An op-ed by the Norwegian novelist Torgrim Eggen, readworthy especially for its historical point of view.

Now they are bombing Beirut again. That’s what it’s like to have the world’s worst neighbor.

THE INTERNET is quite a tool. I am sitting here with Google Earth looking at satellite images of Beirut. I think I have found Khraibeh Street, where I lived in the fall of 1993.
     Khraibeh Street is situated in the hillside in Hadeth east of the airport, and from my roof terrace adorned with pictoresque bullet holes I enjoyed a panorama view of western Beirut. Nearest was the ghetto Hay al-Sellum, which US Marines called “Hooterville” when they served as a peacekeeping force in Beirut from 1982 to 1984. Hay al-Sellum is Hizbollahstan. The area was dangerous, claimed my Christian hosts, so when we ventured there it was on the condition that I was “Swiss.” This, of course, was thanks to the Oslo Accords.

NORTH OF “Hooterville,” in good view of my terrace, was the Palestinian refugee camp of Bourj al-Barajneh. Or rather, what was left of it. North-west of this, in turn, are Sabra and Shatila, the scene of perhaps the blackest chapter of Israeli and Lebanese history.
     I recall people asking: — What are you doing in Beirut day after day? Why don’t you head up to see the Roman ruins at Baalbek, or the ruins of Byblos? My reply: — Don’t you think I see enough ruins from the terrace? There was, as it were, nothing else.

AND NOW THEY are at it bombing Beirut again. What wrong have these people done?
     It would be unfair to blame all of Lebanon’s misery on its southern neighbor. Let us say Israel is merely responsible for ninety percent. It is shocking what brutality the Israelis display when Lebanon is the target. The current Chief of Staff is Dan Halutz, and the acts of war had barely begun when he declared that they would “bomb Lebanon 20 years back in time.” This week he reportedly said that Israel “will bomb ten housing blocks in Beirut for every missile hitting Haifa.” To avoid the commonplace accusations of “anti-Semitism” I shall not mention what this is reminiscent of. According to the Jerusalem Post, Halutz was misquoted. In any case, this is a man who is staying the course toward the Hague. His former boss Ariel Sharon, now in coma, should have been charged there as well.

IN THE WAR OF 1982, Israel managed to commit just about every war crime in the book. Bombing of hospitals. Terror bombing of residential quarters. Use of phosphorous and cluster bombs against civilians. Summary executions of prisoners. You name it. Israel was even able to bomb Beirut’s sole remaining synagogue. All this and more can be read in Pity the Nation: Lebanon and War by Robert Fisk, hereby recommended. This is the book that will make you laugh out loud the next time you hear the term ’surgical strikes’.

SO WHY dwell at length on a war 24 years past? Because that was when Israel invented Hizbollah. It was an accomplishment making the expression ‘to shoot oneself in the leg’ sound tame.
     When Israel invaded Lebanon in 1978 and 1982 to weed out the PLO, the poor Shia minority in southern Lebanon were relatively impartial. The conflict lacked the religous resonances it has today, and besides, the majority of the PLO, Fatah, et cetera were Sunnis. The problem was that the Shias were in the way. The savagery and brutality with which Israel proceeded, first against southern villages and then against the quarters of Beirut to which the villagers fled (those who weren’t mowed down by Israeli aircraft underway), led to radicalization. The Shias became militant, and there was inspiration (as well as finances) on offer in Iran.
     On November 11 1982 it said boom. Israel’s military headquarters in Tyre went up in smoke; 75 Israelis died. A previously unknown group that called itself Islamic Jihad took responsibility for what was in fact the first suicide operation in the Middle East. Islamic Jihad is believed to have been a branch of “the Party of God.”

CAN I TEMPT with an interesting moral dilemma? A “terrorist organization” stations a SAM site on a hospital roof in violation of the Geneva Conventions. A martial power bombs the hospital and kills everyone inside — doctors, nurses, and civilian patients. Is it possible to talk about ‘degrees’ of responsibility here? I think it is. The “terrorists” put civilian lives in danger. The martial power executes them. Much of today’s Lebanon conflict is about such things, about “living shields” and “collateral damage.”
     The above example is once again from Israel’s invasion in 1982. To be fair, they also bombed hospitals on which the “terrorists” had stationed nothing whatsoever. At Bourj al-Barajneh it appeared that the Israeli pilot had used the Red Cross-symbol on the roof to aim. After all, there could be “terrorists” in the hospital beds. This year it seems that shooting at ambulances is the sport in vogue. Or was it UN observers?

ISRAEL’S FORMER Prime Minister Menachem Begin once declared that “if Adolf Hitler were hiding in a housing block full of civilians, we would bomb it.” Now, there wasn’t any Israel at the time when Hitler frequented housing blocks. That is at the core of the problem, so to speak. Back when PLO was the main enemy, it was passable in the Israeli public sphere to compare Yassir Arafat to Hitler. This year the Hizbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah has the honor of being “Hitler.”
     But in that case it would surely suffice to bomb one house? As opposed to reducing a city of millions to rubble?
     This is where the Israeli logic fails, and it does so because it is the logic of terrorism. The logic of terrorism dictates that a hospital is a legitimate target if it may contain combatants.
     The logic is so bizarre that it values the life of one terrorist higher than other lives — if one kills twenty innocents to eliminate one Hizbollah stalwart, the operation is a success.
     Yes, I think Israel must have the right to exist and defend itself. I even find the idea of a “security zone” a good one. But then, in the name of decency, it should surely be located in Israel and not in Lebanon. After all, you don’t empty your garbage bin over the fence to your neighbor, right?

By Torgrim Eggen 2006. Translation by Sirocco.

In a previous post I described Israel as a strange but impressive modern hybrid of Athens and Sparta. The latter side of the Janus face being currently on full display, we might as well familiarize ourselves with its features. Forgotten history is written in its wrinkles.

This recent Telegraph report is a good place to start (emphasis added):

Interesting. Besides terrorist bombing of hotels, what else was the Irgun gang (and its off-shoot the Stern gang) about? Let us dig a little deeper into the history, shall we?

Begin was a dedicated terrorist well into the 1950s. It has recently been revealed that he attempted to assassinate West Germany’s chancellor Konrad Adenauer in 1952 over disagreement on how the German compensation for the Holocaust should be paid.

The proud tradition of terrorist PMs would continue. Yitzhak Shamir was also a member the Irgun, and after the split, of the Stern gang.

Let’s see if this history does not also involve some other individuals we know (emphasis added):

Such is the “freedom” now unleashed on Lebanon. It has a face of its own:

Crossposted from European Tribune.

Today is the 70 years anniversary of the beginning of the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939), which claimed a million victims, many to aerial bombardment.

Pablo Picasso: Guernica (1937)

Crossposted from European Tribune.

Western advocates of Israel tend to see it as a reincarnation of ancient Athens of the 4th century B.C. Like that celebrated city-state, it is the only functioning democracy in its region; a flourishing center of science, scholarship, and the arts; a technological powerhouse; and a bustling, free-trading economy of innovation and export. To paraphrase Pericles, Israel is “an education to all Middle East.”

In contrast, Israel’s Western detractors tend to view it as a modern-day Sparta, Athen’s arch-rival and nemesis, which colonized and oppressed the neighboring Messenia. Upon the latter’s revolt in 630 B.C., Sparta transformed itself into a permanent military camp — austere, oligarchic, insular, and rigid — to keep its conquered serfs under boot. In the same way, allege its critics, Israel uses a formidable standing army, based upon long compulsory service, to subjugate another people and steal its land.

In fact, Israel combines key traits of both Athens and Sparta.* It is a democratic, open society, yet sufficiently militaristic to constitute the world’s fourth-ranking military power at some six million citizens, of whom only 80 percent belong to the ethnic majority and are thus accepted in the army. It is a world-class producer of electronics that occupies and colonizes other people’s land while invading or bombing neighboring countries at will.

In terms of worldly success, or power, this is an extremely potent combination. Rome, the only ancient city-state to embody something like it, won itself an empire of fifty million, including all of Greece. But it is also an unstable combination, especially under modern conditions.

Whenever Israel’s Spartan side predominates, the economy suffers. During the Oslo peace process from 1993 to 1999, growth was 74 percent, compared to 18 percent from 1999 to 2004. Particularly vulnerable is the high-tech export sector at the heart of Athenian Israel. Meanwhile, the imperatives of constant war and occupation are a strain on its democratic culture and civil society.

Paradoxically, those in the West who emphasize Israel’s Athenian nature are also the only ones outside Israel itself to applaud its Spartan excesses. If Israel truly does turn into a contemporary Sparta in the face of ever more hostile surroundings, then its Western enablers will have helped make their own opponents right.

*) Note, though, that the popular image of Athens versus Sparta is a bit inaccurate. Athens was hardly a democracy by modern standards, and for a long time it was more expansionist than Sparta, sometimes brutally so. For its part, Sparta, with its sophisticated pottery and poetry, was not quite the cultural wasteland as which it is often portrayed.

Crossposted from European Tribune.

It is always wise to start with the beginning:

A brief history of Kosovo. Part I: 1189-1989.

1989 On St. Vitus Day, June 28 1989 — the 600th anniversary of the mythologized battle — Slobodan Milošević returned to Kosovo Polje as president-elect of the Serbian Republic. Also back for the occasion was Prince Lazar, whose holy remains had toured the Orthodox monasteries of Yugoslavia for two years, rousing Serbian nationalism. As many as a million pilgrims convened at the plains, waving “Slobo’s” picture alongside that of his illustrious predecessor.

However, Milošević’s actual address on that day has been misrepresented on a scale almost comparable to the events which it commemorated. Though it did, ominously enough, suggest that armed struggle “should not be excluded yet,” it was hardly a “stirringly virulent nationalist speech” (The Economist, June 05, 1999, US edition) that “whipped a million Serbs into a nationalist frenzy” (Time International, July 9, 2001). On the contrary, it touted the peaceful coexistence of ethnic groups within common borders. Why the shift in rhetoric?

This declaration provides a clue: “Serbia of today is united and equal to other republics.” Milošević, in other words, had already achieved one of his key objectives and was seeking to consolidate his position at the helm of an undivided Yugoslavia.

There are rival accounts of how this came to be. The following is that of the the Prosecutor of the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia:

This version of what happened on March 23 1989 was, it must be emphasized, vigorously disputed by witnesses for Milošević at The Hague. What is clear is that Kosovo’s autonomy was downgraded to pre-1974 levels at Milošević’ behest. The Serbian Parliament followed up by passing a number of discriminatory laws, including one that barred Albanians from selling real estate without permission from Serbian authorities.

In July 1990 a majority of Albanian delegates in the Assembly of Kosovo responded by unofficially declaring Kosovo an “equal and independent” republic of SFRY, complete with a shadow government. Greg Campbell, in his book The Road to Kosovo, sums up what happened next:

By September 1990, a US National Intelligence Estimate warned that “the Yugoslav experiment has failed, that the country will break up” and that “this is likely to be accomplished by ethnic violence and unrest which could lead to civil war.” Yet like most close observers, it predicted that the first region engulfed by war would be Kosovo itself. Instead the Kosovo conflict set off a chain reaction through Slovenia, Croatia, and Bosnia that not before 1998 completed the circle and blew up the detonator.

The Serbian crackdown in Kosovo induced Slovenians to vote overwhelmingly for independence in a December 1990 plebiscite. As this left Serbia too dominant for their liking, it moved Croatia, Bosnia, and Macedonia to secede as well. The ensuing war in Bosnia left at least 100,000 dead and created 3 million refugees. The international community could do little to halt the carnage, and did even less.

How did the powder keg of Kosovo avoid war in the early 1990s? One factor is that, despite voting overwhelmingly for independence in an unofficial referendum of September 1991, Albanians lacked the military and political muscle to force secession, while Belgrade was kept in check by the outside world, notably the US. According to a former US ambassador to Croatia, the Bush sr. administration was more concerned about potential war in Kosovo and its destabilizing effects than about Bosnia. In its “Christmas Threat” of late 1992 — since reiterated by President Clinton — it threatened military action if Milošević were to deploy in Kosovo.

Another factor is the pacifism of the late Ibrahim Rugova; a silk-scarfed, Sorbonne-educated academic who in May 1992 was voted President of the “Republic of Kosova” in clandestine elections. Rugova and his party, the Democratic League of Kosova (DLK), favored passive resistance, establishing an underground state of diaspora-financed parallel institutions to which Serbian police saw fit to turn a blind eye. The strategy of the DLK was quietly to await Western support for independence. However, the US and the EU were by now preoccupied with Bosnia. Thus, when the 1995 Dayton Accords recognized Serbia and Montenegro as the new Yugoslavia and the sanctions were lifted, this was not made conditional even upon restored autonomy for the troubled province.

While understandable given the urgency of ending the Bosnian bloodbath, the neglect of the Kosovo question left ethnic Albanians — now on their own with the Serbs and Montenegrins — worse off than in the old SFRY. In result, many DLK adherents gave up on the non-violent approach and switched to the Kosova Liberation Army (KLA): a clan-based rag-tag militia which by 1993 had evolved from emigré separatist groups in Western Europe, comprising refugees from the 1980 crackdown. Faithful to the 19th century nationalist ideal of a polity coextensive with the ethnicity, it revived the old pipedream of uniting the ethnic Albanians of Kosovo, Montenegro, Macedonia, and Albania itself in a Greater Albania. This grandiose irredentist project, harking back to the League of Prizren of 1878, was the long-term ambition. The KLA’s immediate end was independence.

As to the means it was prepared to use, indisputably part of its funding derived from organized crime, possibly including participation in the infamous Balkan Route of heroin to Western Europe. There have also been reports of ties with jihadi groups. Most likely, both accusations contain elements of truth — the former perhaps more than the latter — but have been exaggerated in pro-Serb propaganda. The KLA was not the armed wing of Albanian organized crime, nor did its agenda and leadership have much to do with political Islam.

KLA fighters.

In early 1996 the KLA launched a low-intensity insurgency, ambushing security forces and assailing “collaborators.” Its existence was long only rumored, but by early 1997 it began to claim responsibility.
Stocking up on cheap Kalashnikovs from the looted armories of Albania, then in a state of anarchy after the collapse of nation-wide pyramid financing schemes, the KLA escalated operations throughout the year. On the night to September 11 it performed a series of ten coordinated attacks as much as 150 km apart. On November 28 — a date commemorated as a national day among Kosovo Albanians — a KLA member appeared in public as such for the very first time.

At this point the guerrilla began to target civilian Serbs. The master strategy was a kind of martial judo familiar from terrorist campaigns: turning the enemy’s strength against him. Pinprick operations aimed to provoke disproportionate reprisals which would rally Kosovo Albanians around its cause and, with any luck, elicit Western intervention. Perhaps aware of this risk in the light of Clinton’s threats, and having experience with provocation tactics himself, Milošević shied away from deploying the army.

He eventually changed his mind. On some accounts, this happened when on February 23 1998, US special envoy Robert Gelbard imprudently, if not inaccurately, called the KLA “without any question a terrorist group” which the US condemned “very strongly.” Within a week, Serbian special forces backed by helicopter gunships and armoured personnel carriers performed a brutal crackdown in the western Drenica region, flattening entire towns that served as strongholds for leading KLA (and mafia) clans. To go by Kosovo Albanian sources, this involved summary executions, even outright massacres. Albanian media reported a hundred thousand attending the funerals.

The sweep continued into March, notably at the village of Prekaz in central Kosovo, where fifty-three members of the Jeshari clan allegedly were slaughtered. The KLA made the most of this, posting photos of the corpses on the Internet as soon as available. A massive uprising followed, swelling the ranks of the KLA. Meanwhile, up to 400,000 Kosovo Albanians were forced to flee their homes, some at gunpoint and many over the mountains to Albania.

This humanitarian disaster led to the UN Security Council to impose economic sanctions and an arms embargo on Yugoslavia, threatening “additional measures” if it failed to withdraw. To underline the point, 85 NATO aircraft overflew Albania and Macedonia; the US Sixth Fleet, put on battle alert, cruised into the Adriatic in a show of force. Finally, in late September the Clinton administration opened the door for air strikes; in October, NATO authorized such in the case of non-compliance with “the repeated political and humanitarian demands of the UN Security Council in regards to Kosovo.”

Belgrade had no choice but to fold. In the so-called Holbrooke-Milošević agreement of October 12, it agreed to restore Kosovo’s autonomy and pull out the army and police in return for a lifting of the UN sanctions. A multinational corps of 750 civilian monitors, under the auspices of the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE), moved in to supervise the implementation.

By all accounts, the some 130 strong US contribution to this Kosovo Verification Mission (KVM) was heavily spy-infested. (There are unverified allegations that the KVM head, US diplomat William Walker — an old Latin America hand with stints in El Salvador and Honduras — was himself CIA.) According to the Sunday Times, the Americans operated on “completely different terms” than the Europeans, providing advice and combat manuals to the KLA.

The latter for its part was neither party to nor content with the ceasefire. It surged forth into the power vacuum, seizing half the province and extending a makeshift administrative structure as it went along. As reported in the BBC2 documentary Moral Combat, Walker confidentially told NATO’s governing body that the guerrilla was now “the main initiator of the violence,” apparently engaging in “a deliberate campaign of provocation.”

On January 15 1999, another massacre occurred in the town of Racak, a KLA stronghold in southern Kosovo, where some 45 Albanians were murdered in cold blood after attacks on Serbian police. Or so, at any rate, William Walker assured a press conference, describing in gory detail the aftermath of an “unspeakable atrocity” and a “crime against humanity.” The charge would be central to the case against Milošević in The Hague, where Walker testified for the prosecution about the heaps of dead bodies he had seen on that day.

Bodies at Racak — combatants or civilians?

Yet doubts immediately arose about this incident. There are indications that it was a hoax staged by the KLA to trigger NATO intervention. Frustratingly, there are also persuasive counter-arguments. In a sense it hardly even matters, inasmuch as neither side was morally above what it stood accused of by the other side. What is clear is that, if it was indeed a KLA hoax, it succeeded.

News of the Racak incident broke within hours of a National Security Council meeting in which US Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, who had for nearly a year favored putting military pressure on Milošević, argued in vain for “decisive steps.” Albright later called Racak “a galvanizing incident,” meaning that it galvanized will to contemplate the use of force.

She was right, both in terms of the Clinton administration and international opinion. For the German Foreign Minister Joschka Fisher, for instance, “Racak became the turning point”: “If people are being massacred, you cannot mutter about having no [UN Security Council] mandate. You must act.” Within two weeks, NATO announced its readiness to intervene, France and Britain vowed to send in ground troops if needed, and UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan stateed that Bosnia had proven “the need to use force, when all other means have failed.”

Finally, the so-called Contact Group of Britain, Germany, France, Italy, Russia and the US summoned the parties, on pains of NATO airstrikes, to the Château de Rambouillet outside Paris. Talks began on February 6 amidst intermittent clashes, torched villages, and a Serbian presence some six times heavier than allowed by the ceasefire. What transpired at Rambouillet has been, it is fair to say, misrepresented widely in US and European media to this day.

It was announced that, merely by taking part, the parties implicitly accepted 26 principles which the British Foreign Secretary Robin Cook had stated on January 30. These non-negotiable principles were culled from the January 27 version of an ‘Interim Agreement’ drafted by the US envoy, Holbrooke’s deputy Christopher Hill.

This framework mandated an immediate truce and disarmament followed by restored self-government for Kosovo within the FRY. Upon free elections supervised by the OSCE, the province would enjoy its own parliament, president, judicial system and police; the cultural rights of all ethnic groups would be respected; all political prisoners would be released; and a final settlement would be reached after three years. A new version of the agreement, presented to the parties upon arrival, specified that the latter would occur through a “mechanism” determined by an “international meeting” on the basis of “the will of the people” and various “opinions” and “efforts.” Albright gave the parties one week to endorse this fait accompli and hash out the details, otherwise “appropriate conclusions” would be drawn. In case of Yugoslav refusal, that meant air strikes; in case of Albanian ditto, abandonment to the Serbs.

According to French journalist Paul-Marie De La Gorce writing in Le Monde Diplomatique, the Yugoslavian delegation accepted the proposal. However, the KLA did not: preferring status quo to “mere” autonomy, it demanded a clause guaranteeing eventual independence. This situation — Serbian acceptance cum Albanian refusal — was the opposite of what the US State Department had expected. Albright arrived on February 20 to persuade the KLA’s delegation leader, Hasim Thaci, to sign.

In a letter to Thaci dated 22nd February, she provided an interpretation of the aforementioned “mechanism”:

The next day, negotiations were adjourned, the KLA delegation heading off to Macedonia to consult with its leaders; the US sent down Senator Bob Dole to continue the lobbying. In addition to Albright’s concession, three novel elements were now introduced to further sugar the pill: elections would be held ASAP; the disarmament would not extend to “private weapons”; and last but not least, NATO forces would ensure Yugoslavian compliance.

On March 15, talks resumed in Paris and the KLA announced its readiness to sign the deal unilaterally.

And unilateral the signing would be, for the deal had evolved into something completely unacceptable to Belgrade. It is unclear whether Milošević knew of Albright’s letter; if so, that alone explains his refusal to sign. Having arguably lost three wars in the former Yugoslavia, he could ill afford to lose Kosovo, which he had personally touted as the Serb nation’s ancestral home and the embodiment of its historical martyrdom. Neither his government nor the equally nationalist opposition, nor indeed the disaffected Serbian populace, would condone secession.

The other novelties were also inedible to Belgrade. The revised ‘Interrim Agreement for Peace and Self-Government in Kosovo’ required Serbian security forces to withdraw to at least 5 km from the border. A NATO force with no upward cap or oversight by the the UN Security Council would move in and assume full control, including over the airspace. As if this were not enough, Appendix B on the ‘Status of Multi-National Military Implementation Force’ effectively authorizes NATO occupation of the entire Former Republic of Yugoslavia:

There is an under-appreciated irony in the Czech-born Albright informing reporters that “Munich is my mindset” while trying to coerce a sovereign state into accepting loss of territory on terms such as these. The pro-Serbian side of the continuing debate (or shouting match) argues that said terms both explain and justify Milošević’s rejection of the Rambouillet Accord. Pro-NATO pundits counter that they were lifted from the Dayton Accords, wherein Croatia agreed to the equivalent, and that they were anyway negotiable had the Serbs engaged in negotiation, which they did not.

The latter claim is flatly denied by De La Gorce. According to him, Belgrade’s prime representative at Rambouillet — the President of Serbia, Milan Milutinović — suggested an “international presence” in Kosovo independent of NATO and comprising forces from Russia, Greece, and Western Europe.

Some commentators go as far as to suggest that the US deliberately provoked Belgrade’s rejection to clear the way for war. A more plausible analysis is that it gambled and lost. Faced with the likelihood that no possible agreement would be acceptable to both the parties, its strategy was to secure a KLA signature with all necessary concessions and then make Milošević an offer he could not refuse. Such inequitable use of stick and carrot proved a grave miscalculation on March 18, as the KLA delegates signed while their Yugoslav counterparts refused.

Later that day, Clinton declared that “the treshold had been crossed” in regard to triggering NATO intervention. On the following day, “winter live fire exercises” commenced in Kosovo, prompting evacuation of KVM personnel; again according to the Sunday Times, CIA elements handed over advanced communications equipment to the KLA before leaving.

A major diplomatic crisis ensued. Russia had informally condoned the threat against Yugoslavia but stressed that it could never tolerate its actual implementation. China, preoccupied with sovereignty, was also opposed. Thus, though it cited several UN Security Council resolutions, the first war in NATO’s history lacked an explicit UNSC authorization. Within NATO, Greece and Italy objected.

But the resistance was brushed aside, in part, no doubt, owing to another miscalculation: the US and NATO believed that a brief, token bombing campaign would compel Milošević to sign. This belief also helps account for Clinton’s cavalier vow, in his March 24 address to the nation, that no ground troops would be deployed.

Moreover, the strategic error sheds light on the absence of planning characterizing Operation Allied Force from its beginning later on that day. A recent PhD dissertation by Captain Dag Henriksen at the Norwegian Air Force Academy documents that the NATO targeting cell at the air operations center CAOC Vicenza was asked to find arbitrary targets for a campaign of 2-3 days with no guidance as to strategic objectives. The personnel found the situation so amateurish that they assumed a political deal had already been struck with Milošević. When by a week later nothing had changed, the targeters decided to improvise a strategy of their own.

Based upon interviews with most central actors of Allied Force including the SACEUR, General Wesley Clark, Henriksen also brings out another, and quite remarkable, reason for the neglect of NATO strategy: unbeknown to its allies, the US unilaterally ran a bombing campaign of its own, hitting targets without NATO control. Consequently these targets were sometimes hit twice. European chiefs of staff reacted with fury to discovering this.

To the extent that key allies were kept out of the dark, it happened in a “Black Committee” comprising the US, the UK, and France. The democratic institutions of NATO were creatively bypassed to evade political control with the escalation of target categories as the campaign stagnated.

As other analysts have shown, there was conflict even between Clark and his principal US subordinate, Lt Gen Michael Short of the US Air Force. Clark ordered Short to target air defenses and military units in Kosovo while the latter wanted, as he put it, to “strike at the head of the snake” — Belgrade. Despite threatening to resign, he got permission for shock and awe tactics only by the end of May, by which time sorties had multiplied from 400 to 900 a day and there was still no resolution in sight, much to Washington’s despair. The target list was expanded to include infrastructure like bridges (more than half of those over the Danube were hit); oil refineries and power plants (causing nation-wide power blackouts); government facilities; factories owned by allies of Milošević; the state broadcasting service RTS (at the cost of 16-17 civilian lives); and infamously, the Chinese embassy.

Bombed bridge at Novi-Sad

Meanwhile, things had been taking a dramatic turn on the ground. True to form, and far from any idea of surrender, the cynical Milošević had taken the opportunity to launch the most extensive campaign of forced deportation since World War II, resulting in hundreds of thousands fleeing to Macedonia and Albania within the end of March. This ethnic cleansing was precisely the kind of atrocity the air strikes were supposed to prevent: a true humanitarian disaster on an epic scale. Adding insult to injury, Belgrade was able to argue that the refugees were running from NATO bombs.

Nor did the air strikes weaken Milošević’s popular standing, as naïvely anticipated. On the contrary, the Serbs rallied around him against the superior foreign enemy in what the propanganda could paint as a 20th century Kosovo Battle. To punctuate the symbolism, units of the Yugoslav army exercized on the myth-imbued plains as they trained to confront the NATO ground invasion that could not be excluded — especially not after British PM Tony Blair began to publically advocate it in April. Washington shut him up, but the option was now on the table and increasingly pushed by others, including Clark.

What ultimately swayed Milošević was probably less the strategic bombing than this prospect of ground troops, combined with the unwelcome news that Russia would stay passive in such a scenario.

By the end of April, NATO woke up to the necessity of dealing with Russia, so far humiliated and left to impotent rage as a fellow orthodox nation was attacked (Russian PM Yevgeny Primakov turned his Washington-bound plane around in mid-flight at the war’s beginning). By May, Russia and Germany had opened a secret back channel wherein a Swedish financier, Peter Castenfelt, was smuggled into Belgrade. He communicated to Milošević that not only President Yeltsin but the Russian security establishment would hang him out to dry if he failed to exit. This had the virtue of being true: Yeltsin, moved by the urgency of ending a war that sent his approval ratings nose-diving, had somehow bought off the military, which otherwise might have rebelled. All this according to the aforementioned BBC2 documentary, Moral Combat.

On May 31, Belgrade announced its consent to the Rambouillet Accord. The Serbian Parliament gave it the nod three days later, Milošević reportedly voting in favor. A withdrawal agreement was finalized on May 9, followed on May 10 by pullout; ratification of the Accord by the UNSC; preparations for the ongoing KFOR peacekeeping mission; and suspension of Operation Allied Force 11 weeks after it began.

NATO had launched a total of 38,004 combat sorties, of which 10,484 were strikes against targets in the FRY (Serbia, Kosovo, and Montenegro), and 18,439 were aerial tanker and airlift sorties. The Alliance’s first war properly so-called was also the first in history without a single combat fatality for the victor. As to civilians, Human Rights Watch confirms that at least 500 Yugoslav such were killed in 90 separate incidents over 78 days of bombing, a number considerably smaller than Yugoslav public estimates of up to 5,000 civilian casualties.

On the other hand, the 2000 report noted that:

The report also found that NATO on several occasions broke international humanitarian law, and criticized the use of cluster bombs in civilian areas. Another controversial issue has been the use of DU-tipped munitions, whose detrimental health effects, according to some authorities, are seen in the cancer statistics today.

But what of the campaign’s overarching strategic goals for Kosovo — were these achieved? That is hard to say, not least because these were so ill-defined in the first place. Asked by Captain Dag Henriksen to which extent the operational planning focused on what Kosovo would look like when the strongest military alliance in history had prevailed, then deputy SACEUR General Rupert Smith replied: “Oh, it wasn’t in focus at all.”

Such myopia, especially on the political level, had consequences. Upon the end of hostilities in June, Kosovo Albanian refugees started to return; but at the same time, Serbs fled or were chased out by Albanians in equally large numbers. By July 20, the UN High Commissioner for Refugees estimated that 150,000 Serbs were flooding into Serbia, which already harbored half a million refugees from the other ex-Yugoslavian wars. The total number of refugees from Kosovo rose to some 230,000, most of them Serbs. Of these, over 200,000 remain Internally Displaced Persons in what is Europe’s biggest refugee problem. A hundred thousand Serbs stayed put among approximately 1.8 million ethnic Albanians, among whom little love was lost on Serbs.

This minority now dwell in KFOR-guarded enclaves, with limited freedom of movement and high unemployment even by the standards of a dysfunctional UN protectorate where only the black economy flowers. The Serbian apartheid state has effectively been inverted. More than 4,000 Serbs worked at the public electricity service in 1999; today around 30 do so, out of 8,000 employees. Meanwhile, barbed wire and armed KFOR troops protect those medieval monasteries that remain recognizably intact.

Independence is, however, finally in the offing, mostly because the Western powers acknowledge once again that the majority would never settle for less. Serbia, impoverished and demoralized, is unable to do more than strut and fret at the impending loss of its “historical heartland.”

For now. Anyone doubting that ancient history lives in the Balkans should bear in mind quite a recent incident. On May 24, 1999, Slobodan Milosevic had become the first sitting head of state to be charged with war crimes in the midst of a war, the charges including murder and deportation in Kosovo. A little more than two years later, he was himself deported to the cell at the Hague that would be his final home.

The date chosen for his extradition just happened to be St. Vitus Day, June 28.

Crossposted from Daily Kos.

Who would have thought that a Tunisian scholar who perished 600 years ago developed a theory of the US Democratic netroots in the early 21st century? Right. And I will grant, off the cuff, that he didn’t. Yet his model of political history lends itself strikingly to what is being duly celebrated in Las Vegas.

The New York Times remarks on Yearly Kos:

For me, that passage brought to mind ‘Abd-ar-Rahmân Abû Zayd ibn Muhammad ibn Muhammad ibn Khaldûn al-Hadramî, or as he is also known, Abû Zayd ‘Abd-ar-Rahmân ibn Muhammad ibn Khaldûn al-Hadrami al-Ishbilî; or with merciful simplicity: Ibn Khaldun (1332–1406).

Please let me explain this strange association.

The background for Khaldun’s work was the intellectual stagnation and political disintegration of the Islamic civilization since about 1000 A.D., when the Abbasid dynasty in Baghdad began to unravel. The Mongol hordes had dismantled the Caliphate and the Ottomans not yet established a new one. Across North Africa and the Middle East, Berber, Bedouin, and Tartar tribes washed over the urban settlements in successive waves of invasion. Khaldun, whose biography is extremely colorful, had first-hand experience with this: in 1401, he was lowered down the walls of besieged Damascus to negotiate with Tamerlane, Chinggiz Khan’s odious successor, who liked to build pyramids of his enemies’ skulls.

These turbulent times inspired his Muqaddimah (Prolegomena), which the great British historian Arnold J. Toynbee called “undoubtedly the greatest work of its kind that has ever yet been created by any mind in any time or place.” Others have compared it to the work of Hegel, Machiavelli, Montesquieu, Marx, and Durkheim. Founding a discipline that five centuries later would be called ‘Sociology’, the Muqaddimah highlights how environmental, social, and economic factors produce the ebb and flow of civilization (al-’Umraan).

Khaldun memorably defined the state as an institution that prevents injustice other than such as it inflicts itself. Yet “a thousand years of tyranny,” he affirmed in a classic aphorism, “is preferable to one day of anarchy.” Then again, the political order cannot be based upon brute subjugation. After all, who is to do the subjugation if not some armed group acting of free will? Essential, therefore, is cohesion or group-feeling (al-’Asabiyya); a social glue only prone to arise in the absence of subjugation that can be found in the hinterland of mountain, steppe, or desert.

Here self-governing clans and tribes roam free, protected by their mobility and environment from the emir’s or sultan’s control. Typically egalitarian communities where every man is a warrior, they hone their fighting skills by internal feuds, disdaining the unfree yet lax and decadent life of the city. At the same time they may, however, come to desire the resources and power of the urban rulers. Occasionally — rallied around a feisty leader — they may put their differences aside and ride on the alluring city in the distance.

The philosopher and anthropologist Ernest Gellner summarized Khaldun’s general account as follows:

Within such a cycle of a few generations, a successful urban ruling dynasty goes through five stages of power, theorized Ibn Khaldun:

1) the stage of success (tawr az-zafar).
2) that of establishing a monopoly on organized violence, or complete authority (tawr al-istibdaad).
3) that of leisure and tranquility (tawr al-faraj wa-d-dicah).
4) that of contentment and peacefulness (tawr al-qunuuc wa-l-musaalamah), and
5) that of waste and squandering (tawr al-israaf wa-l-tabdhiir).

It is at the fifth stage that the state is most in need of an infusion of fresh blood if it is not to be overrun by an enemy state. Fortunately, that is also the stage where it is most vulnerable to invasion by the free-roaming, fierce, egalitarian, and honor-craving hordes that, with any luck, will be crashing the gates.

I trust, fellow barbarians, that the analogy does not need to be spelled out further.

Update: I regret and retract the above praise of Daily Kos, whose owner, Markos Moulitsas, is a coward without the balls to speak up with a single word against the US-sponsored destruction of Lebanon.

The Belfast Telegraph reports on a Pope in rough weather:

What’s up? For one thing, Benedict XVI, a.k.a. Joseph Ratzinger, glossed over the shameful silence of the Catholic Church during the Holocaust, and he deserves rebuke for that. But there is more:

It is amusing to see secular intellectuals acting shocked, shocked that the Pope interprets the Holocaust in metaphysical terms. Whatever did they expect? He is the Holy Father, not an editor at Die Zeit.

In Catholic doctrine, evil is not a principle unto itself but privatio boni, a lack of good. Yet it does exist as an active force, personified by the Devil, whom God holds morally accountable (Matt. 25:41). This is obviously paradoxical, but Christianity was never known for its logical coherence, a fact which theology is the attempt to conceal by unintelligible jargon.

Now, to the point. If Nazism is indeed an expression of absolute evil, then it must be of the Devil. If it is indeed of the Devil, then its objective must be to drive a wedge between God and his creation. Hence, indeed “the true, intended victim of the genocide of the Jews was not actually the Jews but Christianity.” Q.E.D.

Those who think this conclusion ridiculous, as I do, might consider simply shrugging at the elaborate creed in question. More distasteful to my mind at least are the operators who, by symbol-heavy obfuscation, try to weld the Holocaust into a kitsch spirituality of its own.

The writ against Ratzinger continues:

Is it not true that the Germans were themselves also victims of a criminal ring? The sanctimonious efforts to deny this are predicated upon the false dilemma that one cannot simultaneously be victim and perpetrator. But of course one can. It’s called the human condition.

If the hysterical hate-monger Daniel Goldhagen now corners the market on historiographic validity, I think that’s more disconcerting than the news that the Pope is Catholic.

If Western humanism has a preeminent advocate of the ages, it is Desiderius Erasmus of Rotterdam (1456–1536). His Adagia (1515), a collection of proverbs with commentary, was the first bestseller in history. And its most popular essay is composed on an ancient aphorism: dulce bellum inexpertis — “war is sweet to the inexperienced.”

These are fitting words on Memorial Day.

Written at a time when war had for perhaps the first time risen to rival disease and starvation — the two traditional scourges of humanity — Erasmus’ essay has been called the founding tract of pacifism. But he was not a pacifist. Rather he insisted, against the grain of his times, that war be confined to a last resort of self-defense, for the excellent reason that “even the most successful and just war,” waged by a good prince for a noble purpose, is prone to descend into unspeakable atrocities. Thus:

Man, says Erasmus, is the one creation made entirely for friendly acts, yet in war his social disposition turns him into “a brute so monstrous that no beast will be called a brute in future if compared to man.” After all, “When did anyone hear of a hundred thousand animals falling dead together after tearing each other to pieces, as men do everywhere?”

How is such perversion even possible? It is due to concerted campaigns for amnesia by which the bitter lessons of the past are unlearned. Though experience teaches that the expenses of bloodshed are ten times higher than those of peace with results much worse, the propaganda of clerics, lawyers, and princes has again made war “such a respectable thing that it is wicked — I might almost say ‘heretical’ — to disapprove of this which of all things is the most abominable and most wretched.”

Five centuries hence, another thoughtful commentator reflected on the difference between West Europeans and North Americans in this respect. William Pfaff, writing in The International Herald Tribune in January 2003, is worth quoting at length:

Pfaff adds the following observation:

Evidently, not just individuals but the whole country has ignored central lessons of “what war means for its victims.” As International Law scholar Richard Falk has put it in The Nation:

In mainstream US discourse, the unforgivable flaws of the Vietnam War are that it was (1) lost at (2) by US standards, a hefty cost in American lives (3) without clear US interests at stake. The scholars debate which was more instrumental in eroding support for the war. It is clear, however, that either dwarfs the fact that it (4) involved grave war crimes such as free fire zones; the deployment of the most poisonous chemical weapons known to science in civilian areas; and the bombing back to the stone age of Laos and Cambodia at an officially estimated cost of respectively 350,000 and 600,000 civilian lives.

Certainly the US military and political establishment had no significant qualms about (4). Anyone in doubt about this should contemplate SIOP-62, the top secret contingency plan for US nuclear first strike. Effective from 1962, this plan mandated a nuclear annihilation of not just the USSR but its enemy China in the event of suspicious Soviet troop movements. Thus it prescribed the murder of up to a hundred million innocent citizens of a non-belligerent nation posing no threat to any NATO country. Anything less, explained the head of the Strategic Air Command, General Thomas Powers, “would really screw up the plan.”

The 2004 release of these utterly sinister documents failed to cause any noticeable stir in the US public, even though they prove that America was ready, at a moment’s notice, to carry out a nuclear holocaust making every previous genocide pale in comparison. One shudders to imagine what Erasmus would have said of this ultimate deviation from his — or any — conception of justifiable warfare.

Or, to return to the current malaise, whatever would he have made of the following sermon, given at a time when only 25 percent of Americans thought the Iraq War a mistake?

Now the warmongering pundits who shilled for that bungled war are using virtually indistinguishable rhetoric to enable another “preventive” onslaught; one that might need to avail itself of nuclear weapons as a tactical necessity. The leading political commentator on America’s most trusted television network thunders: “You know in a sane world, every country would unite against Iran and blow it off the face of the Earth. That would be the sane thing to do.”

Are such odious operators met with a firestorm of popular derision from the US public? Not outside of liberal blogs.

Apart from 9/11 and the events of 150 years ago, the American people still has no experience of being at the receiving end of “this which of all things is the most abominable and most wretched,” but which remains so sweet to the inexperienced.

Crossposted from Booman Tribune, Daily Kos, and European Tribune.

Three years ago, the US President co-piloted a fighter aircraft onto the deck of the USS Lincoln to declare “the end of major hostilities” in Iraq. Above him a banner proclaimed, “Mission Accomplished.” Today, a humble 9 percent of Americans believe that the mission has really been such.

Though I respect the majority view, I have to say that it is, in fact, mistaken.

It is true that the Iraq War has been far from flawless in its conception and execution. The war:

• was justified to the Congress and public with tailor-made and strongly counter-indicated reports of an ultimately non-existent threat to the US homeland — reports in large part supplied by a wanted criminal;
• was prepared in the face of warnings by numerous experts and international statesmen, including President Bush sr. and his senior foreign policy staff;
• triggered an international diplomatic crisis pitting the US against major allies including Germany and France, as well as against Russia, China, and other important countries;
• was blatantly illegal according to most qualified observers, including the International Commission of Jurists and UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan, thus undermining the authority of the UN Security Council;
• was conducted even though the Iraqi President offered to step down and go into exile;
• precipitated a costly, graft-ridden and utterly bungled reconstruction program of which only 30 percent of Iraqis are even aware, as exemplified by the miserable failure to build a health infrastructure;
• was marred by titanic tactical and strategic blunders such as allowing the looting of 250,000 tons of heavy ordnance from unguarded dumps, which is enough for several hundred years of attacks, and the decision to disband Iraq’s police force and 300,000 strong army overnight, thus offering the budding insurgency vast numbers of professional fighters as well as 1769 miles of unsecured border to exploit;
• has deteriorated to a brutal counter-insurgency involving the use of chemical weapons in cities; systematic torture by US troops, implicating hundreds of US service members and extending in some cases to rape of women and children, alienating even close US allies; and death squads manned by US-trained police;
• was based on planning which severely underestimated the required troop strength, against the advise of the US Army and US Air Force chiefs of staff and that of the Secretary of State, himself a former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff;
• involves an effective occupation that keeps 132,000 US service members and thousands of others — many on their second or third deployments — away from home, but which nonetheless only 1 percent of Iraqis trust for their personal protection;
• depends for military morale on fantastic misconceptions among US troops, with 85 percent believing the US mission is mainly “to retaliate for Saddam’s role in the 9-11 attacks” and 77 percent that a major reason for the war was “to stop Saddam from protecting al Qaeda in Iraq”; while even with such false beliefs at work, 72 percent of troops on the ground hold that the US should exit Iraq within this year whether it is needed there or not;
• in fact diverted key special operations forces and intelligence resources away from the hunt for al Qaeda leaders in Afghanistan, and by depleting the US presence there, has enabled their allies the Taliban to reclaim most of that country and parts of Pakistan;
• has generally served the strategic interests of the USA’s principal enemy while likely also spurring it to develop nuclear weapons;
• has claimed an estimated 200,000 Iraqi lives, of which 120,000 directly by violence;
• has spawned a major civil war even by the most stringent definitions (pdf), forcing up to 100,000 families into internal displacement at present and threatening to destabilize the region;
• has not only caused enduring distrust and resentment of the US in Arab countries, including Iraq, but also become a rallying cry for international terrorism even by the administration’s own admission, as well as the main source of US civilian deaths in terrorist strikes;
• may within a matter of months have claimed as many American lives as the terrorist attack of 9/11 2001, preventing whose repetition was used to justify the war in the first place;
• will soon have seen 18,000 US service members wounded in combat, though actual numbers must be much higher considering that 144,424 veterans have sought treatment from the swamped and underfunded VA system since returning from Iraq (and Afghanistan), not counting those hospitalized in military hospitals; and considering that 35 percent of Iraq veterans have already sought treatment for emotional problems;
• has already cost more in inflation-adjusted dollars than the ten-plus-year war in Vietnam, and will, according to estimates by two world-class economists, cost current and future US taxpayers $1-2 trillion when such costs as lifetime disability and healthcare for injured troops as well as the impact on the US economy are factored in.

How, then, is the war a success? Well, do you have to ask?

The Iraq War allowed George W. Bush — who, to dedicate himself more fully to his primary interests, the joys of prostitutes, booze, and cocaine, deserted from the stateside posting his dad had secured for him to keep him out of combat in Vietnam — to at long last fly a fighter jet in war.

That mission, I submit, was accomplished to his satisfaction on May 1, 2003.

The article below ran in a noted European newspaper a week ago. Can you guess which one?

They had no idea what they were talking about. Born and raised in Habsburg Central Europe, they were thinking just like their surroundings. And they were thinking in imperialist terms.
    The natives of Palestine would embrace them, Herzl believed. Jewish supremacy was bound to be preferable to Ottoman ditto.

Two world wars hence a number of things are up for debate, but hardly that the origins of Israel lie in a European understanding of race, religion and language as the foundation of the state. One either belonged to the dominant people, enjoying the privileges of state, or else one belonged to a minority and had to make do as best one could.
    Prior to World War I, the Hungarians ruled the Croats, Slovakians, and Romanians with an iron fist. Then followed the Greater Romanian Kingdom, which treated its Hungarians and Gypsies as third rate citizens. The Czechs would despise the Slovakians, the Serbs would oppress Croats and Albanians, the Greeks would terrorize their Macedonians and Turks. The madness culminated in the German genocide against the Jews.
     That Israel is a democracy is demonstrated by the recent parliamentary election, but Israel has a fundamental problem: the emergence of the Jewish state in the form of a Habsburg nationalist project in the Middle East, long after such projects were discredited in Europe.
    Not for nothing does the great contemporary British-American historian Tony Judt write that “the very idea of a ‘Jewish state’ — a state in which Jews and the Jewish religion have exclusive privileges from which non-Jewish citizens are forever excluded — is rooted in another time and place. Israel, in short, is an anachronism.”

The debate will go on for a long time about what can be derived from the Israeli election and from that in the Palestinian territories, which Hamas won.
    Hamas’ involvement in terrorism and demands that Israel be wiped off the map are not the best starting point for detente.
    But what are the realities?
    The Hamas are laying low, knowing full well that they must continue to do so if they are to keep receiving financial aid from the West. Were they to give up terrorism, it would not be the first such change of direction in Middle Eastern history. The Israeli state was born in blood. One of its later heads of government, Menachem Begin, led the infamous Irgun Gang in 1948.
    Does Israel live up to its obligations? With its illegal settlements, Israel has done its part to sabotage the peace plan of President George W. Bush. Was the plan at all serious? That is open to doubt. As so much in today’s US Middle Eastern policy, it was rather a mixture of dreams and nightmares.
    Israel insists on a non-existent right to politically motivated killings. One absolves oneself of any responsibility for four million Palestinian refugees and displaced people who are entitled to return to their homes and property.
    For years, all that used to be in terms of Palestinian infrastructure — including the security apparatus, government buildings, olive fields, roads, and residential blocks — have been destroyed. Easily perishable export goods are routinely blockaded; customs and other fees due the Palestinian Authorities in Ramallah are not being paid. Whatever seeds of prosperity there were 15–20 years ago have been transformed into abject poverty. The Palestinians are stuck in their bantustans, powerless and desperate, hemmed in by barbed wire, minefields, roadblocks, passport requirements, and Jewish settlements. So far the latter encompass a quarter million colonists, many of them heavily armed. It is a lack of respect for international law and agreements that, one might say, also has a background in traditional European thinking.
    Radical rightwing politicians like Avigdor Lieberman declare their willingness to deport tens of thousands of Israeli citizens. Why? Because they are Arabs, not Jews. Lieberman is an immigrant from Moldova. To hear him speak is like hearing the Iron Guard on the march. There are many like him.

If the elections in Israel and the Palestinian territories are to have a common meaning, it must be that the time is ripe to abandon the old European ways.
    The initiative has to come from Israel, the military great power of the region. It ought to be generous: the policy that was implemented — alas, unilaterally — in Gaza should be followed up with an equally consistent withdrawal from all other illegally occupied areas. That means the Syrian Golan Heights; that means the West Bank; that means the Arab East Jerusalem. The parties may agree on modifications, but in general Israel must return to the borders from before the war of 1967. Furthermore, a genuine Palestinian state with its own airspace, sea territory, and security forces should be established — a serious country that inspires confidence in its citizens and that can be held responsible by the international community.
    To persist in building on a way of thinking that characterized Europe a hundred years ago is to invite a repetition in the Middle East of the European tragedy in the 20th century.

So where did the article run? Answer: the author is a staff writer at that most dreadful reactionary rag and purveyor of virulent ethnic nationalism, that foul anti-Arab and anti-Muslim propaganda outlet: Jyllands-Posten.

News from America: in the world’s supposedly leading nation, whose fine constitution is founded entirely on Enlightenment values, the tiny atheist minority are pariah, a study finds.

While I knew that declared atheists are unelectable for office above county level in the USA, I naïvely thought George Bush sr. went out on a limb when he opined (and yes, he really did) that atheists shouldn’t be regarded as citizens. Apparently he was expressing common sense.

Salman Rushdie — himself not unacquainted with the zealous mindset — sums up the attitude in question:

I wonder what blinkers such faithful bigots don to sustain their delusion of superiority. Aside from the philosophical hollowness of deriving ethics from the command of supernatural beings — exposed in Plato’s dialogue Euthyphro some 2,400 years ago — the idea sits rather poorly with the facts. Let us briefly consider the evidence.

The 1994 Rwandan genocide, wherein 800,000 men, women and children were slashed to pieces with machetes (or, if babies, bashed SS-style against the trees) took place in a devoutly Catholic country. The faith was introduced by the same Belgian colonialists who, moved by a mix of race theory and divide et impera, did such a splendid job of setting the Tutsis up against the Hutus, after their impeccably Catholic king had transformed the neighboring Congo basin into Hell. The US President who literally spent more time at the office pushing cigars up his intern’s vagina than stopping the butchery — though the latter was within his powers — is a Southern Baptist whose speeches brim with spiritual uplift. In Sudan another genocide is in its fourth year, conducted at the hands of glowing theists, who, rather like the Hutus, find the work fulfilling. Sudan’s 21-year, two million-victims civil war wasn’t waged by atheists either. And in northern Uganda “the Lord’s Resistance Army” has spent two decades turning children into monsters. Joseph Kony, its sadistic, child-raping leader, communes with the Holy Spirit; his political platform is the Ten Commandments. While true, it is beside the point that he makes a mockery of Christian doctrine. The point is his well-documented innocence of atheism — and of little else.

In Algeria a few years ago, some 70,000 civilians were slaughtered by insurgents of the kind that enjoys playing football with human heads. If these gentlemen were atheists, it is news to me.

Tony Blair, a passionate Evangelical who sees everything as a struggle against wickedness, thinks God will judge his effort to throw Iraq into civil war; and presumably, give it rave reviews. His American partner in war crime was born again with televangelist Billy Graham as a busy midwife. Graham, whom Bill Clinton has called “the man I love,” prayed with US Presidents before just about every commencement of hostilities from Vietnam to Iraq and will surely do so again when God instructs Bush the Lesser to smite Iran.

Ah yes, Iran. This safely non-atheist country — the only one besides the Vatican to be run by clergy — executes sexually active 16 year old girls and homosexuals by slow asphyxiation. As Pascal, who lived through the most horrific wars of religion in Europe, observed: “Men never do evil so completely and cheerfully as when they do it from religious conviction.” I recently forced myself to watch this movie of a stoning to death in the mullah’s paradise. Swaying back and forth in agony, the victims’ heads are mashed into bloody pulp to enthusiastic cries of Allahu akbar (”God is greater”). Well, if an allmighty sky-god exists — which I doubt even more after watching this savagery — I should hope he is greater than that.

Thirty years ago today there was a military coup in Argentina, upon which at least 10,000 people were murdered, often after rape and torture. Not noted for their atheism, the coupmakers spent most of the preceding day with Argentina’s leading bishops, who gave their blessings. And though some priests later joined the resistance, the Church condoned the regime, as it had those of Mussolini and Franco.

A woman to be stoned by confirmed non-atheists

Of course, none of this suggests that moral behavior necessarily goes with the absence of belief in deities. The two most prolific mass murderers of all time, Stalin and Mao — probably also Hitler, the bronze medal winner — are enough to invalidate that notion.

It does suggest, however, that indulgence in revealed religion is pretty useless as a bulwark against evil. The bigots among the believers, then, can take their smug condemnation of us godless people and stick it.

Update: My favorite blogger, Digby, tackles the subject here and here.

Crossposted from European Tribune.

The Balkans region has a penchant for producing more history than it can consume. ~ Winston Churchill

Getting history wrong is an essential part of being a nation. ~ Ernest Renan

The Serbian province — and UN protectorate — informally known as Kosovo is a fertile, mountain-ringed area of 10.887 km². It subdivides into the valleys of Kosovo proper and Metohija (Greek for ‘monastic land’): indeed, its full name, as Serbs often like to point out, is ‘Kosovo and Metohija’. Below, ‘Kosovo’ refers to the entire area unless otherwise noted.

The ancient history of the region is fairly obscure. Suffice it to say that, conquered by Alexander the Great 300 years B.C.E., it became part of the Roman province of Dardania in the 4th century A.D. and thus belonged to the Byzantine empire when the Serbs arrived in the Balkans about two centuries later. Fast forward to…

1189 In this year, the Holy Roman Emperor Frederick I Barbarossa passed through on his way to the Third Crusade. Stefan Nemanjić, ruler of the small Serbian principality of Rascia, met with him and signed a trade agreement. Barbarossa drowned underway to Jerusalem, but Nemanjić used the mayhem of the time to carve out a kingdom. One of his sons was crowned; another founded the Serbian Orthodox Church and secured it autocephalous status. As proven today by some 1,300 monasteries and churches, Kosovo was the cultural, political, and economic heartland of this advanced medieval state.

The Kingdom of Serbia flourished between the demise of the Byzantines, from whom it emerged, and the rise of the Ottomans, to whom it fell prey. This Golden Age spanned less than two centuries, culminating with Tzar Stefan Dušan the Powerful, who doubled his empire until it stretched from the Danube to the Peloponnes and encompassed present-day Bosnia, Montenegro, Macedonia, northern Greece, and Bulgaria. When Dušan died en route to seizing Constantinople in 1355, it dissolved into squabbling fiefdoms.

By then, the Ottoman Sultanate had embarked on a formidable campaign of conquest. In 1371 it vanquished a Christian army in modern Bulgaria, wiping out the chief contenders for the Serbian throne. Militarily, this spat was far more important than the one to follow in 1389; the same can be said of the final Serbian loss on the Danube in 1459. In terms of mythic significance, however, it is the other way around: “In all of European history,” notes Tim Judah in The Serbs: History, Myth and the Destruction of Yugoslavia, “it is impossible to find any comparison with the effect of Kosovo on the Serbian national psyche.” (30). By way of attempts, the Battle of Kosovo has been likened to Hastings, Bastogne, the Siege of Leningrad, and the Fall of Troy — combined.

1389 On St. Vitus Day, June 28, 1389, at a desolate plain near Priština, a scrambled Christian alliance of Serbs and Bosnians faced its foe. Its commander was a minor Serb nobleman, a certain Prince Lazar; his Ottoman counterpart being the Sultan, Murad I. Neither man survived the day. And though the Turks gained the most in relative terms, the battle itself was apparently a tie which mostly pleased the blackbirds feasting on the tens of thousands of slain. This gave the region its name: Kosovo Polje means ‘the Field of Blackbirds’.

But legend has painted the draw as a Serbian disaster, and elevated the defeat, in turn, to a moral triumph. As was Ottoman practice, the Sultan had offered Prince Lazar a choice between vassalage and war. Après la lutte — likely in order to boost morale as well as the interests of Lazar’s heir — the Serbian Church cast the decision to fight as an affirmation of moral purity over worldly gain. According to this hagiography, God made Lazar choose between victory and temporal power, or death and an eternal Kingdom of Heaven. “And the emperor chose the empire of heaven above the empire of the earth,” one poem, “The Downfall of the Serbian Empire,” declares.

Lovingly embellished over the centuries, this story evolved into a veritable Passion. For example, a 16th century interpolation involves a Last Supper, as well as a Judas figure represented by Vuk Branković, one of Lazar’s favorite knights, who supposedly withdrew at a critical stage in the battle. Taken to extremes, the myth suggests that St. Lazar’s “martyrdom” absolved the Serbs of the sins by which their state had perished, making them in effect a “new Israel.” So, in the fullness of time, they shall be restored even their earthly kingdom.

In the present, however, Serbia was duly conquered by 1459 and would remain so for centuries. Killing or expelling most of the nobility, the Ottomans imposed shari’a laws reducing Christians to second-class citizenry. This included a poll tax (jizya), legal discrimination, and worst of all, devshirme: the dreaded “blood tribute” of perhaps a thousand male children per annum, to be converted to Islam and enrolled in the imperial apparatus. While these were better terms than those offered Muslims by Christian rulers of the age — notably in Spain upon the Reconquista — that obviously did little to console the Serbs. The most hardcore fled to the mountains of Montenegro, the only semi-independent Balkan state. There the monks would carry forth the martyr cult of Kosovo Polje, while by the flickering bonfires, village bards sang of Prince Lazar.

In the meantime, another ethnic group was moving down from the highlands. The people now known as Albanians began settling in the lowlands. These were fiercely clannish pastoralists of disputed ancestry, who are thought (though all such questions are controversial) to have been a minority in the Serbian Kingdom. Having neither a Church of their own nor the memory of statehood, the proto-Albanians proved more susceptible than Serbs to conversion and its rewards. An estimated two-thirds took up Islam. And from their ranks sprang the new feudal lords of Kosovo; a mainstay of Serb resentment ever since.

Kosovo Albanian folk dance

1689 The demographic shift came to a head after the failed second siege of Vienna. When the Turks repelled an Austrian invasion in 1689, Serb peasants, who had risen to support it, fled the harsh retaliations. In 1690 the Archbishop of Peć, whose monastery the Ottomans had destroyed, led 30,000-40,000 families across the Danube to the Austrian military frontier, the area now called Vojvodina.

This “Great Migration” — another paradoxically celebrated event, which in the Serbian national consciousness evokes the Exodus — moved the center of Serb culture to the Belgrade region, where it has since remained. This rendered Kosovo underpopulated, causing a Turk-sponsored influx of Muslims from present-day Albania. Along with not necessarily voluntary mass conversions among remaining Serbs, many of whom came in time to adopt Albanian customs and even language, this produced an ethnic Albanian majority in Kosovo that has also endured to this day. Such, at any rate, is the simple version