A Fight Empire Can’t Win
by Nebojsa Malic
Future historians studying the decline and fall of the American Empire will probably focus on George W. Bush’s disastrous Iraqi adventure – the modern-day equivalent of Alcibiades’ Sicilian expedition – to explain the pathology of a global hyper-power. However, while Iraq has been, beyond any doubt, a significant factor in depleting Imperial power, it is arguably not the conflict that destroyed the Empire’s authority. Since it is the authority that marks the difference between the State and a gang of street thugs (i.e. the perception of legitimacy in the use of force by the populace against which it is being used), its loss is much harder for an Empire to recover from.
Before there was Iraq, there was Kosovo – another “war of choice,” another war of aggression against all international law, national constitutions and alliance charters, waged to show the world that the United States and its NATO military arm asserted the right to attack anyone, anywhere, for whatever reason. It was packaged and sold as a “humanitarian” war, waged to “prevent genocide” and “stop ethnic cleansing.” There was nothing humanitarian about targeting civilian infrastructure. There was no genocide. And the ethnic cleansing that ended up taking place was the expulsion of Serbs, Jews and Roma from the “liberated” province – much as the Jews, Christians, and others who ended up in the “wrong” areas became refugees from “liberated” Iraq.A Hollow Victory
After eight years of triumphalist lies, it is easy to forget how the war itself went badly; not only did Belgrade not surrender after a day or two, but its stubborn resistance for almost 80 days nearly fractured the Alliance on its 50th anniversary. Only after deceiving Belgrade into accepting a compromise armistice (which was supposed to include a substantial Russian role and a return of Serbian police and border patrols to the province) did NATO manage to declare victory and turn Kosovo over to Albanian separatists. Yugoslav Army casualties were much lighter than estimated, the world’s foremost air power foiled by improvised decoys and camouflage. The war was generally considered a failure until October 2000, when Serbian opposition parties – with U.S. training, funding and propaganda aid – organized mass demonstrations and compelled Slobodan Milosevic to resign from office.
Kosovo returned to the Imperial agenda in 2004, following an Albanian pogrom of Serbs; with the presidential election coming, Democrats played up the “success” of Kosovo against the failure of Iraq that was already becoming apparent. By the spring of 2005, the Bush regime adopted their line, and set forth to resolve the province’s “final status” by making it an independent Albanian state.
Two years of propaganda, extortion, threats, and false diplomacy later, the Empire’s effort failed. The proposal for Kosovo’s independence penned by former Finnish president Martti Ahtisaari did not survive a showdown in the UN Security Council. Three new envoys were named to conduct further talks between the government in Belgrade and the provisional Albanian regime in Pristina. The Emperor and his top foreign policy operatives, who have openly and publicly declared that Kosovo’s independence was “inevitable,” a “done deal,” and “sooner or later,” have found themselves painted into a corner, unable to deliver.
http://www.antiwar.com/malic/?articleid=11561