America’s Deceptive Model for Aggression

Since NATO’s 1999 war on Serbia, U.S. officials have followed a script demonizing targeted foreign leaders, calling ultimatums “diplomacy,” lying about “war as a last resort” and selling aggression as humanitarianism, says Nicolas J S Davies.

By Nicolas J S Davies

Across the political spectrum, U.S. leaders insist that they will only go to war “as a last resort.” They want us to believe that they will try every peaceful means to resolve differences with other countries before resorting to war. But if those “peaceful means” mean only ultimatums that are unacceptable to the target country, then U.S. leaders are simply going through a diplomatic charade before going to war.

In such a case, “war as a last resort” refers only to the means of achieving a goal, not to the rights or wrongs of the goal itself. If the underlying purpose is to impose the will of the U.S. government on another country or society, then “war as a last resort” amounts to an illegal threat of war to compel a country to submit to U.S. demands, not a commitment to peace or to the rule of law.

Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton speaking with supporters at a campaign rally at Carl Hayden High School in Phoenix, Arizona, March 21, 2016. (Photo by Gage Skidmore)

Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton speaking with supporters at a campaign rally at Carl Hayden High School in Phoenix, Arizona, March 21, 2016. (Photo by Gage Skidmore)

As I wrote last February, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton uses the term “diplomacy” to mean precisely this kind of brinksmanship, which creates a pretext for war if the other side won’t back down and is quite different from diplomacy to resolve international disputes peacefully, as required by the United Nations Charter and customary international law.

When Clinton told a televised “national security” forum that she “view(s) force as a last resort, not a first choice,” she was echoing what she and Sen. Bernie Sanders both said in Democratic Party debates. But in Clinton’s case, using the phrase “last resort” in this way is a clever way to reassure her listeners without actually modifying her hawkish and coercive approach to international relations. By contrast, Sanders was on firmer ground since he voted against two wars on Iraq (in 1990 and 2002), but did vote for war on Yugoslavia in 1999, a vote he still defends.

In negotiations at Rambouillet, France, in 1999, Secretary of State Madeleine Albright gave Yugoslavia only a devil’s choice between agreeing to a NATO military occupation (of all its remaining territory, not just Kosovo) and a NATO assault. When President Slobodan Milosevic refused these impossible terms, the West blamed him for triggering a U.S.-led war that was neither a war of self-defense nor a U.N.-backed collective security operation. In other words, it was a war of aggression by the U.S. and NATO against a largely defenseless nation.

But Milosevic had been so thoroughly demonized that few Americans seriously considered Yugoslavia’s position. Today, even fewer Americans know that the man our leaders tagged as a “new Hitler” and the “Butcher of the Balkans” was eventually exonerated by the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY), ten years after he died of a heart attack in a prison cell at The Hague.

Few also remember that the 1,380-member-strong Kosovo Verification Mission (KVM) of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) was withdrawn six days before NATO began its aerial bombardment.

Pascal Neuffer, a Swiss member of the KVM, said, “The situation on the ground on the eve of the bombing did not justify a military intervention. We could certainly have continued our work. And the explanations given in the press, saying the mission was compromised by Serb threats, did not correspond to what I saw. Let’s say rather that we were evacuated because NATO had decided to bomb.”

The political stage was set for NATO’s assault on Yugoslavia by a battle in a village called Racak two months earlier. Yugoslav forces attacked CIA-backed Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) fighters who had terrorized the area and ambushed police patrols. The head of the KVM, former U.S. Ambassador to El Salvador William Walker, arrived in Racak the next day and misreported the battle to uncritical Western media as a massacre of civilians by Serb forces.

But autopsies conducted by Yugoslav, Belarusian and Finnish medical examiners contradicted Walker’s account. The dead did not appear to be victims of summary execution. They died from a variety of gunshot wounds, as in any firefight; only one of 40 corpses examined was shot at close range; and there were only one woman and one teenage boy among the otherwise adult male bodies.

While the Western media largely parroted Walker’s false account, and the confirmation of the autopsy results by the Finnish medical examiners was only partially made public in a journal article two years later, two French reporters in Kosovo immediately challenged Walker’s narrative based on Associated Press video footage of the battle and other anomalies.

Questioning a Massacre

Christophe Chatelet’s article in Le Monde was headlined, “Were the dead in Racak really massacred in cold blood?” Describing how the KLA who reoccupied the village the evening after the battle appeared to have staged the scene to look like the result of a massacre, Le Figaro’s veteran Yugoslavia correspondent Renaud Girard presciently concluded his story on Racak with a rhetorical question, “did the KLA seek to transform a military defeat into a political victory?”

Serbian leader Slobodan Milosevic.

Serbian leader Slobodan Milosevic.

Racak was the “atrocity” needed by President Bill Clinton and Secretary of State Albright to rally the media, the public and otherwise progressive Members of Congress like Bernie Sanders to support a war of aggression. The U.S. and its allies then dropped 23,000 bombs and missiles on civilian as well as military targets across Yugoslavia, killing thousands of civilians and striking hospitals, schools, power stations, private homes, a TV station and the Chinese Embassy in Belgrade.

Kosovo was annexed as a NATO protectorate, and Hashim Thaci, the KLA leader and organized crime figure whom Albright had chosen over Kosovo’s political leaders to head its delegation at Rambouillet, is now the president of a new nation that has struggled for stability and international recognition.

But Thaci’s days in the sun may be numbered – Le Figaro reported in March that an international court is preparing new charges against him. One shocking charge, already well documented by former ICTY prosecutor Carla Del Ponte and an investigation by the Council of Europe, is that Thaci was the head of a criminal gang that exploited the chaos of Kosovo under NATO bombing to murder up to 500 Serbian and Roma prisoners so that they could harvest their internal organs to sell on the international transplant market.

But the Kosovo Model has served Western warmongers well. The exaggeration or fabrication of atrocities by U.S. enemies and the blind eye turned to atrocities by U.S. allies are now standard fare whenever our leaders promote some new military intervention, and the subservient Western mainstream media remains reliable allies in these deceptions. If a foreign leader has been sufficiently demonized by Western propaganda, even baseless predictions of unlikely atrocities can serve as a casus belli, as was the case in Libya in 2011.

The U.K. parliament’s foreign affairs committee recently concluded an inquiry into the Western destruction of Libya. One of its key findings was that the British government “failed to identify that the threat to civilians was overstated,” because it “selectively took elements of Gaddafi’s rhetoric at face value.”

Of course, it was Western governments themselves who “overstated” the threat to civilians in Benghazi from Libyan government forces. The cherry-picking of Colonel Gaddafi’s statements ignored his offer of amnesty to rebels who laid down their arms. There were also no massacres in other towns recaptured by Libyan government forces.

The committee also concluded that the emergence of “militant extremist groups” among the NATO-backed rebels was entirely predictable; and that the U.K. “drifted into an opportunistic policy of regime change” that “was not underpinned by a strategy to support and shape post-Gaddafi Libya.”

Yet, just last April in a Democratic presidential debate, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton was still repeating the same propaganda line, justifying the U.S.-supported “regime change” on the grounds that Gaddafi was a “genocidal” dictator.

If only the world had been presented with an honest account of our country’s international crimes against Yugoslavia in 1999, the worldwide civil society resistance to Western aggression against Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya would have been strengthened by broader awareness of the dangers of U.S. militarism and the deceptive role of Western propaganda in setting the stage for war.

We’ll never know for sure, but that might just have tipped the balance in favor of those who insisted that only the guilty should be punished for the crimes of 9/11, not millions of innocent people in Afghanistan, Iraq and other countries.

Massive Military Spending

Politicians and candidates keep telling us that the key to our safety and security lies in the strength of the U.S. military, which must therefore always be two or three times larger and more expensive than those of all its potential enemies combined. The U.S. today spends more on its military than the sum of our nine closest military competitors (most of whom are U.S. allies in any case) and more than the total military spending of 182 less militarized countries combined.

Barack Obama and George W. Bush at the White House.

Barack Obama and George W. Bush at the White House.

Despite the chaos unleashed by decades of military adventurism, U.S. leaders seem blissfully unaware that this lop-sided military imbalance is undermining global security and stability instead of improving it. After President George W. Bush oversaw the most expensive unilateral arms build-up in history, President Obama has achieved what would have seemed impossible to most Americans in 2008 – he has actually outspent Bush.

The reason that this imbalance is so dangerous lies in the very nature of military force. Weapons of war are designed to wound, maim or kill people, not to help them in any way. Bombs and missiles do not rebuild buildings, cities or societies – they only damage or destroy them.

The term “regime change” is a misnomer. Overwhelming military force does not “change” regimes – it just destroys them. We should understand by now that when our leaders threaten to “change” a regime by military force, that will replace it only with rubble, graveyards, chaos, corruption and poverty.

But this huge imbalance in military forces and expenditures creates the dangerous illusion that our leaders can threaten or use military force to reshape the world as they see fit, to solve any problem or achieve any geostrategic goal. Corporate media, from Hollywood to the New York Times, spin this military madness into a full-fledged fantasy in which a country that doesn’t even provide its own people with basic human rights like healthcare, housing or a subsistence living, and instead manages poverty with aggressive, militarized policing and mass incarceration, is cast as a global warrior for democracy and human rights.

U.S. leaders saw the collapse of the Soviet Union as an ideological victory that opened doors to expand the U.S.-based capitalist economic system to the four corners of the world. They have bullied and bribed compliant governments to join U.S.-led trade and investment schemes that prioritize concentration of wealth and power over people and the environment.

Countries that resist integration into this neoliberal system or try to develop alternative models are subject to withering propaganda, crippling sanctions, U.S.-backed coups and, in the “last resort,” to the threat and catastrophic use of military force.

This strategy and the role of the U.S. military in enforcing it have now been explicitly detailed in U.S. policy documents for 25 years, beginning with the original version of the Pentagon’s “Defense Planning Guidance” that was leaked to the New York Times in 1992. This U.S. policy of illegal, unilateral use of force to “protect vital U.S. interests,” explicitly defined to include “uninhibited access to key markets, energy supplies and strategic resources,” was formally unveiled to the world in the 1997 Quadrennial Defense Review and the 2002 National Security Strategy.

The late Sen. Edward Kennedy condemned the latter as “a call for 21st century American imperialism that no other country can or should accept.” But there is no hint that the spiral of violence and chaos our leaders have unleashed across the world has led them to rethink their commitment to the illegal threat and use of military force as an instrument of U.S. policy.

What we need from our political leaders and candidates is not the threat of more “last resort” wars on the Kosovo model, but a new commitment to peace and international law, most importantly to the U.N. Charter’s prohibition on the threat or use of military force.

Until then, we should interpret deceptive formulations like “force as a last resort” as meaning that our leaders remain committed to an endless state of war that they have no idea how to contain or control. If humanity and civilization are to survive, we must force them to consider a very different “last resort”: peace, disarmament and a rule of law that governs the rich and powerful as well as the poor and downtrodden.

Nicolas J S Davies is the author of Blood On Our Hands: the American Invasion and Destruction of Iraq.  He also wrote the chapters on “Obama at War” in Grading the 44th President: a Report Card on Barack Obama’s First Term as a Progressive Leader.

11 comments for “America’s Deceptive Model for Aggression

  1. Paranoid Android
    September 28, 2016 at 17:27

    As a millenial having the circumstance of the nato agression in Kosovo clearly explained has immense value. I too am bewildered by the current direction the west has chosen, from the exploitation of 911 to the Ukrainian Coup and Syria. I feel at this point perhaps all this warmongering is merely the oligarchs choosing to play with their MIC toys before climate collapse, but then again the west has consistently chosen short term gains at long term expense. Thanks for a great resource acknowledging reality in this crazy world.

  2. Curious
    September 26, 2016 at 21:05

    Thank you Mr Davies for a very fine article.

    This article does fly in the face of Obama, who, in his last State of the Union address he bragged about how much expenditure was going to the military ahead of other countries. He should have bragged about the areas of peace the US has created around the world with its military, but that would be a stretch of course. When countries stand up to defend themselves they are cast as the enemy.

    Keeping America save by stealing other countries resources. That could be a title to a book.

  3. September 26, 2016 at 18:28

    Excellent article. I believe what is happening could be called,
    “The Trail of Blood, Bodies, Destruction and Death, That Leads to the War Criminals in Our Midst” See link below:
    http://graysinfo.blogspot.ca/2016/09/the-trail-of-blood-bodies-destruction.html

  4. Bill Bodden
    September 26, 2016 at 18:16

    The head of the KVM, former U.S. Ambassador to El Salvador William Walker, arrived in Racak the next day and misreported the battle to uncritical Western media as a massacre of civilians by Serb forces.

    The US ambassador to Havana was a source of lies to help get the Spanish-American War going. I didn’t realize this was part of an ambassador’s duties. Now that I know I’ll be skeptical of any stories relayed by other ambassadors.

  5. Bill Bodden
    September 26, 2016 at 18:05

    Secretary of State Hillary Clinton uses the term “diplomacy” to mean precisely this kind of brinksmanship, which creates a pretext for war if the other side won’t back down and is quite different from diplomacy to resolve international disputes peacefully, as required by the United Nations Charter and customary international law.

    Shades of how Woodrow Wilson maneuvered the US into the First World War.

  6. Bill Bodden
    September 26, 2016 at 18:01

    But if those “peaceful means” mean only ultimatums that are unacceptable to the target country, then U.S. leaders are simply going through a diplomatic charade before going to war.

    Kind of like how Woodrow Wilson maneuvered the US into the First World War that begat the Second World War that clinched America’s eventual role to become the world’s hegemon.

    • Bill Bodden
      September 26, 2016 at 18:12

      I received a message indicating this was a duplicate though I didn’t recall posting it before I was so informed hence the revised version below.

    • Joe B
      September 26, 2016 at 19:14

      Wilson seems not to have pushed the US toward WWI until about two years after the :Lusitania sinking 5/6/1915. Teddy Roosevelt and Gen. Sherman were among the war advocates. There was much sensible opposition including Wilson, for which he was heavily criticized, and the US had trouble supplying arms to allies while pretending to be neutral. It appears that the heavy defensive losses of Britain and France were considered sufficient causes, and the losses of several hundred US lives to submarine warfare pushed the public to approve a draft. Total US casualties were less than those of France in the few weeks before the first US troops landed, and we did not have large forces there for many months after that. It was a tough process of compromise of sensible isolationism with humanitarian protection of democracies against invasion, a slow process because it was not thought out in advance due to lack of precedent.

      • Bill Bodden
        September 27, 2016 at 12:12

        It appears that the heavy defensive losses of Britain and France were considered sufficient causes

        Retired Marine General Smedley Butler claimed Wall Street pushed for US entry into the First World War to prevent Britain defaulting on loans. In his book The Politics of War, Walter Karp suggests that Wilson’s vanity was another factor in getting the US into this war.

        Another historian suggested that Britain rejected a truce in mid-1917 because it had the understanding that the US would enter the war and give the allies victory. The consequence of this was the countless people who died between the time the truce was turned down and signing of the Armistice on November 11, 1918. Despite the millions of people who died up to the signing of the Armistice, Generals Pershing and MacArthur wanted to continue the war and take it on to German soil.

  7. Nancy
    September 26, 2016 at 17:08

    “Forcing” them to mend their ways is not likely to come with any democratic tool – at least before they take their greed and insanity to more horrific levels. I feel totally sold-out by the once progressive left. Voting Stein.

  8. Joe B
    September 26, 2016 at 16:40

    This is an excellent essay on the deceptions used by warmonger demagogues. the tyrants over democracy against whom Aristotle warned.

    We should also note that the federal government does not have any power under the Constitution to wage foreign war. It can only repel invasions, suppress insurrections, and issue letter of marque (foreign arrest warrants) and letters of reprisal (authorizations to attack a specific fugitive military target, originally a pirate ship). Anything more than that requires a treaty authority such as the UN or NATO. NATO war power has never been properly used for generations: it survives only to empower warmonger tyrants in the US and should be renounced immediately.

    Also note that the Executive branch of the federal government does not have warmaking power. It has military power only because an invasion or insurrection must be handled faster than Congress can respond; it does not have any authority to make policy or initiate hostilities of any kind. Allowing the executive to seize policymaking power is foolish and suicidal: it has led to generations of bone-headed tyrants in the Presidency exerting totalitarian powers over the world, with disastrous effects. Congress must take back that warmaking power, renounce the NATO treaty. and investigate its corrupt members taking bribes from the MIC and foreign powers, and establish felony punishments for such abuses.

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