Death of a Dictator \u2013 The Weekly Standard, 27 March 2006<\/b><\/p>\n
The Weekly Standard was a newsletter reflecting the views of neocons such as Dick Chaney, Donald Rumsfeld and John Bolton (Google states \u201cNeoconservatives typically advocate the promotion of democracy and interventionism in international affairs, including peace through strength, and are known for espousing disdain for communism and political radicalism). \u00a0The article below, written in 2006,\u00a0displays the extraordinary ignorance and prejudice that informed their views. \u00a0We have added our comments in bold italics.<\/i><\/b><\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
The Weekly Standard<\/p>\n
March\u00a027, 2006\u00a0Monday<\/p>\n
SECTION:\u00a0EDITORIAL Vol. 11 No. 26
\nHEADLINE:\u00a0Death of a Dictator;\u00a0<\/b>
\nGood riddance to\u00a0Milosevic\u2013and to Saddam, too.<\/b>
\nBYLINE:\u00a0Stephen Schwartz and William Kristol, The Weekly Standard<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
ALBERT WOHLSTETTER, better than almost any other American strategic thinker, understood Slobodan\u00a0Milosevic,\u00a0the Serbian dictator who died at The Hague where he was on trial for genocide.<\/p>\n
Writing in the Wall Street Journal in 1995, Wohlstetter drew a direct line between Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein and the Balkan butcher: \u201cThe successful coalition in the Gulf War . . . left in place a Ba\u2019ath dictatorship . . . .That told Slobodan\u00a0Milosevic,\u00a0who is not a slow learner, that the West would be even less likely . . . to stop his own overt use of the Yugoslav Federal Army to create a Greater Serbia purged of non-Serbs.\u201d\u00a0<\/span> [The notion that Milosevic was a rabid Serbian nationalist bent on creating a Greater Serbia is entirely without foundation. The German government admitted in 1991 that the infamous \u2018Operation Horseshoe\u2019 document, submitted to The Hague tribunal as evidence of the Milosevic policy, had been faked by German intelligence. Milosevic was a consistent advocate of a multi-cultural Yugoslavia. Far from being a nationalist he alone among the leaders of the republics tried to keep multi-racial Yugoslavia together.]<\/i><\/b><\/p>\n Wohlstetter was not the only person to recognize the evil of\u00a0Milosevic.\u00a0Margaret Thatcher was a prominent advocate of direct and firm action against Serbian aggression. She recalled indignantly in 1999, \u201cThe West could have stopped\u00a0Milosevic\u00a0in\u00a0Slovenia\u00a0or\u00a0Croatia\u00a0in 1991, or in\u00a0Bosnia\u00a0in 1992.\u201d\u00a0 <\/span>[Mrs. Thatcher was wrong. She made the elementary error of not understanding that the brief war in Slovenia followed a decision by all the Republics to send in a token military force in response to Slovenia seizing control of its borders. The government of the FRY at that time was led by a Croatian, Stipe Mesic. \u00a0None of the Republic leaders was keen on military action, but all felt they had to do something to halt Slovenia\u2019s unilateral and illegal plans to leave the FRY. As for Bosnia, it was the Bosnian\u00a0Muslims who started the war in the belief that this would bring the western powers in on their side<\/i><\/b>.\u00a0<\/span><\/i><\/b> The Bosnian Serbs\u2019 predictable and natural response was to defend their threatened communities and vital lines of communication. Milosevic, however, consistently urged the Bosnian Serb leadership to negotiate rather than resort to military force.]<\/i><\/b>\u00a0<\/i><\/b><\/p>\n In 1995,\u00a0Milosevic\u00a0was slowed, at least, by the Dayton Accord, which, however, left Bosnian Serbs with most of the country and treated\u00a0Milosevic,\u00a0who had incited them to mass murder, rape, and wholesale vandalism, as a more or less respectable figure.\u00a0[<\/i><\/b>The Dayton Accord was the product of very difficult negotiations whose successful conclusion was in large part due to Slobodan Milosevic. Indeed, the chief US Negotiator, Richard Holbrooke paid public tribute to Milosevic, saying that agreement would not have reached without him.<\/i><\/b> \u00a0<\/i><\/b>No evidence has ever been found for claims that<\/i><\/b> <\/i><\/b>Milosevic incited the\u00a0Bosnian Serbs to \u2018mass murder, rape and wholesale vandalism\u2019. Muslim leader Alia Izetbegovic admitted on his deathbed that he had lied about the existence of Serbian death camps in Bosnia in order to attract Western intervention.] \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0<\/span><\/i><\/b> \u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/i><\/b><\/p>\n In 1999, four years after Dayton, 33 prominent foreign policy experts, including John Bolton and Paul Wolfowitz, signed a statement calling on President Clinton to end the \u201cpact with the devil\u201d signed at Dayton and to intervene immediately in Kosovo, the last setting for\u00a0Milosevic\u2019s\u00a0theater of the macabre. So we did, and\u00a0Milosevic\u00a0was stopped.\u00a0[<\/i><\/b>This is a complete distortion. The US had long been seeking a pretext to launch NATO aggression against Serbia.<\/i><\/b> \u00a0<\/i><\/b>A so-called massacre was faked at Racak in January 1999 by the notorious CIA fixer William Walker who \u2013 incredibly \u2013 had just been appointed the OSCE\u2019s Chief \u2018Peace Monitor\u2019 in Kosovo. \u00a0This enabled the US to convene peace talks at Rambouillet where the sole aim of the US had been to devise a deal the Kosovo Albanians could accept and the Serbs could not. \u00a0This was achieved by the last-minute addition of a secret annex to the\u00a0proposed terms giving Nato personnel carte blanche to operate within Serbia with complete immunity from all local laws. \u00a0The existence of this condition was only revealed two months after the Nato bombing started, when it was too late for anything to be done. \u00a0Many countries later said that no sovereign state could be expected to accept such terms, but typically no further action was taken. \u00a0Subsequently all the claims made about ethnic cleansing and killings in Kosovo were proved totally false. \u00a0The UN estimated deaths caused by the war at 4,000 in total, with 2,000 attributed directly to the Nato bombing. \u00a0No mass\u00a0graves were discovered.]<\/i><\/b><\/p>\n He was deposed by his countrymen in 2000, deported to\u00a0The Hague\u00a0by the Yugoslav government, and put on trial before a special tribunal. At the trial he attempted to present himself as a prescient and courageous defender of the West against al Qaeda. According to him, the murder of elderly Muslim peasants in remote districts of\u00a0Bosnia\u00a0or Kosovo was a blow against Islamist terrorism. In 2002, he even tried to claim American government support for the allegation that \u201cmujahedeen\u201d had fought in Kosovo. In reality, while some 2,000-4,000 Saudi-backed \u201cArab Afghans\u201d intruded into the Bosnian conflict, they failed to influence the course of the fighting, and their form of Islam repelled the European Bosnians.\u00a0[Fantasy. \u00a0Milosevic lost the election in 2000 after gross intervention in the electoral process by the United States. \u00a0Not only did they pour money into the opposition campaign, they also made it plain how hard they would make it for Serbia if Milosevic got re-elected \u2013 and how good it could be if he wasn\u2019t. \u00a0Huge sums in aid were promised, much of which was never delivered.]<\/i><\/b><\/p>\n And now the brute will be buried, leaving a legacy of some 250,000 dead (mostly Bosnian Muslims), thousands of victims of rape (also mostly Bosnian Muslims), and the economic and cultural wreckage of the former\u00a0Yugoslavia.\u00a0[This figure, which was always ridiculous, was first destroyed when, in the early 2000s, the Hague Tribunal\u2019s own professional statisticians reduced their original estimate of deaths from 200,000 to 100,000, which was still a very high figure in relation to the number of bodies actually recovered.\u00a0 <\/span>The claims of systematic mass rapes in Bosnia could not be substantiated by the scores of western journalists who poured into Bosnia seeking rape victims\u00a0but failing to find any. \u00a0The whole story was crude propaganda originated by the\u00a0Croatian and Bosnian information teams which had been schooled in\u00a0lies and deceit by leading New York PR agencies.]<\/i><\/b><\/p>\n His vision of a Greater Serbia resulted in the reality of a Lesser Serbia, reduced to the country as it existed in 1911, plus war booty taken from the Hungarians after World War I (Vojvodina in the north) and two unhappily acquired possessions that may soon be gone, Montenegro and Kosovo.(Yet another instance of shocking historical ignorance. Kosovo was the oldest part of Serbia, occupied by Serbs for more than 600 years. Almost all Montenegrins are Serbs. \u00a0Montenegro was part of Serbia until malign US intervention led to an independence referendum in 2006. \u00a0Thanks to a mass influx of dollars, a narrow majority was achieved for independence.)<\/i><\/b><\/p>\n Montenegro, annexed in 1918, is preparing a referendum on secession from its current \u201cfederation\u201d with\u00a0Serbia\u00a0for May of this year, and the \u201cfinal status\u201d of Kosovo, conquered by\u00a0Serbia\u00a0in 1912, is being negotiated by the international community. [<\/i><\/b>Serbs regained control of Kosovo and other territories when the Ottoman occupation ended in the early part of the 20th century. \u00a0Albania had wanted to colonise Kosovo for many years and made steady progress towards this goal. \u00a0During Tito\u2019s rule of Yugoslavia there were frequent occasions when, as part of his divide and rule approach, Tito opened Kosovo\u2019s borders to allow mass immigration from Albania. \u00a0Most controversially, Tito introduced a law at the end of World War Two preventing the return of Kosovo Serbs who had left the province during the war to fight the Germans. All this, combined with a Kosovo Albanian birth rate four times higher\u00a0than the European average, swiftly increased the Albanian population.]<\/i><\/b><\/p>\n Milosevic\u00a0will be remembered as the man who, at the end of the 20th century, reintroduced mass atrocities into a\u00a0Europe\u00a0that had ostensibly banished them forever.\u00a0Milosevic\u2019s\u00a0retro political style included \u201cethnic cleansing\u201d or mass expulsion; internment in concentration camps; grotesque torture and sexual terrorism; gratuitous slaughter of whole families, villages, and even the equivalent of a significant town\u20138,000 Muslim males at Srebrenica, and the systematic destruction of holy places and cultural landmarks. All was carried out by lawless gangs and \u201cmilitias,\u201d in addition to the Yugoslav army.\u00a0 [No, history will remember him very differently. In the course of a 4-year prosecution case against Milosevic at\u00a0The Hague Tribunal, no substantive evidence to support these allegations was ever produced. \u00a0His prosecutor, Geoffrey Nice QC, admitted he was still struggling to make a case against Milosevic. The best the Tribunal could do was to produce uncorroborated testimony from witnesses who gave their evidence anonymously and by video link or evidence\u00a0obtained via plea bargaining. Scientific evidence reported to the court verbally was never put before it for independent scrutiny and analysis. \u00a0This wilful failure to follow fundamental due process will progressively expose the travesty that currently passes for truth.]<\/i><\/b><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Death of a Dictator \u2013 The Weekly Standard, 27 March 2006 The Weekly Standard was a newsletter reflecting the views of neocons such as Dick Chaney, Donald Rumsfeld and John Bolton (Google states \u201cNeoconservatives typically advocate the promotion of democracy and interventionism in international affairs, including peace through strength, and are known for espousing disdain […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"parent":0,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"_genesis_hide_title":false,"_genesis_hide_breadcrumbs":false,"_genesis_hide_singular_image":false,"_genesis_hide_footer_widgets":false,"_genesis_custom_body_class":"","_genesis_custom_post_class":"","_genesis_layout":"","footnotes":""},"class_list":{"0":"post-1291","1":"page","2":"type-page","3":"status-publish","5":"entry"},"yoast_head":"\n