More about Kosovo

/ kosovo / fallout / reviewed /

Doug Muir has posted a very interesting commentary on an article by William Montgomery, former US ambassador to Serbia and Montenegro. The article is quite frank about the failings of the "International Community" as far as Kosovo is concerned, and confirms what seemed to me pretty obvious at the time, namely that far from being a "solution" to the Kosovo problem, the NATO action turned it into an unsolvable problem. Even worse it turned it into a perpetuating and potentially expanding problem, principally because the attack on Yugoslavia was only ostensibly about Kosovo. In reality it was meant as a display of military resolve for potential "troublemakers" and a roadmap for use of lethal force as a tool for obtaining immediate compliance. Thus the, much less unilateral, diplomatic process was abandoned. And let's not ignore its value as a precedent for ignoring the UN SC, which made the current Iraqi debacle easier to justify (see my comments on Douglas' post for more).

It is also instructive to note that considerations of who's running the show on the Albanian side are missing, as the ambassador's proposal of a decentralization on a city scale would give legal control of much of the countryside to the KLA associated mafias that are thriving in the region - or anyone with enough firepower. It is also instructive to note that considerations of who's running the show on the Albanian side are missing, as the ambassador's proposal of a decentralization on a city scale would give legal control of much of the countryside to the KLA associated mafias that are thriving in the region - or anyone with enough firepower.

...Anyway, nothing of what is happening was not easily predictable. That alone is argument enough for the total wrongness of the war. In September 1999 Lord Carrington was making all the significant observations:

...did Lord Carrington believe that Nato’'s action in Kosovo in the past few months had been mistaken?

“Yes,”

“Why?’

“Well, to start with, it was impossible for Milosevic to accept the Rambouillet agreement because what it asked him to do was allow Nato to use Serbia as a part of the Nato organisation. Sovereignty would have been lost over it. He couldn’'t accept that.

“I think what Nato did by bombing Serbia actually precipitated the exodus of the Kosovo Albanians into Macedonia and Montenegro. I think the bombing did cause the ethnic cleansing.

“I’'m not sticking up for the Serbs because I think they behaved badly and extremely stupidly by removing the autonomy of Kosovo, given them by Tito, in the first place. But I think what we did made things very much worse and what we are now faced with is a sort of ethnic cleansing in reverse. The Serbs are now being cleared out. I think it’s a great mistake to intervene in a civil war.”

Lord Carrington has no liking for President Milosevic but, again, he thinks it was wrong to brand him officially as a war criminal. “I don’t think he is any more a war criminal than President Tudjman of Croatia who ethnically cleansed 200,000 Serbs out of [Krajina]. Nobody kicked up a fuss about that. I think we are a little bit selective about our condemnation of ethnic cleansing, in Africa as well as in Europe.”

Chris Deliso has more about the protectorate and its relation to the Iraqi occupation (plus other worrying stuff).

Me, I can see a real solution emerging only as part of a real democratization process in the area, which can come only after a thorough re-examination by the EU, of the situation in the Balkans and an offer of a total plan for the region (including all minorities and the situation in Bosnia). This should be accompanied by a serious, generous and carefully managed aid/reconstruction programme. Then, Kosovar Albanians could be lured into a federal solution pending an EU date for a much decentralized Serbia and Montenegro (& Kosovo?). This could conceivably work - but is unfortunately a rather unlikely scenario.

Chomsky replies to Nader

/ evils / lesser / debate

Noam Chomsky was one of the signatories of the "Nader 2000 Leaders Organize To Defeat Bush" petition. Apparently Ralph Nader responded to the issues the signatories were raising, in an interview he gave to Amy Goodman on Democracy Now.
This is Chomsky's reply
An exerpt:

Nader: “Well, it’s a total loss of nerve. I mean, first of all, they didn’t ask anything of Kerry.”

Chomsky: Nor of Bush. Kerry and Bush are not my audience. Nor their predecessors. Nor the party leaders.

Activists have quite different concerns. They are engaged with the public, and try to help in the growth and development of popular organizations that will become powerful enough so that they cannot be ignored by centers of power. If Pat Robertson says, as he recently did, that he’ll start a third party unless the Republicans are sufficiently extreme in “support of Israel,” that’s a threat, because he might be able to mobilize tens of millions of evangelical Christians who already form a significant political force, thanks to extensive work over decades from local levels and on, and on numerous issues apart from the political choices from school boards to presidents. If I were to ask something of the Democratic or Republican campaigns, it would be a joke. If we had succeeded in creating mass popular organizations, they would be able to influence campaign rhetoric (and, if powerful enough, decisions) as well. The way we “ask something of Kerry” or Bush is by joining in the work to develop those popular forces.

"...one person at a time..."

/ caucasus / blood / bad /

Ossetia is boiling after the Beslan tragedy, and prearations for violent retribution are being made.

“There will be violence. It won’t be noisy. It will be quiet —- one person at a time,’’ Kuizev said as he wandered through the burned-out husk of the school, stepping over flowers and stuffed animals left in memory of the victims.

Although Kuizev’s 12-year-daughter was among the hostages, she survived. But that hasn’t softened his anger.

”They say, ’forgive, forgive.’ How do you forgive something like this? How do you explain this? Forgive? No way,’’ Kuizev said.

“It’s not a secret that we are waiting’’ for the end of the 40-day [mourning] period, said 67-year-old SergeiTandaleyev of the village of Sunja.

”We will demand that (the Ingush) leave. All of them,’’ he said. If they don’t, “there will be war.’’

Coming from a region of Greece where blood feuds still exist (Crete), this mentality doesn't seem too foreign - or improbable. Indeed it seems like a natural next step that would require a major policing operation to prevent. Yet the Ingush president is downplaying the threat, but he would, wouldn't he?

This falls in quite nicely with Gary Brecher's theory, over at the "exile", that Ossetia was chosen deliberately by the Beslan terrorists in order to ignite the Caucasus with a Christian vs. Muslim war:

Everybody's calling it "senseless," the Chechen raid on Beslan in North Ossetia. Well, the sad thing is, it wasn't senseless. Look at it coldly and it makes a horrible kind of strategic sense.

The thing to keep in mind is that the Chechens who organized this always knew it was going to end with lots of Ossetian kids dead. The Chechens were playing a game of dominoes, Caucasus-style. It's a nasty, twisted, gory game, and to understand it you have to get an idea of how the Caucasian homelands line up...

... [the fallout of the Beslan murders] turns their fight with Russia into a much bigger regional war, and better yet it turns the whole thing into a Muslim vs. Christian fight, with the two Christian tribes, Russian and Ossetian, attacking the Muslim Ingush and Chechens. It's a great way to recruit other Muslims, like the little tribes in Dagestan, or the Ingush, the Tatars in central Russia, and also suck in the big money from the Saudis and the Emirates.

It could be the big equalizer for the Chechens. Russia vs. Chechnya -- not good odds for the Chechens. But Orthodox Christians vs. Muslims -- that's very, very good odds. The Orthodox have been losing out for decades -- just look at the poor old Serbs -- and there's a huge Muslim birthrate popping out millions of surplus believers who don't have a hope in Hell of getting a job and don't know anything but the Quran and how to disassemble an AK-47. Once you've turned the whole of the Caucasus into a bonfire, the light will bring those guys running to help

The Abu Ghraib Supplementary Documents

/ torture / investigations / forgotten /

"The military's mission at Abu Ghraib was inadequately planned almost from conception. It was subordinated to political and intelligence goals and bogged down at every level by inadequate resources and hostile conditions, according to classified documents reviewed and now posted by the Center for Public Integrity.

The documents, the first installment of background materials from Army Major General Anthony Taguba's investigation [pdf file] into abuses of military detainees in Iraq, were provided to the Center by Rolling Stone contributor Osha Gray Davidson. The Center plans to post the second installment of the documents later this month."

Some chilling documents... Especially upsetting is the document of the CID investigation [pdf file ~6Mb -not for the slowly connected].

The Unofficial Stephen Jay Gould Archive

/ evolution / theorists /

This is the unofficial site since the official site is not yet up and running completely. A great resource with a plethora of the late evolutionary biologist's (and essayist's) works and related material.

It is now mandated by international law, I think, to always mention Dawkins whenever SJG is discussed. Thus I present the Richard Dawkins unofficial website.

A message from February, 2003

/ prophetic / trotskyites /

This from a communique of the Workers Communist Party of Iraq, just before the invasion started. This is a group that is very much against the occupation, but very much against the Islamist and Baathist resistance. They seem to have the gift of seeing the future (or maybe guessing the consequences of the invasion wasn't that hard...):

"This war is not about fighting terrorism. Terrorism will only increase as a result of this war. This war and its aftermath will provide another grievance and another excuse for Islamic terrorists to exploit for many years to come for their own horrific and reactionary ends – just as they have been doing with the injustices against the Palestinian people...

...The reactionary opposition groupings in Iraq, the monarchists, Islamists, Kurdish nationalist gangs and former army officers and secret service agents of the Iraqi regime, are not the representatives of the Iraqi people. They are warlords and self-appointed rulers who already have a dark and bloody record of repression against the people of Iraq and Iraqi Kurdistan. They are not the ‘liberators’ of the people of Iraq. They are, rather, the new Iraqi Contras - armed and financed by the CIA and Pentagon and/or various repressive regional states such as the Islamic regime in Iran. A devastating war and the unleashing of these forces is the grim future being planned by Bush and Blair for the Iraqi people."

This was a, clearly visible, looming catastrophe...

The convenient bogeyman

/ iraq / terror / monopoly /

One of the latest atrocities in "liberated Iraq", involving the murder of 40 children, was again blamed on comic-book-type evil arch-villain Abu Musab al-Zarqawi... In the quest for the evil Zarqawi, the US indulges in precision bombing of random neighborhoods that kill an imprecise number of women and children...

So Riverbend (who's thankfully starting to blog again more frequently), in the liked post logically asks:

One wonders who is behind the explosions and the car bombs. Bin Laden? Zarqawi? Possibly... but it's just too easy. It's too perfect. Bin Laden hit the WTC and Afghanistan was attacked. Iraq was occupied. At first, any explosion or attack on troops was quickly blamed on "loyalists" and "Baathists" and EVERYTHING was being coordinated by Saddam. As soon as he was caught, it became the work of "Islamic extremists" and Al-Qaida and Zarqawi suddenly made his debut. One wonders who it will be after it is discovered that Zarqawi has been dead for several months or that he never even existed. Whoever it is, you can bet his name will three syllables or less because that is Bush's limit.

A week ago, four men were caught by Iraqi security in the area of A'adhamiya in Baghdad. No one covered this on television or on the internet, as far as I know- we heard it from a friend involved in the whole thing. The four men were caught trying to set up some explosives in a residential area by some of the residents themselves. One of the four men got away, one of them was killed on the spot and two were detained and interrogated. They turned out to be a part of Badir's Brigade (Faylaq Badir), the militia belonging to the Supreme Council of the Islamic Revolution in Iraq. Should the culprits never have been caught, and should the explosives have gone off, would Zarqawi have been blamed? Of course.

Admittedly Zarqawi is far too active for an allegedly dead person. Not only that, he's eager to claim responsibility for an attack that killed 40 innocent children... why? To win friends in Iraq? This is the kind of murderous thuggery that no one claims responsibility for... unless one has a Hollywood-type manichean view of the world as divided between the Forces of Evil and the Forces of Good, in which case Zarqawi is simply acting out his evilness, one fails to understand what possible good would it do the group to celebrate this as a "heroic operation"?

Adrian Blomfield in the Age, quotes an unnamed US agent, about the elusiveness of this Zarqawi concept:

"We were basically paying up to $US10,000... a time to opportunists, criminals and chancers who passed off fiction and supposition about Zarqawi as cast-iron fact, making him out as the linchpin of just about every attack in Iraq," one agent said.

"Back home this stuff was gratefully received and formed the basis of policy decisions. We needed a villain, someone identifiable for the public to latch on to, and we got one."

Seymour Hersh, also sees Zarqawi as a "composite figure":

...Zarqawi is mister everybody, he’s never liked bin Laden, and it’s not clear that the person that we claim responsible for all those acts is he. Some of the people who know the Arab world very well and very carefully and listen to his statements. He’s a Jordanian, and many of the comments that have been alleged to have been in his name are not made by him. In other words, the suggestion is that he’s a composite figure. He’s very convenient.

I don’t want to suggest to you that we’ve ever been propagandized by our government [laughter], but it’s very convenient. It’s very convenient to keep on telling the press that Zarqawi’s — my favorite one is that nice kid that was beheaded, remember. The guy that beheaded him had a hood over him. He was described very confidently by the American establishment government as Zarqawi. Well, if they can see through hoods...

Elsewhere in Iraq Naomi Klein explains the obvious about yet another Iraqi villain:

Muqtada al-Sadr's calls for press freedom may not include the freedom of women journalists to cover him. Yet he still deserves to have his right to publish a political newspaper — not because he believes in freedom but because we supposedly do. Similarly, Sadr's calls for fair elections and an end to occupation demand our unequivocal support — not because we are blind to the threat he would pose if he were actually elected but because believing in self-determination means admitting that the outcome of democracy is not ours to control.

Indefensible

/ budget? / ah, that budget! /
Continuing, in a sense, the previous post about the Greek military budget, it might be interesting to connect the country's military overspending to this recent scandal:

The Defense Ministry yesterday forwarded two cases relating to the procurement of arms by the previous government for further investigation by prosecutors. It also looks increasingly likely that a parliamentary committee will be formed to look at a report into the purchase of two other weapons systems.

The new cases relate to the purchase of four Russian hovercraft in 2000 and a contract to buy 20 NH-90 helicopters in 2003 from a multinational company based in France. The hovercraft deal was worth 62.8 million euros. The helicopter contract amounted to 699 million euros.

Files on these cases were sent to Athens chief prosecutor Dimitris Papangelopoulos yesterday, by the head of economic planning at the Defense Ministry, Giorgos Zorbas, with the overall allegation that the two deals harmed the Greek State. The report claims that among other things, several procurement rules were broken, the hovercraft have never been used and each helicopter was overpriced by 8 million euros.

Note that the unit prices for the transport version of the NH-90 are quoted at 20 million Euros... times 20 equals 400 million Euros, even if one purchased them one at a time... Reportedly the Finns paid half the amount Greece paid for the exact same number and type of NH-90 helicopters... (Initially, Greece was supposed to purchase 42 helicopters (find NH-90 near the bottom of the page) for the same amount of money , but then the number of helicopters inexplicably was halved, while the price remained the same...

The situation is pretty much as Kathimerini describes it:

It is common knowledge that the military has often purchased weaponry that does not meet the country’s genuine security needs. Overblown procurements are often only a pretext for kickbacks, bribery and illegal profit by a dark group of middlemen who have set their eye on public wealth. In this sector, corruption, deception and fraud are king.

Greatly indebted

/ Greece / budget / imaginary /
Well, it's not as if this was unexpected... Kathimerini is right in claiming that "...ever since 1997" they have "...repeatedly drawn attention to the government’s falsification of budget data..." Even my humbleness would have been willing to bet good money that the miraculous numbers that the Greek economy was achieving were in large part fictitious. PASOK has chosen to attack rather than accept the blame:

“We were insistent from the start of the government’s tenure that a non-transparent audit would result in the defamation of our country,” said PASOK leader George Papandreou. Christodoulakis claimed the government was “rewriting history” in order to cover up its lack of policies, while Papantoniou said the audit had been conducted in secret, “in the corridors of government.” He also claimed that PASOK had an understanding with Eurostat as to how to incorporate military spending into the government accounts.

Yet the EU denies such an arrangement:

European Monetary Affairs Commissioner Joaquin Almunia denied Friday that Greece's previous socialist government had an arrangement with the EU's statistics arm Eurostat on how to calculate the country's public deficit.

Asked by private radio station Flash if such an accord existed, Almunia said: "No. Statistical information is not a question of negotiations but of substantiated data". The remarks were a translation into Greek.

...but this is certainly not the whole story... I find it hard to believe that the Commission was surprised by the discrepancies:

...Doubts over the reliability of Greek economic figures are not new and were not provoked by the government's audit, said Alogoskoufis, who claimed the IMF and Eurostat had expressed concern over Greece's official returns in the past. «There was a huge discrepancy, creating a lot of suspicion from everybody, which undermined the trustworthiness of the country,» said Alogoskoufis.

On Saturday, European Central Bank Vice President Lucas Papademos, former governor of the Bank of Greece, said the revisions should have come as no surprise as the figures were in Greek central bank reports and known to Eurostat...[emphasis mine]

Apart from PASOK's fraud and the blatant hypocrisy, there is a real issue here, concerning both the military and the Olympic expenditures (if I hear any more gloating about "our successful Olympics" I swear I'll kill a pundit or two!)

In terms of military expenditure Greece is up there above Lebanon, Pakistan and the DR of Congo! (and they're not counting various "black" budget expenses and allocations to other ministries for military-related expenses...) Frankly, whether the current détente with Turkey persists or not, the EU can't really hinder military expenditures. I am well aware that many in Europe consider that Greece is under no external threat whatsoever, I tend to agree, but I would advise all of them to spend a few months on the island of Lesvos and see the nice Turkish fighter planes roaring directly overhead. Given the fact that the military elite, which is still playing a major role in governing our heavily armed Eastern neighbour, harbours a rather expansionist mentality (something that might change with Erdogan - let's see), the only way that Greece can accept the indirect limitation of its right to self-defense is if the EU guarantees its current legal borders. In that case I would be willing to participate in all kinds of civil unrest in order to disband the Greek army and turn swords to ploughshares...

So, yes Papantoniou is probably talking nonsense, but this is a real and non-trivial issue for the time being.

...And don't even get me started on the discussion of what exactly the deficit and debt caps achieve... (quick and fast answer: among other things it's a tool for the dismantling of the European welfare state and the Americanization of European economies - and thus societies... Well, Northern European societies... over here we have a mixed economical model, part Russian oligarch-type capitalism with widespread corruption and part selectively unregulated market economy, with a heavy dose of the most inefficient public sector imaginable). And, as a thought-experiment, imagine the US economy burdened by anything as restrictive as our growth and stability pact: imagine its growth rate...

Chomsky succumbs to lesser-evilism, endorses Kerry

/ lesser / evils /
Well, not that there's anything wrong with that, in this particular case, and it's not new... Anyway, he seems to see this as a "popular front" issue, where it is imperative to block the nutters from returning to power, even at the cost of strengthening policies one is also opposed to.
John Pilger vehemenhtly disagrees:

The multilateralism or "muscular internationalism" that Kerry offers in contrast to Bush's unilateralism is seen as hopeful by the terminally naive; in truth, it beckons even greater dangers. Having given the American elite its greatest disaster since Vietnam, writes the historian Gabriel Kolko, Bush "is much more likely to continue the destruction of the alliance system that is so crucial to American power. One does not have to believe the worse the better, but we have to consider candidly the foreign policy consequences of a renewal of Bush's mandate . . . As dangerous as it is, Bush's re-election may be a lesser evil." With Nato back in train under President Kerry, and the French and Germans compliant, American ambitions will proceed without the Napoleonic hindrances of the Bush gang.

Michael Albert has a more inclusive (one would say diplomatic) approach to this...

So we are down to one debatable disagreement, it seems. In contested states should leftists spend any time trying to increase the vote for Cobb or Nader instead of being quiet or aiding Kerry? This is contentious. Logically, writing and speaking about it could affect people’s choices. But I bet those who are for aiding Cobb or Nader are not going to convince those who are against doing so that they should start doing it. And I bet those who are against aiding Cobb or Nader are not going to convince those who are for doing so that they should stop doing it. So what is the point of reams of back and forth debate that can sour otherwise positive relations, I wonder?

At this point, the arguments have been made. So why don’t we just do our things, hopefully including non electoral things, leaving one another alone, and letting the results of our separate efforts impact subsequent choices? I bet all sides will be better off for it.

And I'd love to see Pilger debate Chomsky on this...