar Towers blast, the
downing of TWA flight 800, the Atlantic Olympics bombing, the attacks on
U.S. military trainers in Riyadh, and a failed plot to take out New York
landmarks, as the shadow of Al Qaeda lurks in the background. When Bin Laden
is expelled from Saudi Arabia and takes up residence in Sudan, the Balkans
become the worldwide rallying point of a burgeoning Islamo- terrorist
movement: "What we saw unfold in Bosnia," reveals Clarke, "was a guidebook
to the Bin Laden network, though we didn't recognize it as such at the
time." With the complicity of Bosnia's Muslim government, Iranian arms and
Osama bin Laden's legions poured into the Euro-Muslim sanctuary: President
Alija Izetbegovic was reluctant to expel them even after agreeing to do so
under pressure from his American patrons. As Kosovo re-ignites, the context
provided by Clarke leads one to wonder what is really going on there: more
blowback from yet another heedless intervention?

While a small group, including Clarke, Sandy Berger, and a few others, are
convinced early on of Bin Laden's significance as the epicenter of a
terrorist conspiracy against America, it isn't until the summer of 1995,
when OBL denounces the presence of American troops in Saudi Arabia, that
Washington begins to recognize Al Qaeda as a distinct threat. Clarke's
bitterness comes through loud and clear in his condemnation of some in the
CIA, who were "pathetically unable to accomplish the mission" when it came
to Al Qaeda. And, in the end, when the U.S.S Cole was attacked and there was
no retaliation, the Clintonites just didn't get it. "Does Al Qaeda have to
attack the Pentagon to get their attention" remarked a prescient State
Department counter-terrorism official. Apparently so.

Clearly, however, the Clinton administration, for all its operational
incompetence, had a far better handle on the nature and extent of the
problem than Team Bush. Of the Bush II principals, only Colin Powell ever
exhibited any pre-9/11 interest in Al Qaeda. Cheney and the neocons were
focused almost exclusively on Iraq: Wolfowitz was actively hostile to the
focus on Al Qaeda, and Clarke notes that when our ambassador to Indonesia
began making "too much noise" about OBL & Co., Wolfowitz had him fired.

Ms. Rice, who had never even heard of Al Qaeda, is portrayed here as
genuinely annoyed that Clarke was bringing this bothersome subject up when
there were so many other important items on her agenda. Counter-terrorism?
We don't do "operational" stuff here at the National Security Council, Condi
informed him, and Clarke was just going to have to move all that out of the
NSC structure, while the whole business was downgraded.

By late June, 2001, Clarke and CIA Director Tenet were convinced that "a
major series of attacks" was on the horizon. In July, speaking at a
counter-terrorism task force meeting, Clarke notes intelligence pointing to
an attack overseas, "in Israel or Saudi Arabia. Maybe. But maybe it will be
here." After finagling for the better part of a year to convene a high-level
national security briefing focused on Al Qaeda, Clarke finally gets his
wish, on September 4, 2001, and makes his case to the overlords of
Washington that they are living in a fool's paradise. Rumsfeld looks
distracted, and keeps bringing up Iraq. Clarke's proposal to send an armed
Predator drone after Bin Laden is vetoed.

Clarke is ambivalent about the possibility that 9/11 might have been
stopped, at that point. But he does note that the FBI and the CIA "had
specific information about individual terrorists from which one could have
deduced what was about to happen." After years of sounding the alarm, Clarke
is too saddened and weary to take any comfort in his prescience. He doesn't
have to say "I told you so," because the rest, as they say, is history.

When it comes to the Iraq war, Clarke's blues turn to white-hot anger. Short
of opening Al Qaeda recruitment centers, the U.S. couldn't have come to Bin
Laden's aid more effectively than by invading and occupying an oil-rich
Middle Eastern country that represented no threat to us. "It was as if Usama
bin Laden, hidden in some high mountain redoubt, were engaging in long-range
mind control of George Bush, chanting 'Invade Iraq, you must invade Iraq.'"

This administration, says Clarke, is fighting the wrong war, the wrong way,
for the wrong reasons: even the Afghan war was "treated as a regime-change
rather than a search-and-destroy against terrorists." The pinpoint strategy
- pin down and destroy the Al Qaeda network - favored by Clarke, versus the
broad "drain-the-swamp" social engineering scheme envisioned by the neocons,
is what the debate engendered by this book is really all about. It was
pragmatism versus ideology in the Bush administration, and the latter won
out: now Clarke is taking his pragmatic results-oriented approach to
fighting terrorism to the public, and odds are they'll buy it more easily
than a crusade to "end evil," as the neocons would have it.

Early in the text, as Clarke is walking through an eerily empty West Wing on
9/11, he thinks to himself that, finally, the administration would be forced
to move against the Afghan camps which were no doubt as bereft of human
beings in that moment as the White House: "We would begin a long fight
against al Qaeda, with no holds barred. But it was too late."

If Clarke is right about that, then God help us. If he's wrong, then Against
All Enemies may have been published just in time to save us from losing the
fight of our lives.

THE WASHINGTON TIMES (USA)