https://www.counterpunch.org/2024/03/08/how-madeleine-albright-got-the-war-the-u-s-wanted/
Elich speaks of the US wanting war in 1999 and setting up negotiations with the Serbs to fail. This is true but is no less so when it comes to the first phase of the Yugoslav break-up in 1991. The US played a role in facilitating the split that would lead to independent nations like Slovenia, Croatia, and Bosnia - and a bombing campaign in 1995.
In the lead-up to the 1999 bombing campaign, the US sided with the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) which was a terrorist organisation with both Chechen rebels and al Qaeda members within its ranks. As has been previously suggested the US has long history of working with Islamist fighters - the post 9/11 period was actually a decade-long anomaly that the US effectively dispensed with by 2011 when it started collaborating with such fighters in places like Libya and Syria. Though it seems distant and perhaps impossible to conceive of, it would not surprise me to see the US at some future date working with the Taliban in opposition to China. Indeed the US has supported and hosted Uighur Islamists with ties to al Qaeda and a great deal more could be said about the US relationship with ISIS - now splintered into various permutations.
The US long supported the KLA's Hashim Thaçi who is a war criminal - and is now charged as such. Clearly he lost some of his US support somewhere along the way, but as the dynamics of Balkan politics have continued to change, one-time assets can turn into liabilities. One thing is clear - the Albanians play a central role in US regional plans. This is true in Albania proper, Kosovo, and the nation now known as North Macedonia.
Elich rightly exposes the US line that sought to deceptively cast the conflict in terms of a simple Serb-Albanian binary. This was also done with regard to the Bosnian War. In both cases the narrative deliberately cast the Serbs as the villains. And why? Because the Serbs were part of the Orthodox sphere tied to Russia - with a little nod to the Huntington thesis regarding the Clash of Civilizations. It's a flawed model with hints of truth.
The Serbs were (and to some extent are) a pro-Russian outpost within Europe or at its back door one might say. These days, there are more powerful nations such as Orban's Hungary and Slovakia (under Fico) that pose a Russian policy threat to the Atlanticist bloc (so much for Huntington) - but as such Serbia doesn't receive the media attention it once did. But you can be sure the strategists in Brussels and Washington have not forgotten the Serbs in both Belgrade and Bosnia. They are a kind of fifth column within the confines of the EU orbit. They are not in the EU which is precisely the problem.
The Yugoslav Wars were about consolidating power and wiping out pro-Russian elements during a period in which Russia was down and out and unable to assert its interests. It was also about justifying NATO which seemed to no longer have a purpose in the aftermath of the 1991 Soviet collapse. The Yugoslav Wars were encouraged and yet remain in part a failure as the Serbs were militarily defeated but their spirits were not crushed and they remain independent and defiant - a thorn in the side of an increasingly shaky Atlantic Empire.
Looking back, as a member of the US Air Force stationed in Italy in the mid-1990's I understood something of what was happening with regard to the nascent EU and NATO and how all of this worked in the interest of the American-dominated Atlanticist Empire. People were writing about these things and I was reading them in my off-work hours - often at the base library. I was troubled by the Bosnian War (and the logistical role I played in it) and the overall US geopolitical strategy - and I wanted out. As a new Christian my eyes were opened and this period continues to define and haunt me and I think about all things I saw and heard - as well as all that has happened since. We were stooges for NATO (and thus the US Empire) and I firmly believe that what we were doing was part of a larger set of geo-strategic and political moves that ultimately resulted in the 2022 invasion of Ukraine by Moscow. That invasion was of course but a culmination of specific events surrounding Ukraine that are easily traced to the early 2000's. Putin in attempting to arrest the aggressive expansion of the Atlanticist Bloc is ever painted as the aggressor. His 2022 invasion was a gift to Western propagandists who will in its wake ever be able to paint him as such.
I loathed Madeleine Albright at the time when she was the ambassador at the UN. She certainly played her part in the Bosnian War and as Secretary of State became a major player in the Kosovo phase. Thankfully I was a civilian by then. And who can forget her support of the US genocide in Iraq? Reading the names of Richard Holbrooke and Christopher Hill certainly take me back to that period. When Holbrooke died in 2010, I grew disgusted with the coverage and the praises heaped upon him. I wrote this piece in response:
https://proto-protestantism.blogspot.com/2010/12/holbrookes-mirror.html
Elich also reveals some interesting nuggets that have either been forgotten or were never properly understood. The US was determined to impose free market economics on Kosovo - knowing that such a scenario would ensure US domination and the ability to 'win' whatever resources or deals it wanted with the sheer power of its mammon.
As suggested, this makes for a rather cynical 'peace' negotiation. The US was setting up a protectorate in the Balkans - a base, or as some put it the 51st state. It's agents were Islamists, drug gangs, smugglers, traffickers and other criminals, and to some extent that's still the case. It's a rough neighbourhood and so the US will work with whatever elements are going to get the job done - and make money at the same time. It's hardly something out of the ordinary when it comes to US foreign policy - if unofficial.
It's clear the negotiations were farcical and the Rambouillet document in question was not meant to be taken as a serious attempt to curtail war but an occasion for it and a framework for the post-war settlement. Even Henry Kissinger said as much at the time - signifying a split within the US diplomatic community, and implicitly condemning Albright. She was not engaged in diplomacy but militarism and deserves the same kind of scorn heaped on a figure like Ribbentrop - if not his fate.
This strategic schism which emerged in the 1990's and early 2000's would become more pronounced in the post-9/11 epoch and would later generate additional factions - and the chaos and internecine war that defines the present.
Albright is praised as a diplomat and yet these negotiations reveal her to be little more than a thug in high-heels. The proposal was a mafia-style offer the Serbs could not refuse - and yet they tried desperately to work out some kind of peace agreement, but everything was rejected. It was an offer they couldn't refuse but it seemed that even if they had accepted everything the US demanded - the bombs were going to rain down on them regardless. It was all theatre for Western audiences. It's a bizarre episode unless you simply admit what was happening. The Clinton administration wanted war.
The US started the bombing campaign and the media played its part in the grand deception. I remember grinding my teeth while attending an OPC at the time, holding my infant son on my lap. Even these 'conservatives' drank all the Kosovo Kool-aid. Though the Republicans were less than eager to support Bill Clinton, many nevertheless supported the war. For my part I was just thankful that I had been able to extricate myself from the military. Had I not been able to secure an early exit, I would have still been on active duty as the bombs were dropping.
Near the end of the Elich piece, this paragraph caught my eye:
While the United States and its NATO allies prepared for war, Yugoslavia made last-ditch efforts to stave off bombing, including reaching out to intermediaries. Greek Foreign Minister Theodoros Pangalos contacted Madeleine Albright and told her that Yugoslav President Slobodan Milošević had offered to engage in further negotiations. But Albright told him that the decision to bomb had already been made. “In fact,” Pangalos reported, “she told me to ‘desist, you’re just being a nuisance.’” In a final act of desperation to save the people from bombing, Milutinović contacted Christopher Hill and made an extraordinary offer: Yugoslavia would join NATO if the United States would allow Yugoslavia to remain whole, including the province of Kosovo. Hill responded that this was not a topic for discussion and he would not talk about it.
Two things need to be said. One, with the hindsight that twenty-five years affords, I'm sure some American strategists would have wished for such a scenario. The Serbian problem would have been solved if Yugoslavia would have been brought into NATO. It's politics could have been more easily manipulated and given that the Atlanticist bloc has bigger headaches with regard to the likes of Hungary - lingering Serb bitterness would have been a small grievance at best.
But this was also 1999 and the US was keen to demonstrate its global reach. Well do I remember all the talk at the time and the buzz in the Air Force just a couple of years prior when I was still wearing its blood-stained uniform. The US had new weapons it was eager to use and the 78 day bombing campaign was also pedagogic, a lesson to the world about what the US was capable of. It bombed the Serbian-led government of Yugoslavia into submission without having to put boots in the ground. As Albright said - the decision had been made.
Many are familiar with Albright's cold calculating statements regarding the deaths of 500,000 Iraqi children, but this quote is also rather chilling:
U.S. officials knew the Yugoslav delegation could not possibly accept such a plan. “We deliberately set the bar higher than the Serbs could accept,” Madeleine Albright confided to a group of journalists, “because they needed a little bombing.”
And then this woman who also profited from her wars had the audacity to warn the world of resurgent fascism in her 2018 screed directed primarily at Putin, Orban, and Trump - the main roadblocks standing in the path America's imperialist aspirations, at least domestically and in Europe. These players do indeed flirt with fascism but Albright and the regime she represents has no moral standing when it comes to this question. The real ire on display is not against the fascism or fascist tendencies of these actors but the fact that they are blocking the imperial ambitions of the United States. In Putin's case this is direct. Orban's interests (along with Erdogan of Türkiye) are more self-serving vis-à-vis the EU and NATO. And in the case of the would-be dictator Trump there is no principle at work apart from the forces behind him that struggle to steer him and his own megalomaniac buffoonery.
Many mourned Albright's death in 2022, but I did not - nor did anyone with a hint of moral conscience about them. There is a kind of satisfaction in knowing that she went to her grave disappointed - so much of what she had strived for had unraveled. Henry Kissinger and Zbigniew Brzezinski her colleagues and rivals more or less had admitted as much in the period prior to their own deaths. In many ways their failures were the result of the Neo-Conservative faction and the presidency of George W Bush. His failures led to the hyper-polarization in US politics that produced a series of reactions - the Barack Obama presidency and then a more extreme counter-reaction, Donald Trump. Bush's invasion of Iraq sidetracked US imperial ambitions and created a window that allowed for China's rapid rise and a Russian resurgence. I do not doubt that Establishment historians writing a generation or more from now will look back at the 2003 invasion of Iraq as one of the greatest disasters of American foreign policy. It was exceeded in some respects by Vietnam and yet the US was able to recover from that debacle and by the 1990's and emerge the most powerful country in history. Twenty-three years after 9/11 the US is clearly in decline and facing internal collapse. The schemes of the mad Albright and her ilk have failed.
A century after the US worked to dismantle the Habsburg Empire which led to the creation of nations such as Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia - the US is still there trying to manipulate the politics of Central and Eastern Europe and that of the Balkans. The US thinks of itself as the exceptional and indispensable nation and as such can (in a god-like manner) transcend history. Clearly it cannot. The Balkans are still a thorn in the side of the Western powers and Russia is still part of the equation. And Liberalism, the religion of the Enlightenment West now stands on shaky ground. A century after it was brought (and in some cases imposed) on the nations of Central Europe, its status is at best uncertain. It has not delivered what it promised. It has not transcended history and it has not been able to whitewash the hypocrisy and lies of the imperial regimes that hide behind this ideology and use its lexicon to cover up and justify their dark deeds.
NATO leaders have consistently dismissed Russian concerns over its eastward expansion. There's no valid concern as we are a defensive alliance - so they claim. This is simply not the case. The real history of the Yugoslav Wars reveals the offensive nature of NATO that openly emerged at that time. Their missile defense array is in actuality an offensive weapon and Moscow knows this. The lies of 9/11 led to NATO involvement in the Afghan War and then NATO took its aggression to a new level in 2011 with regime change in Libya and its role in the Western fomented and sponsored Syrian Civil War. While NATO's official doctrine does not claim to want the dismantling of Russia, it's clear enough that is the goal - many of the politicians within the NATO orbit have said as much and plans are being made.
This harks back more than a century to Anglo-American scheming in connection to World War I and the Russian Revolution - and their military intervention in the civil war. The plans took the most sinister turn with the invasion of Adolf Hitler and the Nazis. And yet the basic plan remains on the table - the Western powers want to break up and partition Russia and expropriate its resources. This was the goal in the aftermath of 1991 and the collapse of the USSR and after many delays and sidetracks, it's on the table once again. Putin knows all of this and has acted accordingly (if immorally) and yet because of Western ignorance and the propaganda campaign waged by academia and the media - all his actions (many of which are detestable) are presented as aggression, and absurdly in some quarters an attempt to reconstitute the Soviet Union.
See also:
https://pilgrimunderground.blogspot.com/2022/04/the-death-of-madeleine-albright-1937.html
https://pilgrimunderground.blogspot.com/2019/09/kosovo-to-victors-go-spoils.html
https://pilgrimunderground.blogspot.com/2016/03/albrights-hypocrisy-on-display.html