Bill Clinton, Hero
Just as most people don’t know that a
small, relatively new Caribbean island nation has named the highest point to be
found there, Mount Obama, I did not know
until very recently that a small, even newer country in the Balkans had named a
major street in its capital
city, Pristina, after Bill Clinton. They have even erected a heroic-looking statue to the man on
that boulevard, with a gigantic portrait of him identified
as the 42nd president of the United States topping a large American
flag, cut off to fit the blank wall of a building right behind the statue. Above the portrait is a large silhouette of
the country honoring him. There is also
a huge building-side
photo
of Clinton clasping the hand of a likely local leader whom I am unable to
identify.
The Caribbean country honoring Obama is
Antigua and Barbuda; the Balkan country honoring Clinton is Kosovo. The former honor was made because of who the
man is—the first person of African heritage to become president of the United
States—rather for anything that he might have done for the Caribbean
country. By contrast, one can certainly
say, for better or for worse, that President Clinton certainly earned the honor
bestowed upon him by the government of Kosovo.
Without the major intervention by NATO, led by the United States, and
its relentless 1999 bombing of Serbia, of which the Kosovo region had long been
an important historical part, there is absolutely no chance that Kosovo would
have become a separate, independent country.
The government of Kosovo is right to
single out Bill Clinton as the responsible party for their independence from
Serbia, that is, in so far as he has ever been his own man, even when
president. The American people
themselves never had much of a say in the crushing air assault upon a
relatively defenseless Serbia. This was
only the latest in a series of very one-sided “humanitarian” wars waged by
American presidents, justified through media propaganda, following up Reagan’s
assault on Grenada and George H. W. Bush’s attacks on Panama and then on Iraq
after Saddam Hussein had been led to believe that he had a free hand to settle
his oil dispute with neighboring Kuwait militarily. The justification given in this latest
instance was that the Serbian tyrant, the tyrant du jour, if you will, Slobodan
Milosevic, was engaging in atrocities in his effort to put down the insurrection
led by the Kosovo Liberation
Army
(KLA), which, itself, hardly had clean hands, to put it mildly.
Even with its best efforts, the press
never did a particularly effective job of explaining why it was in U.S.
national interests—so much so that we had to intervene militarily—for the
secession of the territory of Kosovo, which in the 20th century had
come to be dominated by ethnic Albanians through immigration from neighboring
Albania and a high birth rate. With the
future of California in mind, we might even have seen Kosovo’s independence
from Serbia as the establishment of a very bad precedent. But it hardly mattered. We just bombed, meeting little resistance and
without any blood cost, so Bill had his splendid little war and has since been
duly honored with his street, posters, and statue.
Good and Bad
Secession
The whole episode invites further
reflection. As we have noted, Kosovo’s
secession from Serbia stood virtually no chance without U.S./NATO
intervention. As a general rule, secession
movements need powerful outside patrons.
What we call the American Revolution was really a war of secession from
the British Empire by the thirteen American colonies. It is unlikely to have been successful
without the assistance of the French.
The decisive Siege of Yorktown, resulting in the
surrender of the British General Charles Cornwallis, is properly called by
historians a Franco-American victory, though it is likely that few Americans
are aware of the fact. The French
certainly know it. A gigantic reminder
is in the Hall of Paintings at the Palace of Versailles in the form of a work
by Louis Charles-Auguste Couder’s
work appropriately titled “The Siege of Yorktown.” Since 2017, visitors to the Museum of the
American Revolution in Philadelphia have been able to see a replica of that
painting.
Another reminder of the crucial French
role in the American war of secession is that the Marquis de Lafayette has his
own hero statues in this country,
including one in a square that is named for him right in front of the White
House. I think the first historical
marker I ever saw is the one honoring Lafayette beside the road
we traveled on to do our shopping in the nearby town of Rocky Mount, North
Carolina, from the farm community of Red Oak, in which I grew up. The marker is practically across the road
from the town’s rather elaborate monument to the soldiers
of the Confederacy.
That latter statue reminds us of another
big war of secession, one that failed, largely because it lacked a powerful
external patron. It was not for
want of trying. The natural ally for the Confederacy was Great Britain,
which obtained most of its cotton, crucial for its manufacturing economy, from
the Southern states, and it was heavily invested in the South. The Northern states were Britain’s economic
rivals and the high-tariff policies of President Abraham Lincoln and his Whig
and Republican supporters were anathema to it.
For that reason and others, the sympathy of Lord Palmerston, the British
Prime Minister, and many other British leaders lay with the Confederacy. It’s
unlikely that Britain would have sent troops to aid the South, but it might
have used its superior sea power to relieve the economic pressure on the South
and increase it on the North. If the
British had intervened for the South and the secession had succeeded, a statue
or two of Lord Palmerston might well be among the first that I would have
encountered in my young Tar Heel life.
A rather shrewd political move by
President Lincoln was largely responsible for Britain staying out of that war,
though. That was his issuance of the
Emancipation Proclamation in the wake of the Battle of Antietam. It actually freed no slaves, because it only
applied to that territory under the control of the Confederacy, but, because
the anti-slavery movement was politically strong in Britain, it cut the legs
out from under any movement in Britain to ally itself with the Confederacy.
Another major war of secession occurred in
Africa a little more than a century later.
That is the Nigerian Civil War, 1967-1970, in
which the southern region of Biafra unsuccessfully attempted to secede from the
central state. Had we wanted to use the
“atrocity” excuse that we used for intervening on behalf of the secessionists
that we used for Kosovo, the Nigerian military certainly provided ample opportunity
for it. But, as it happened, the former
colonial masters, the British, actually provided material support for the
central government, while the United States remained neutral, and the secession
failed.
Another reason why this country, and the
people of Great Britain, as well, might have favored Biafra in that war is that
its dominant ethnic group, the members of the Igbo tribe, are largely Christian
and very Westernized. The Hausa and
Fulani tribes controlling the central government, by contrast, are largely
Muslim and the virtual antithesis of the Igbos when it comes to
Westernization. But neither favoritism
toward Christianity nor toward the more progressive populace played any role in
the U.S./NATO intervention on behalf of Kosovo, either. As with Biafra, at least as far as the
British were concerned, it was quite the contrary. The largely Albanian Kosovars are Muslim,
while the Serbs are more advanced economically and Christian.
Why Kosovo?
So, what was it that the Kosovars and the
KLA had going for them that the Igbos and the Biafrans did not? Perhaps the answer to the question is to be
found in a 2008 article by Tom Burghardt entitled, “Welcome to Kosovo!
The World’s Newest Narco State.” A couple of
passages from that article get right to the heart of the matter:
As in Bosnia Herzegovina and Croatia, the
Kosovo Liberation Army was secretly armed by America and Germany and remains
what it has always been, a creature of Western intelligence services.
---
Hypocritically, while Washington had
officially designated the KLA a “terrorist organization” funded by the heroin
trade, the Clinton administration was complicit with their German allies in the
division of the Serb province along ethnic and religious lines.
In Kosovo, Hashim Thaci’s KLA served as the militarized vanguard for
the Albanian mafia whose “15 Families” control virtually every facet of the
Balkan heroin trade. Kosovar traffickers ship heroin originating exclusively
from Asia’s Golden Crescent. At one end lies
Afghanistan where poppy is harvested for transshipment through Iran and Turkey;
as morphine base it is then refined into “product” for worldwide consumption.
From there it passes into the hands of the Albanian syndicates who control the
Balkan Route.
As a place for the real power behind the
U.S. government to intervene militarily, Kosovo, it would seem, has a lot more
in common with Afghanistan than with Biafra.
To explain that, let me turn to a couple of my previous articles. The first is my review article of Sally Denton
and Roger Morris’s 2001 book, The Money and the Power: The Making of Las
Vegas and Its Hold on America. This
quote from that article says it all:
One cannot talk about power and corruption
in the United States in the second half of the twentieth century without
mentioning the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). We learn from Denton and Morris that the
well-known collaboration between the CIA and the mob in the attempt to
assassinate Cuban dictator Fidel Castro was hardly an anomaly. As wielders of secret power, the mob—or the
Syndicate if you prefer—and the CIA are in the same business, and they have
found it in many instances to work together rather than to compete. The cooperation has been so complete in such
things as illicit drug smuggling and the laundering of money that it is often
difficult to figure out where one of them stops and the other begins. I lost track at a count of 30 pages as I was
going through the various sub-categories in the index for mention of the CIA
(e.g. assassination plots, 71, 174, 208, 209-10, 213, 246, 253, 293, 295-296,
297, 298, 299, 306-7, 307-12; drug trade and, 6, 52, 103, 143, 311-12, 329….)
The second article is “The Heroin Epidemic and the News.” The point of that article is that the
absolutely devastating national death toll from drug overdoses is called
unanimously by the news media simply as an “opioid epidemic” and the blame is
laid almost completely upon the pharmaceutical industry and doctors who
over-prescribe pain killers. While it is
true that the synthetic opioid, fentanyl, has risen greatly as a drug-related cause
of death, heroin remains an important cause, and it is also true that the press
avoidance of that fact has become even more pronounced than it was when I wrote
the article. Heroin and the fact that
our invasion of Afghanistan resulted in a huge increase in its origination from
that country would appear to be completely off-limits for our news media.
Now let us return to the Burghardt article
for another quote:
According to regional experts the outlook
for Kosovo is grim. The economy is in shambles, unemployment
hovers near 50 percent, a population of young people with “criminality as the
sole career choice” populate a society tottering on the brink of collapse where
the state is dominated by organized crime.
How appropriate, one might say, that their
national hero should be Bill Clinton, he of the Mena Airport CIA drug-smuggling operation! See also the section entitled “Vince Foster’s
Criminal Connections?” in my 2016 article, “Was Vince Foster’s Murder PizzaGate-Related?” Perhaps the illicit drug
business
connection also explains why Pristina has named a street for President
George W. Bush, as well. And when it
comes to honoring prominent Americans of doubtful probity, Kosovo has not
neglected that other Clinton. Near the statue on Bill Clinton Boulevard one
can buy fashionable pants suits at the “Hillary” boutique.
David Martin
December 9, 2019
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