STATES OF DENIAL

By Professor R. K. Kent

Can an ordinary American with specialized knowledge and something more than commonplace insights reach the people who make the U.S. Foreign policy? How does one influence them in some meaningful way without spending millions of dollars, without being a member of a powerful lobby? This writer has spent seven long years in the wilderness, with agonizing knowledge of details, in trying to persuade our policy shapers that the Clinton years were the incubating period for the kind of hate that produced the disasters of 11th September 2001.

The hate was by no means limited to the Muslim World. It permeated populations throughout Europe but the governments did their level best not to reflect the undertow. It got, in fact, so bad about three-quarters of the way into Mr. Clinto’s last term that he appointed a group of ‘young Turks’ from various agencies to ‘improve the image of the United States’ abroad.

While there has been a wide perception that the Black September reflects a high degree of hate against the United States, our current leaders have failed to explain the realities behind this level of hate. President Bush just about said that he does not understand how anyone can hate the good American People. He was right about the people but very wrong in refusing to expose the legacy left by the previous Administration.

There are four main causes that interplay here. The first is a complete detachment of foreign policy from the American People and THEIR National Interest. The second is general apathy in regard to foreign policy, especially in times of high economic prosperity at home. The third is the emergence of corporate media as the ‘guardians’ of national morality. The fourth can be called ‘thought control’? Not in the sense of some tightly imposed censorship by the State but by inventing, Hollywood-like, a Wonderland that exists within this Mondo Cane.

Once again, the Balkans provide us with the best documented picture which merges the four elements.

A Foreign Policy Without the American People.

It was not until late 1994 that came the admission from the Pentagon and the White House that we had entered the Yugoslav space in a serious way. But, that was almost a year after it had taken place. It was roundly denied when the European media, especially the major British newspapers, began to report early in 1993 and thereafter that both the CIA and the Pentagon were already present in helping Croatia and the Bosnian Muslims in their wars against the Serbs.

The reason for the clandestine entry of major proportions was simple. The American People were not, at the time , in favor of our engagement in areas remote from the United States and without real ties to any DISCERNIBLE National Interest. After initially opposing the break-up of Yugoslavia, the U.S. policy shifted abruptly in its favor. Instead of supporting the successful European peace efforts in February 1992, our Ambassador to Yugoslavia delivered the mortal blow. Early in 1993, the Owen-Vance plan for peace, accepted in principle by all three of the Yugoslav co-belligerents was roundly rejected by the STATE DEPARTMENT.

At about the same time came into being the ‘International Criminal Tribunal for Yugoslavia’ (ICTY) at the Hague. It was given competence in the U.N. Security Council (which is not the legislative arm of the United Nations) for all events taking place sine January 1991 but not before.

No matter what the various representatives of the Clinton Administration tried to implant into the public mind at home, no one was able to persuade the American People to rally behind this major U.S. presence in ex-Yugoslavia. General apathy in respect to foreign affairs, prosperity at home and the Viet-Nam memories inter-combined to diminish the persuasive value of almost any argument for entering into the intra-Yugoslav ethnic conflicts. The first major opposition from within to the disintegration of Federal Yugoslavia came from the Yugoslav Federal Army (YFA). As its Slovene, Croat and Bosnian Muslim officers began to desert and join their own ethno-religious ‘wars of independence’, the Serbs left in the YFA became not only the enemy of (2) Slovenia, Croatia and a Bosnia under a Muslim government. ‘The Serbs’ were transformed also into the sole enemy in the Balkans of the intervening United States and , even more broadly, of the ‘West’. In order to ‘win the war against the Serbs’ some of the most powerful propaganda blitzes were unleashed as much to gain support at home as to reduce ‘the Serbs’ collectively to the status of sub-humans to whom anything could be done by way of ‘justifiable retributions’.

Psychological Warfare and Cerebral Terror

An immediate part of the agenda, linking the ‘West’ in its total propaganda effort, was to deny by all and any means that ‘the Serbs’ could EVER be regarded as victims. This is still operative across the board, despite huge changes. They could only be the aggressors. In this way all the sympathies and support would automatically go to their enemies inside the ex-Yugoslav space. The enemies of our enemy became our friends in a repetition of reasoning – by analogy – which belongs to the Middle Ages. In some three years in operation, the ICTY, for example, could not find a single Bosnian Muslim or Croat who harmed a single Serb anywhere. All the war crimes and crimes against humanity were attributed solely to ‘the Serbs’.

This took place systematically despite the transmittal of official documents, many providing prima facie evidence of both Croat and Bosnian Muslim atrocities on a wide scale. Although, in the last few years, the ICTY did ‘discover’ a few alleged Croat and Bosnian Muslim war criminals, most were low-ranking and some were released for ‘insufficient evidence’. In contrast, most of the major Serbs in Bosnia and Serbia have been under indictments.

‘Human Rights’ became the second pillar of the same agenda. The widespread media practice was to fail to ‘report’ or yet to minimize, through brevity and the placing of news items, any acts that might even hint at ‘the Serbs’ as victims. Anything favorable to them, including letters to the Editors of major newspapers by well informed individuals in the whole ‘West’ rarely saw any major media exposure. At the same time, any atrocity that could be pinned on ‘the Serbs’, whether true or ‘arranged’, reached gigantic proportions.

‘Mass graves’ were evoked to replay the Holocaust and incite members of the Jewish faith all over the ‘West’ to turn against a people that had one of the best records, however imperfect, in wartime Europe of siding with and protecting Jews during the Nazi occupation of Serbia. Later, in the ‘air war’ for Kosovo, major Jewish orgnizations in the U.S. floated a large pictorial ad in the New York Times showing trains that took Jewish men, women and children into extermination camps. This was a psychological tour de force connecting the Holocaust with the Albanians leaving Kosovo en masse.

What the ad did NOT say was that the 600,000 plus of the exiting ‘Kosovars’ were going into SAFETY and international help from tripartite violence involving not only the Serbs Army and police but also the so-called ‘Kosovo Liberation Army’ (KLA) and the NATO bombs and missiles. There was no mass exodus until NATO’s ‘humanitarian intervention’.

If one looks dispassionately at the record as opposed to propaganda, the ‘West’ was kept in ignorance by its major media when it came to what was done TO the Serbs. This became standard practice already in late 1980’s, when Serbs living in Croatia (about 14 percent of the total population) were subjected to all sorts of abuses, beatings, threats, arrests and insults. It was followed by the FIRST MASSIVE ‘ethnic cleansing’ OF SERBS from western Slavonia (August 1991-February 1992). Some 40,000 men, women and children fled in panic. Their Churches were systematically destroyed, properties looted and often torched. The elderly who could not flee were simply executed.

Seven months of mayhem in western Slavonia barely rated a brief mention in the ‘West’.The largest and most dramatic ‘ethnic cleansing’ before Kosovo took place in August 1995. This is when a U.S. trained and (partly) equipped Croat Army and para-military forced out of Krajina about 250,000 Serbs. Looting, torching and killing with impunity. Even an event of this magnitude lasted only a couple of days in the media.

Yet, hardly anyone could learn that our own jets strafed the Serb radar sites around Knin, the capital of Krajina, or that Madeleine Albright and Anthony Lake gave the green light to Croatia to carry out its ‘Operation Storm.’ (3) Hardly anyone knew that almost a million Serbs ‘ethnically cleansed’ from Croatia and Bosnia fell upon a declining economy within Serbia. This was before the Kosovo Liberation Army ‘cleansed’ another couple of hundred thousand Serbs from that region.

While Croatia became ethnically pure, with Kosovo well on the way and Bosnia sub-divided into three enclaves, hardly anyone knew that there were 25 different ethnicities within Serbia. It is today the only plural society coming out of the old Yugoslavia’s ashes. As ‘the Serbs’ were accused of harboring racist and genocidal intents against Albanians at Kosovo, hardly anyone bothered to find out that about 200,000 ethnic Albanians were living in Serbia, with 80,000 concentrated in the Greater Belgrade area alone. They were, for the most part, pro-Yugoslav Albanians. Some had even fled from the KLA.

As Croatia was doing away with its Serbs (about 14 percent of its total population), some 60,000 Croats lived unmolested in Belgrade. All of these simple and verifiable facts were skillfully ‘hidden’ from any public view in the ‘West’. The drive to deny that ‘the Serbs’ could be victims became so powerful and pervasive that even some of the better informed intellectuals kept demanding that ‘the Serbs confront their past’ as the sole aggressors in the Balkans of the 1990’s.

A few responded to some of the evidence by conceding its veracity in part but held that ‘the Serbs’ were the ‘main’ aggressors, thus reducing the local complexities and historical contexts to a virtual zero. Any further discussion of this became ‘unnecessary’. In glaring contrast, crimes attributed to ‘the Serbs’ received top billings. The worst one, with some truth in it, is the Massacre at Srebrenica in 1995. It was given, as yet without any submitted PROOF, great prominence precisely to push out of the front pages the ethnic cleansing of Krajina.

Taken entirely out of context, accepting at face value statements coming out of the Bosnian Muslim Ministry of Information and rejecting even the incoming evidence against inflated figures and claims, the ‘Srebrenica Massacre’ is replayed to this day as a ‘typical’ crime committed by ‘the Serbs’, who must admit their ‘collective guilt’. It was ?covered up? deliberately by introducing to a completely innocent public the Massacre at Srebrenica, a silver mining town in Eastern Bosnia. Completely out of any real context and with grossly inflated figures, this story of Srebrenica surfaces to this day whenever ‘the Serbs’ ‘need’ to be put down. Attempts to provide the context and give a more balanced appraisal of where the guilt resides are simply disregarded in favor of continuing sensation-mongering.

Two of the pivotal ‘massacres’, one in Sarajevo and the other at Kosovo, triggered the U.S. armed intervention through air strikes against the Serbs. A detailed U.N. report exculpated the Serbs from the so-called Markale Massacre at Sarajevo but it is held secret to this day at the request of the then-U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. Madeleine Albright. The second event, at Racak, was a Hoax prepared by the Kosovo Liberation Army, with very probable CIA connection MEANT TO DRIVE the International Community into war.

As is generally unknown, the CIA and the Pentagon had trained this ‘Bastard Army’ long before the air war of 24 March – 4 June 1999 and Bin-Laden was one of its major fundraisers in Saudi Arabia .

The Hate Factor

As hate-mongering against the Serbs went on and on throughout the decade of the 1990’s, almost no one grasped in any sustained way just how contagious hate can be and, most often, is. It warps everyone who gets near it. Hate transcends the issues that are immediately at hand. It lingers on and begets more hate. It snowballs and spills out.

Until the air war against Yugoslavia, which was mainly a war arranged for the United States and NATO by Madeleine Albright, Uncle Sam was regarded in Europe as a more or less arrogant and brash Uncle, unsure of himself and the status of America as the sole remaining super-power. The eleven weeks of relentless bombings of another European state and people transformed this image. The mask fell off and the New Imperial face came into full view . Few, if any on this side of the Atlantic, knew that the bombings stopped mainly because NATO was about to disintegrate as the European states became unable to take the air war any longer. All of them experienced destruction in two world wars, a completely alien experience within the United States. Few, if any at home, know that the Serbs were set-up deliberately as the ‘Enemy of the West’ in order to save a moribund NATO after the collapse of the (4) Soviet Union. Almost no one knew that the real purpose of the ‘Humanitarian Intervention’ at Kosovo was to place the second largest U.S. military base in Europe exactly on the pipeline road to the rich oil deposits in the area of the Caspian Sea.

As the bombings went on, day after day, for 78 days, as Camp Bondsteel grew on 300 acres of land at Kosovo with a 99-year lease, as Spanish pilots began to tell Europe that depleted uranium and long-lasting toxins of all kinds were being dropped on the Serbs, ordinary people throughout Europe began to HATE the United States. A lingering dislike of the brash new and sole super-power, whose leaders did not have Europe’s pedigree and ‘class’ of a De Gaulle or a Churchill, who could not really measure up to the greatness of an envied American People, who had basically an insular and myopic mentality and poor knowledge of the world, all of this merged into an undercurrent of hate.

With the drive for Globalization as an add-on for hate, this became already apparent to the morally corrupt but master PR man and domestic politico, William Jefferson Clinton, whose own capitulation in foreign affairs to the likes of Madeleine Albright had been a potent cause for the transformation of popular feelings in Europe from dislike to hate.

Our current President is riding high on the support the U.S. is getting from Europe’s leaders, from the NATO partners?and on the candle-light vigils and sympathies in Europe for the victims of the World Trade Center. If the Europeans come to perceive that the war against terrorism is no less asymmetrical and manipulative than the ‘enforcement’ of Human Rights across the board, the U.S. will become far more hated than it ever had been.

Nor should our current leaders fall into the rhetorical traps of Tony Blair who is committing his minor forces and grabbing the pulpit in order to make Britain weightier by hooking it up with the sole remaining super-power. By egging us on into greater arrogance and arrogant behavior he is not doing any favors to the American People at all. . . The hate-factor situation in the Middle East and across the Muslim- dominated countries was also affected by the general atmosphere of relentless hate-mongering and structured cerebral terror against a single people. It does not much matter which people.

Arab and other Muslims resented the arrogance of the Clinton Administration. They were not simply driven to escalate hate by the never-ending support of Israel.. Rather, through sanctions and constant punishment of Iraq, adding to the Yugoslav experience of the arrogance of U.S. power, they saw an ‘Israelization’ of American foreign policy. It looked increasingly as if the succeeding hard-line governments in Israel and their arrogant treatment of the Palestinians had somehow come to permeate the U.S. foreign policy in general.

This was the point at which radical differences between a generous, kind and fair-minded American People and their Machiavellian ruling elites started to get blurred The fact that the U.S. did not lose a single soldier at Kosovo may have been the straw that broke the camel’s back in the unbearable degree of hate. It is the IMPOTENCE of U.S. opponents in the face of its might and invulnerability that produced the massive destruction of the WTC on a single day in September as Pentagon itself was hit. The symbolic message is clear. We are vulnerable at home. Neither Globalization nor Pentagon are omnipotent abroad.

By making Americans permanently INSECURE a change in foreign policy is expected as otherwise it will not come about.

It can be worse.

That is just fine because it will stroke the latent fires of militant Islam. We just cannot comprehend ecstatic religions and their mystical quality .It can also meet the demands of which there are basic two. First and foremost, use your might to end the Israeli-Palestinian war. Secondly, remove your naked and provocative presence in the Holy Land of Islam. Quo Vadis the Bush Administration Mayor Rudolf Giuliani, a much admired and authentic American hero, because of his compassion and mental toughness , knowledge of details and management skills, his energy in the face of prostate cancer failed to grasp what is going on out there.

He turned down a $10 million relief fund donation by a (5) Saudi Prince because he dared suggest in a letter that the U.S. might have a more balanced approach to the Israeli-Palestinian problem. Given the fact that the Jewish vote usually carries the day in NYC, Giuliani decided that the Arab was trying to buy U.S. good will over the dead and maimed bodies of some 13,000, most of them Americans. But, his ability to deal with the Mafiosi in New York skewed his judgement about foreign policy to be pursued, in which he has absolutely no competence.

The blind support for anything that is decided between the American Hawks of Jewish faith, (like Richard Perle and Paul Wolfowitz) and their Israeli counterparts (like Ariel Sharon) is not in the interest of the American People, the people of Israel, or the Palestinians. It only fans the fires of revanchist Nationalism and increasingly militant Islam. But, the use of the need for ‘National Unity’ is giving short shrift to any reasoned discourse at home. You either support the President without questions or you are not a patriot.

It is a canard that should not be allowed to win. It was used in the air war over Yugoslavia. Anyone who questioned what was being done there became an un-patriotic American, a non-supporter of Human Rights , or even worse, a Serb apologist. All three sins merged in the present writer. He kept warning for seven frustrating years that the tragedy was coming, that we are widely hated and that there is too wide a gap in the way our leaders and corporate media keep us informed and the outer world realities that are stunningly different. No one in power or with real influence took him seriously. His articles could only find a publisher or two in France.

A basic question poses itself . Granted that someone like this writer is not politically correct, without being of the Left or the Right, but can freely move in one direction or another away from the dead center, like most intelligent men and women, as he goes beyond the unquestioned lining-up behind the President, will anybody listen at all, except perhaps the Echelon?

In the name of National Security

If we have arrived at that level already, we are in irreparable trouble. Relatively few have the integrity to stand alone against the pack. It might just really serve the Interest of the American People, as opposed to a National Interest as perceived by the same men and women who have made all sorts of egregious foreign policy mistakes over the years without being accountable to any one, including the People that have lavishly funded their foreign misadventures, pensions and retirements.

Instead of repudiating the egregious interventionism of the previous Administration , the new football team and its Coach, impelled by a prominent war hero and two hawkish quarterbacks in the Pentagon, are taking it to unprecedented heights.

Thank God at least for Colin Powell.

The new policy looks like Mission Impossible. The longer the bombing of Afghanistan lasts in a Yugoslav-like air war, the sooner will the support for it disappear at home and even faster abroad. Yugoslavia was a modern state before being bombed back into the Nineteenth Century .But, the Afghans are among the poorest of peoples. They have hardly anything and their refugees are streaming out just like the Kosovars to escape the destruction and fighting. Ending states  could make many parts of the planet earth less than livable and it would make no difference where the oil deposits are and which pipelines are controlled by whom.

(1) This essay is written without an intimidating footnote structure as most of the specific items and events cited are eminently verifiable . Raymond K. Kent, Emeritus History Department, University of California. Berkeley, Ca.