Dear Friends near and far,

     Thankfully, the U.S./NATO 78-day bombing campaign against Yugoslavia has now been over for more than a month and a half. As we know now (and fully suspected during the war) and despite NATO's repeated assertions in its wartime press briefings (whose claims were reminiscent of the heavily inflated body counts issued during the Vietnam War to demonstrate the need to "stay the course"), relatively little damage was done to the Yugoslav military -- which successfully preserved most of its assets such as planes and tanks through subterfuge, by moving them around a lot and tucking them away in hardened underground bunkers built during the Cold War to survive nuclear attacks.

     On the other hand, vast damage was done -- and not necessarily "accidentally" or as a consequence of the notorious Orwellian "collateral damage" -- to the unprotected civilian population and the economic infrastructure of the country. Several thousand innocent civilians of all ages and ethnicities -- people simply sitting quietly at home or on their way as usual to Saturday market -- were killed or maimed by anonymous terror bombing from 15,000 feet, in what was correctly termed NATO's "coward's war". Houses, whole villages and neighborhoods were reduced to rubble. Hospitals, schools and old age homes were struck by the wondrous "smart" bombs. Bridges across the Danube, the lifelines of regional commerce and of great historical value, were wiped out. In the Serbian province of Kosovo itself, there can be no doubt that much more death and destruction was caused by NATO's "humanitarian" bombing than by anything being meted out against the Kosovar Albanian population as "ethnic cleansing" or counterinsurgency, or whatever it was, by the local Serb paramilitaries or the reviled Yugoslav government of Slobodon Milosevic and which it was supposed to stop.

     A group of prominent independent Yugoslavian economists estimates "that NATO bombing caused $US29.6 billion ($45.7 billion) damage to Yugoslavia, and that it will take the country 15 years to reach the productivity level it had before the air strikes." (Sidney Morning Herald, 7/28/99). Western companies, perhaps needless to say, are already queuing up to profiteer from the Yugoslav state of misery -- and to find further ways to infiltrate into the Yugoslav economy, which, we should remember, with its experiments in workers' self-management, once upon a time, before the West started dismantling the country in the late 1980s through economic pressures and the incitation of ethnic division and civil war, was upheld by some people as a possible model for a non-capitalist but non-Stalinist road of economic development.

     NATO has declared a great "victory" and occupied Kosovo. The news media focus their attention elsewhere: Clinton goes on a tour to commiserate with the poor people of America. A useless rich guy's plane crashes into the ocean. Life under capitalism goes on. But the effects of the Yugoslav war, a war that the U.S./NATO forced to happen through its arrogant and totally unfulfillable demands at Rambouillet, will not be over for years for people who live in the region.

     One of the most terrible effects there of this war – a war with no U.S. or NATO battle casualties (or so they say) – is the long-term environmental and human damage from the wanton bombing of oil refineries, chemical and fertilizer plants and from the use of depleted uranium armor-piercing bombs. A UN scientific team is currently inspecting an area around the city of Pancevo on the Danube near Belgrade where highly toxic and carcinogenic chemicals burned out of control for days following NATO bombing raids. Will these acts, and the widespread bombing of civilian targets, be punished as the war crimes they undoubtedly are? Probably not, no more than those who engineered the genocide at Dresden and Hiroshima were ever punished after the Second World War. Showcasing war crimes tribunals and acting morally superior to other nations has been, and will no doubt continue to be, a privilege of the victors. (The U.S., incidentally, looks like it is going to refuse to join a new permanent international War Crimes Tribunal that is being proposed because it won't be assured of immunity itself ahead of time for any of its "peacekeeping" missions. Such imperial arrogance!)

     A grassroots effort, nonetheless, is being organized by former U.S. Attorney General Ramsey Clark's International Action Center to gather evidence for a people's war crimes tribunal, similar to Bertrand Russell's tribunal on the U.S. aggression in Vietnam, to investigate, indict and try the culpable U.S. and other NATO leaders. More information can be found at the IAC's Web site: http://www.iacenter.org. Other in Canada are putting pressure on Arbour. I think we should give these efforts our support.

     What was the purpose of this bloody skyborne mayhem, which is now being followed up, as with Iraq, by brutal economic sanctions and the refusal of aid for reconstruction, until they “cry uncle” and the West can dictate its choice of governmental leadership to the people of the country? Bill and Tony and the other NATO leaders claimed that their motives were purely altruistic, that they were acting to save the Albanian Kosovars from an evil Serbian government extermination campaign -- that, to win support in some bleeding-heart liberal and human rights industry quarters, was hyperbolically compared to Hitler's "Final Solution". That was bullshit from the very beginning. As Chomsky and others have pointed out, Turkey, a U.S. ally and a party as a NATO member to this war, is a far worse certified human rights abuser of the Kurds and of other peoples than the Yugoslav Milosevic government. (And, for that matter, look at the U.S. itself for a long and sordid record of abuses, here and abroad.)

     Sadly to report, this particular kind of sales job seems to have fooled a number of people, including even some seasoned activists here and there on the Left, whom one would have expected ought to have known better than to fall for it from their past war and antiwar experiences. How could they have supported, even in some cases did cheerleading for this war, when they rightly opposed U.S. aggression in Vietnam, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Panama, etc.? Was this war then so different somehow? Our rulers, the warmakers, haven't changed their identities as capitalists and imperialists one iota. Unfortunately, they do seem to have learned how to package their wars of aggression and conquest more plausibly this time around as "humanitarian interventions". While this isn't a totally new phenomenon -- the U.S. intervened in Cuba in 1898 allegedly to stop Spanish colonial atrocities and then became the new colonial ruler of it, Puerto Rico and the Philippines -- this is a problem that we need to arm ourselves theoretically to be able to deal with better.

     Yes, many displaced Kosovar Albanians -- displaced either due to previous inter-ethnic violence and/or the U.S./NATO bombing -- have been able to return to their homes, where they still exist. But tens of thousands of Serbs and Roma (Gypsies) have now fled Kosovo due to, or in fear of, attacks on them by the KLA -- like the recent cold-blooded murders of the 14 farmers, with NATO troops often standing close by and doing nothing to interfere. Where is the vaunted "humanitarian intervention" now? About this fairly predictable turn of events there is very little being said in the Western media.

     Friends, the real reasons this war was launched had little or nothing to do with humanitarianism. The real reasons had everything to do instead with greedy economics and cynical geo-politics: (1) undermining the last at least somewhat independent government and economy in Eastern Europe, the rest having been, or in the process of being, absorbed into NATO; (2) securing safe routes for Western capital to the huge oil reserves of the Caspian Sea region; and (3) erecting a new cordon sanitaire around the ex-Soviet Union where the people are waking up to the realities of life under capitalism and don't like it.

     This is not to say that the Milosevic Yugoslav government, the “enemy”, is entirely laudable in its policies and behavior. It, too, may have committed, as charged, horrible crimes against humanity before and during the war, although in my opinion the allegations that we hear repeated ad nauseum, and so totally one-sidedly in the Western press, so far remain largely unproven. Based on past history, we should always take accusations made in wartime by one side against the other with a good degree of healthy skepticism. (See, at my Web site, where I am continuing to cover the war and its aftermath, a cautionary article by Phillip Knightley from the British Independent newspaper June 27, 1999 comparing this war's NATO atrocity allegations against the Serbs with the British propaganda and demonization campaign during the Boer War.) Louise Arbour, who rushed to indict Milosevic and his generals during the war – and at the same time said nothing about NATO’s actions in violation of international laws and norms – is an ambitious person headed for the Canadian Supreme Court and thus hardly an impartial factfinder.

     As activists in the U.S., we should definitely try whenever possible to built support for people in places like Yugoslavia, Iraq, and elsewhere, attacked by our rulers, who are more genuine agents of progressive and revolutionary change. I can certainly testify that these good Leftist people with their own independent agendas for change do exist -- I was in contact with some of them in Yugoslavia by e-mail during the war. But they noticeably joined ranks, then at least, to oppose the U.S./NATO aggression. And our main goal, as anti-imperialists who happen to be living here in the Belly of the Beast ought to be, as I see it, to oppose and to expose our own rulers and their machinations around the world. Changing things right here -- destroying the imperial Beast -- is what would really make the world we all have to live in a better place.

     One of the best post-mortems of the war, tearing apart the prevarications and distortions foisted by our rulers and their talking heads in the mainstream corporate-owned media is, as is often the case, a piece by our radical polymath Noam Chomsky which appears in the current issue of "Z Magazine" (and which will probably eventually appear on their Web site: http://www.lbbs.org/). Chomsky explains the current UN peace agreement in relationship to the discussions held back at Rabouillet and shows how there was no straight NATO military victory here but actually some gains for the Yugoslavs in protecting their country’s sovereignty, and he deconstructs all the duplicitous, dangerous "humanitarian intervention" crap quite effectively . Something else on the the latter topic I have seen, read and can recommend -- but which isn't available unfortunately on the Web -- is the March-April issue of "New Left Review", whose theme is "the imperialism of human rights." If you can find it, see especially the articles there by Tariq Ali and Peter Gowan. Also on the same target - - and this time available on the Web -- is a good short piece by Australian journalist and film-maker, John Pilger: http://www.lbbs.org/CrisesCurEvts/pilgerimperialism.htm

     Having succeeded at this "humanitarian war" con job once and gotten largely away with it with the American public, if not with world opinion (which increasingly sees the U.S. as a rogue state), these crooks are likely to try it again -- despite Madeline Albright's recent pat denials that Kosovo was anything more than a specific instance with no lessons to generalize for the U.S.’s foreign policy. Indeed, that very thing seems to be what is in the offing right now already in the case of Colombia, where the revolutionary Left, after a 35-year long guerilla war, is within reach of seizing power, overthrowing a corrupt power structure, and socializing the economy. Largely unnoticed, the U.S. has become heavily involved there, under the guise of fighting the "drug war" (an earlier and continuing Pentagon public relations packaging effort). It is already a lot like Vietnam back in the early 1960s with growing aid to the local forces of repression -- Colombia is already the 3rd largest recipient of U.S. foreign aid after Israel and Egypt and Clinton is asking for more -- and the active presence of several hundred U.S. military advisors (5 of whom were recently killed in a surveillance plane crash). The U.S. leaders recently floated the idea of assembling a hemispheric force to intervene militarily, much as in Kosovo, in the name of stopping the violence. Fortunately, so far, the other Latin American countries -- the U.S. record of military and CIA interventions in the affairs of sovereign states in the hemisphere has left a very bad taste -- have refused to cooperate.

     Few Norte Americanos, even on the Left, seem to have much more than a vague clue about what's going on in Colombia and the increasing U.S. role there. We need to get ourselves informed asap. A good deal of relevant information about this rapidly developing situation can be found at the Web site of the Madison, Wisconsin-based Colombia Support Network: http://www.igc.apc.org/csn/csn.html. Get ready for action, anti- warriors and anti-imperialists! This whole region could turn into our next major struggle. Next door to Colombia is Venezuela, the U.S.'s biggest foreign source of oil, where a populist president Hugo Chavez has taken power through elections and promised structural changes to benefit the impoverished masses. Already, a campaign seems to have been launched in the obliging U.S. media to portray Chavez as a would-be "dictator", the usual first step for a CIA destabilization campaign. That situation, too, should bear close watching. My feeling is that we ought to find ways now to educate others more broadly about both situations and to find ways to do solidarity with the people there. Let's try to be more proactive, instead of trying desperately to catch up when things have really gotten out of control. That is another lesson, it seems to me, of our experiences with the recent war.

     Finally, it seems to me that activists need to do more serious education around the nature of capitalism and imperialism. Edward Herman has suggested from anecdotal evidence that he's collected that the support for the war, including among "progressives", was directly proportional to the degree of reliance people had on what the mainstream corporate-owned media outlets were force-feeding them. Very few dissenting anti-war, much less anti-imperialist, voices were allowed to be heard on these media, even fewer it seems to me than at the time of the Gulf War -- which was bad enough. Those who had access to alternative media like, say, Pacifica Radio and "Z Magazine", were more likely to see through the government lies. Herman's conclusion is that we need to preserve and to develop our own alternative media. (Perhaps not coincidentally, the kind of radical coverage provided by Pacifica is, in fact, currently under attack by the network's Clintonite board of directors who have locked-out all of the programmers and staff at the flagship station, KPFA, in Berkeley. See http://www.savepacifica.net for the gory details and info on what you can do about it.)

     In this war, the World-Wide Web amply proved its newfound significance as a way to do an end-around of the hegemony of the mainstream corporate- owned media, to connect with other activists around the world, to build radical consciousness, and to organize fighting oppositional movements. On this very subject, check out an article by me in the special July war issue of the Vermont-based publication, Toward Freedom: http://www.towardfreedom.com/jul99/activistsonline.htm

     I would suggest further that the fact that some people, including some nominally on the Left, have been taken in by "humanitarian interventionism" shows that we need to do more and better education around the structural nature of the System. Most people, lacking a structural analysis of the U.S. state and its relationship to capitalism, tend to look at "their" government as having certain discrete "policies", which from their point of view can be either good or bad, right or wrong, and which can be changed from administration to administration, etc. They have not been helped yet to see the state as representing the interests of the capitalist class and acting as the "executive committee of the bourgeoisie", as Marx once called it. Thus some of "our" wars -- statecraft by other means -- might be seen as OK, even if people are not taken in by the usual patriotic, support-the-troops hoopla that surrounds all wars. When you go on to obtain a structural analysis -- I can remember when the scales fell from my eyes -- a lot of things suddenly being to make more sense; and, consequently, you probably don't ask first whether this particular war is good or bad, you think first about how the whole fucking System is rotten (dysfunctional, irrational, exploitative, etc.) and that this is yet another crime of the System (which, as always, proves empirically to be true). Maybe we all need to take a look again, or for the first time, at basic works like Lenin's Imperialism and Felix Green's The Enemy. Anybody else "out there" in cyberspace or our real Vermont space interested in a study or discussion group? Please contact me if you are.

     In any case, let's try to keep the new activist energy that the war stirred up -- if there was a lining to this awfully dark cloud, this was it -- flowing along.