Press Clips by Jason Vest
Press Clips was not going to write about Kosovo this week. However, the sight
of State Department spinmeister Jamie Rubin defiling the atmosphere of
a Washington restaurant by sucking cigarettes and blabbering on his cell
phone while we were recovering from a hangover served to remind us of
the (ob)noxious quality of Clintonian foreign policy and its handmaidens in
the media.
Case in point: lack of clarity regarding last March’s Rambouillet
conference, where the failure of the Serbs to sign the U.S.- sponsored
diplomatic initiative hastened NATO’s loosing its airborne arsenal.
After hostilities commenced two months ago, Sam Husseini, director of
the Washington office of the Institute for Public Accuracy, began to look
more closely at the antecedents to NATO’s mobilization in the ostensible
name of regional stability and humanitarian endeavor. Doing what few who
covered the conference apparently did, Husseini actually read the entire
text of the proposed accords. Appendix B in particular caught his eye, as its
wording didn’t seem to lend itself to an amicable settlement.
Subsections 7 and 8, for example, said that “NATO personnel shall be immune
from any form of arrest, investigation, or detention by the authorities in
the FRY [FederalRepublic of Yugoslavia] and “shall enjoy . . . free and
unrestricted passage and unimpeded access throughout the FRY, including
associated airspace and territorial waters.” Clauses 11 and 15 granted NATO
“the use of airports, roads, rails, and ports without payment [and] the right
to use all of the electromagnetic spectrum.” Also included were arbitrary
arrest and detention powers for NATO personnel.
As the Serbs were hardly amenable to the notion of an independent
Kosovo, it struck Husseini that they probably wouldn’t be too keen on NATO
forces taking full advantage of Appendix B in Serbia proper.
Robert Hayden, director of the Center for Russian and East European Studies
at the University of Pittsburgh, agreed; in his view, a close reading of the
accords “provided for the independence of Kosovo in all but name and the
military occupation by NATO of all of Yugoslavia, not just Kosovo.”
At an April 26 event at the National Press Club, Husseini asked NATO spokesman
Jamie Shea about Appendix B. “There was no intention whatever of having
any kind of NATO occupation regime in Yugoslavia itself. What Rambouillet
refers to is simply the right of transit, nothing more,” the NATO flack
replied.
When Husseini pressed Shea to explain other non-transit-related
provisions of Appendix B, Shea pled lack of firsthand knowledge, explaining
that he wasn’t “a negotiator at Rambouillet.”
While The Washington Post’s For theRecord column ran an edited-for-space
excerpt of the Husseini-Shea exchange, no mention or subsequent investigation
of Appendix B has appeared in the news pages of the Post or any other
publication. It seems unlikely that the Rambouillet accords were a cloak for
the ulterior motive of a full-scale occupation of Yugoslavia.
Yet a number of neglected analysts are troubled that the media isn’t
reexamining Rambouillet; if nothing else, they say, the wording of Appendix B
reflects U.S.-led NATO’s embrace of cruise missile diplomacy based on
miscalculation and arrogance.
“The administration went to Rambouillet basically to arrange a trap for
Milosevic. It was a no-win situation for him and frankly, Albright was basically
trying to find apretext for bombing,” said Dan Goure, deputy director of political
and military studies at the conservative Center for Strategic and International
Studies, in an IPA release.
“They told the Kosovar Albanians that if they signed and Milosevic didn’t,
they’d bomb Serbia. Rambouillet was not a negotiation, it was a setup, a
lynch party. The administration saw ethnic cleansing as an aid to their case.
For them, the more the better. The administration’s current position is to
continue to use the refugee situation as a basis for justifying their hard-line
political approach in dealing with Milosevic.”
“The Rambouillet document was not a compromise,” echoes Julianne Smith,
a senior analyst at the progressive British American Security Information
Council. “Even the ethnic Albanians were not keen about this. It didn’t
really constitute any sort of an agreement.
Now, as we move towards a newsettlement, the language keeps changing as
to the force that will be there. Over the past few days we’ve gone from a
NATO force to an ‘international NATO core’ to an ‘international force with
a NATO core.’ Whatever it is, what’s not consistent with peacekeeping is
total occupation of a country.”
While Goure and others from left to right believe that Rambouillet’s
wording was enough to give the Serbs legitimate pause, they’re also irked that
the press has largely declined to look at Rambouillet in the context of
NATO’s future.
“This was largely an attempt by the Clinton administration to codify the rules by
which NATO and the West would operate in the areas between the great empires for
the next 50 years – the operational version of the new strategic concept for
NATO,” says Goure.
Indeed, Hussein Ibish, an analyst at the American Arab Anti-Discrimination
Committee, recently penned an op-ed referencing the Pentagon’s Defense
Planning Guidance report for 1994-1999. As Ibish notes, the document
stated that “While the United States supports the goal of European
integration, we must seek to prevent the emergence of European-only security
arrangements which would undermine NATO. . . . Therefore, it is of fundamental
importance to preserve NATO as the primary instrument of Western defense and
security, as well as the channel for U.S. influence and participation in European
security affairs.”
Perhaps not surprisingly, Ibish’s phone isn’t ringing off the hook with
editors eager to publish his piece.
