The bombing of Belgrade is yet another warning that the USwill stop at nothing to secure world domination, writes John Pilger
When the United States dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima after Japan had all but surrendered, the front page of the London Daily Express said: “This is a warning to the world.”
When American missiles and bombs attacked a sovereign European state on Wednesday night, it was another clear warning to the world, with the message fundamentally unchanged.
The most powerful and rapacious imperial power in history will stop at nothing to secure its domination over human affairs. This is a truth that we who have survived the most violent period of the American imperium ought to comprehend above all others, if we are to understand how our world is threatened, over and again.
The basic details of the assault on Serbia illuminate this truth vividly. The bombing has nothing to do with a humanitarian concern for the suffering people of Kosovo.
On the contrary, “the West” (as the Anglo- American imperial forces are known) has consistently used humanitarian rhetoric to justify intervening in the Balkans, mostly on the side of regional power, often the Milosevic regime.
Last October, the US drafted an entirely pro- Serbian plan for the Kosovars, giving them a fake autonomy with far less freedom than they had under the old Yugoslav Constitution.
Similarly, in the early 1990s, Anglo- American propaganda during Bosnia’s life-and- death struggle masked Washington’s true aims. It was an American plan, devised by former US secretary of state Cyrus Vance in 1992, that handed the Milosevic regime and the fascist Bosnian Serbs the entire arsenal of former Yugoslavia. Thereafter, the people of Bosnia hardly stood a chance. At the same time, Nato navies in the Adriatic Sea and United Nations (mostly British) troops at Bosnian airports enforced an arms embargo against the Sarajevo government.
To the Americans, what mattered, above all, was that Serbia was not fragmented and did not slip beyond Western – that is American – control. The ensuing American-arranged “Dayton peace plan” legitimised the ethnic cleansing; the wishes of the people of Bosnia were ignored and American power was asserted.
Today Nato, which of course is Washington, is bombing Serbia because the Milosevic regime – like Saddam Hussein in 1990 – has become uppity. The man is not following orders. He is not subduing the Kosovars as the American plan dictated. He has become all too flagrant, allowing his troops to slaughter people and leave their bodies to be filmed by Western television. More seriously, he is challenging the “stability of the region”; the kind of false stability essential for an imperial power to go about its God-given tasks.
US special envoy to the Balkans Richard Holbrooke has admitted, in effect, that the real reason for the bombing is “the credibility of Nato” – in other words, the credibility of American power. Since the end of the Cold War, the US has sought new reasons for maintaining Nato, which ensures US control over European military forces and Nato’s usefulness for imperial action outside Europe.
Since 1990, Washington has pushed for Nato to be used “out of area” and to act without UN approval: in other words, to usurp the role of the UNas the world’s “peacekeeper”. After all, even the UN Security Council, which Washington dominates, requires resolutions before UNforces can take military action.
This has not proved an insurmountable problem in the past. The slaughter in the Gulf “war” in 1991 was legitimised by the UN after then USsecretary of state James Baker travelled the world, offering the biggest bribes in history to potential military allies.
In Cairo, Baker bribed the Egyptians with $14-billion, which wiped out a third of the country’s foreign debt. Turkey received $8- billion in military gifts and a low-cost International Monetary Fund loan of $1,5- billion. In return for China’s support, the USarranged for China’s return to diplomatic legitimacy following the massacre in Tiananmen Square. Within a week, $114-million of “freed-up” World Bank money was deposited in Beijing.
However, these days, having attacked Iraq on and off for eight years, the UScan no longer rely on the open support of conservative Muslim states. The imperial godfather is impatient to complete its main project following the collapse of its former rival, the Soviet Union – to secure an oil “protectorate” all the way from the Gulf to the Caspian Sea, thus controlling most of the world’s principal energy reserves. With this aim, the UShas imposed crushing economic sanctions on the uppity Saddam, a former American favourite, thus preventing him from selling Iraq’s oil on the open market and further undermining the economies of the current US favourites in the region, notably Saudi Arabia.
Nato is to be the policeman of the new American oil protectorate, and we can expect to see more Nato (mainly Anglo-American) violence in support of the newly charted imperial hegemony. It is a bitter irony for the Serb regime that, while the US regards Slobodan Milosevic as useful and is opposed to an independent Kosovo, the attack on his country is too good an opportunity to pass up.
It demonstrates to the world what Nato is really for, in the same way that the 1991 Gulf “war” was as much a demonstration of American power when US dominance appeared under serious challenge from both the Japanese and Europeans, as it was an act of punishment to one of the US’s client tyrants for stepping across a line that the West had drawn in the sand of the region.
The Nato attacks will kill civilian Serbs, who have nothing to do with Kosovo. They are “collateral damage” and “unfortunately expendable”, as an American general once famously said in Vietnam.
The Americans are not guarded about their aims. Last year US Secretary of State Madeleine Albright was asked on TV: “We have heard half-a-million children have died [as a result of sanctions against Iraq]. That is more children than died at Hiroshima … Is the price worth it?”
Albright replied:”We think the price is worth it.”