Slobodan Milosevic, RIP

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March 15, 2006
Slobodan Milosevic, RIP
The Saddam of the Balkans makes his escape into history
by Justin Raimondo

The death of Serbian strongman Slobodan Milosevic is an occasion for all wings of the War Party, no matter what their current squabbles over the war in Iraq, to come together in a bipartisan and trans-ideological show of unity: from the Weekly Standard to the The New Republic, and virtually all points in between, the consensus opinion is that the war to "liberate" Kosovo from the Serbian jackboot was a just cause. The same Clintonian Democrats who today decry the naked unilateralism of the U.S. in invading Iraq vocally supported America's attack on "The Butcher of the Balkans" - undertaken without UN approval - and defend it to this day. The bombing of Yugoslavia, which killed 5,000-7,000 Serbian civilians, was bitterly opposed by congressional Republicans, who were accused by the other side of the aisle of undermining the troops and acting, in effect, as a kind of fifth column. As George W. Bush and his supporters impugn the patriotism of Iraq war opponents, the Democrats' loud squeals of protest evoke no sympathy from me. Nothing is sweeter to the ear than the sound of a hypocrite's howls as he's hoisted on his own petard.

The image of old Slobo splashed across the front pages evokes, in me, a sense of nostalgia � for the good old days of Antiwar.com's youth, when we were just beginning our efforts to expose and oppose the War Party. It was a lonely time to be an antiwar activist, since so many on the Left supported the first wave of Wilsonian interventionism that later metamorphosed into the Bush Doctrine. A broad united front made up of Democratic Party loyalists, neoconservatives, George Soros, and leftist intellectuals of the black-turtleneck Susan Sontag type, along with Bianca Jagger and the mad Trotskyist [.pdf] "Red" Vanessa Redgrave, gathered to demonize not only poor old Slobo but all Serbs. The New Republic branded them an intrinsically evil people who deserved collective punishment, exhaustive "reeducation," and permanent occupation: Stacy Sullivan's piece equated the Serbs with the Nazis and recommended a latter-day version of the draconian Morgenthau Plan to reduce them to a state of harmless quiescence.

Milosevic was the Saddam of the Balkans, and Serbia - a ramshackle country without resources, either economic or military, and no threat to the United States in any way, shape, or form - bears an eerie resemblance to pre-war Iraq. Dominated by a single party for many decades, with an economy driven into the ground by years of socialist mismanagement and outright plunder, and ruled by terror and baksheesh, Serbia - like Iraq - insisted on believing in the myth of its own sovereignty, and crossed the path of the aspiring American hegemon once too often for its own good.

Kosovo may have belonged to Serbia for generations, it may have been the historical seat of the national mythos, its churches may have housed the soul of the Serbian people; but none of that mattered to the Americans, not a single bit. Nor does it matter to them that, today, those churches are charred ruins, while Kosovo has fallen into the hands of terrorists and drug lords of the Albanian mafioso, and become an international center of the white slavery circuit and the arms-smuggling trade.

What matters is that the preening moralists of the interventionist "Left" feel good about themselves and can pat themselves on the back for having stopped "genocide." That was the word Rep. Nancy Pelosi used to describe what was going on in Bosnia and Kosovo, as I questioned her support for Clinton's war at a public meeting. Her bugged-out eyes bulged and seemed almost to pop out of their sockets as she exclaimed in horror that of course U.S. military intervention was a moral necessity. Hitler-Nazis-"ethnic cleansing" - all the by-now-familiar buzzwords used by the neocons to justify the invasion and occupation of Iraq were trotted out and tested first by the Nancy Pelosis of this world, as they defended a war against a country that had never attacked us and posed no threat, either to our territory or our legitimate interests.

This is an excerpt of http://antiwar.com/justin/?articleid=8704.