The practice war

I know George Bush has stolen the car, but you might say the car was running, the door was open, and the keys were left in the ignition by his predecessors.

Counterpunch takes the occasion of Milosevic's murky death to revisit those heady days of "the liberals' war"—when self-identified progressives discovered the frisson that comes with getting behind blowing women and children up with bombs from on high.

The opening paragraph of a March 6, 1999 Cockburn piece is a classic:

Strange are the ways of men! It feels like only yesterday that the New York Times was denouncing President Bill as a moral midget, deserving of the harshest reprobation for fondling Monica Lewinsky's breasts. And today here's the New York Times doling out measured praise to the same president for blowing little children in pieces. The Times last Thursday had pictures of those dead refugees on its cover, bombed by one of NATO's aviators. Editorial page editor Howell Raines staked out the Times official view that "For now, NATO must sustain and intensify the bombing." What a weird guy Raines must be. Kiss Monica's tits and he goes crazy. Bomb peasants and he shouts for more.

Some of this lookback doesn't age all that well. "Leftist opponents of the war, such as ourselves [writes Cockburn] now march shoulder to shoulder with Chuck Colson, Barry Farber, Don Feder, Bob Grant, Bob Novak, Arriana Huffington, A.M. Rosenthal, Charles Krauthammer, Edward Luttwak, Oliver North, Joe Sobran and the Pope."

That was the other Pope, the dead one, who described NATO's bombing as an "act of diabolical retribution." Cockburn can still be pals with some of the guys he mentions, but not all. Is it safe to say some of those characters were antiwar simply out of of party loyalty/anti-Clinton prejudice? But here's to Counterpunch's celebration of "heartening evidence of interesting coalitions"—something that goes on to this day—and for its unceasing exposure of frauds.

This scene ends badly, as you might imagine. Anything sound familiar here?

So the NATO bombs began to fall and, exactly as could have been predicted, the Serbian brutalities in Kosovo escalated and the tidal wave of refugees began. Everything has gone according the script. NATO bombs destroying Serbian civilian infrastructure: power plants, sewage treatment, electricity and gas and oil supplies. Everything that's hit is hastily described by NATO spokesmen as "dual purpose," (i.e., possibly also for Serb military use) unless it's obvious to all that only peasants, with no conceivable "dual purposes" have been blasted to bits. Wednesday last saw the mad NATO supreme commander, Wesley Clark, utter his most deliberate and obvious lie to date, when he said that "There was a military convoy and a refugee convoy. We struck the Serb convoy and we have very strong evidence that the Serbs then retaliated by attacking the column of refugees." By the next day it became clear that there was no "Serb convoy," no "very strong evidence" and that an Albanian column of refugees on tractors had been killed by NATO bombers.

And three years later, the demonize-and-bomb (but only as "a last option") scam worked to perfection in another venue. Except, uh, the bombs are still falling....