by Scott Ritter

Scott Ritter is a former US Marine Corps intelligence officer and author of ‘SCORPION KING: America’s Suicidal Embrace of Nuclear Weapons from FDR to Trump.’ He served in the Soviet Union as an inspector implementing the INF Treaty, in General Schwarzkopf’s staff during the Gulf War, and from 1991-1998 as a UN weapons inspector.

It is a travesty of international justice that the 1999 bombing remains unrecognized by the perpetrators and unpunished

Twenty-three years ago, NATO bombed Serbia. This act was the opening round of what was to become a 78-day illegal war of aggression, the repercussions of which haunt the world to this day.

Act One: The Encounter

It was a chance meeting – two men who had crossed paths in Iraq two years past, now running into each other on a stretch of highway connecting Kosovo to Macedonia. The date was March 20, 1999. Monitors assigned to the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) Kosovo Verification Mission (KVM) were in the process of being withdrawn from their assigned areas of responsibility to the town of Ohrid, in Macedonia, due to the collapse of diplomatic talks with Serbia about the devolving situation in the Serbian autonomous province of Kosovo, where Albanian separatists were engaged in a quasi-civil war with the Serbian authorities.

The British contingent of the KVM was stopped at the border between Kosovo and Macedonia, awaiting final clearance to cross the border. Among the British observers was a former Royal Marine officer who had previously served with the United Nations Special Commission (UNSCOM) in Iraq, helping oversee the dismantling of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction programs. While he and his fellow observers waited, he watched as other vehicles driven by members of the US observer contingent drove in the opposite direction – into Kosovo. At the wheel of one of these vehicles was a familiar face – a man who was known as ‘Kurtz’.

Kurtz was a man of tremendous experience who was brought into UNSCOM in mid-1997 for the purpose of providing operational planning and leadership. ‘Kurtz’, of course, was not his real name, but rather a nickname derived from the fact that with his shaved head, walrus mustache, and weathered face, he looked like a combination of Robert Duvall’s Colonel Kilgore and Marlon Brando’s Colonel Kurtz in the movie ‘Apocalypse Now’. With a wide-brim Stetson, cowboy boots, and an ever-present wad of chewing tobacco stuck in his cheek, he looked every bit the part.

Kurtz was picked for this job in part because of his background, which was embedded in the world of covert special operations. His most recent assignment prior to coming on board at UNSCOM was preparing diplomats for E&E – escape and evasion – from hostile situations. Given the sensitivity of some of the UNSCOM operations taking place in Iraq at that time, it was thought that such training might be ideal for situations the inspectors might find themselves in.

But Kurtz’s background had been his undoing. He was, so to speak, too ‘black’, or covert, for his own good. Even though he was performing wonderfully in Iraq, his managers in Washington began to panic when the situation in Baghdad began to deteriorate in October 1997. The decision was made to pull Kurtz out of Iraq. It was bitter irony – the one man who was best equipped to deal with a hostage situation, to keep not only himself but other, less fully-trained personnel alive and well, was being withdrawn in haste out of fear of his being taken hostage.

Once Kurtz was assigned to UNSCOM, he was technically UN property for the duration of the assignment, and the US could not just simply snap its fingers and bring him home. But snap, they did, with the US ambassador, Bill Richardson, summoning the Australian diplomat who headed UNSCOM, Richard Butler, to the US Mission in New York for a meeting. “One of the personnel provided to you [Kurtz],” Richardson said, “is a bit too exposed by the current situation, and we feel that it would be best for us all if he were withdrawn at this time.”

I oversaw the team in Iraq that Kurtz and the British officer were assigned to. Butler called me up to his office after his meeting with Richardson. “The man’s CIA,” he told me. “The Americans want him out.”

Now, as the Kosovo Monitoring Mission was departing Kosovo, Kurtz was back in action. The Americans, it seemed, wanted this man with the impressive covert operations skill set back in.

The role played by the CIA in the OSCE KVM is quite controversial – at a time when the US and NATO were accusing the Serbian government of committing atrocities, the CIA was using the cover provided by the OSCE observer mission to coordinate with fighters from the Kosovo Liberation Army who were engaged in a guerilla war with the Serbian military. Serbian operations in response to CIA-directed KLA attacks were being characterized by the West as ‘genocide’, and used to justify a planned NATO aerial bombardment of Serbia.

These facts, however, ran counter to the narrative of a Serbian-initiated campaign of ethnic cleansing which the US and NATO were spinning. The British OSCE observers were well aware of the complex reality of what was transpiring inside Kosovo, where legitimate Serbian military operations against known KLA forces were being described as “massacres of innocent civilians” by the Western media. The truth, however, was often inconvenient, which is why at that moment in time, on March 20, 1999, the British observer contingent found itself exiting Kosovo at the same time Kurtz and his fellow CIA officers were going in.

Act Two: The Phone Call

March 24, 1999. 9:20am. In the White House Situation Room, an aid places a phone call to the Kremlin, where Russian President Boris Yeltsin is waiting. The call goes through, and the aid hands the phone to Bill Clinton, the 42nd president of the United States. The conversation started off with a grimnotification: The leaders of NATO, including himself, Clinton said, “have decided we have to launch air strikes against military targets in Serbia soon.”

The problem, Clinton noted, was the Serbian leader, Slobodan Milosevic. “He has displaced 30,000 more people just since last Friday,” Clinton said. “He is killing innocent people. We have reports of summary executions.” Left unspoken was the role played by Kurtz and his fellow CIA operatives in creating the conditions for such actions. Clinton continued. “He [Milosevic] has basically told Russian, EU, and American negotiators that he doesn’t care what any of us think.”

Clinton was getting worked up by the consequences he had triggered by unleashing the CIA on Kosovo. “My God, they [the Europeans] have nightmares they’ll [the Serbs] repeat Bosnia and all the instability and all the problems, and it will spread from Kosovo to Macedonia to Albania and engulf all of their southern flank. They are very, very worried about it. They are right to be worried about it.”

Again, left unsaid was the fact that the very scenario that was giving the Europeans nightmares had been carefully crafted by the CIA, at Bill Clinton’s direction.

Yeltsin wasn’t buying any of it. “It is easy to throw bombs about,” he said, dismissing Clinton’s characterization of the problem and proffered solution. “It is intolerable because of the hundreds of thousands of people who will suffer and die.”

The consequences of any NATO strike, Yeltsin warned Clinton, were dire. “In the name of our future, in the name of you and me, in the name of the future of our countries, in the name of security in Europe, I ask you to renounce that strike, and I suggest that we should meet somewhere and develop a tactical line of fighting against Milosevic, against him personally. And we are wiser, we are more experienced, and we can come up with a solution. That should be done for the sake of our relationship. That should be done for the sake of peace in Europe.”

The Russian leader’s pleas fell on deaf ears. “Well, Boris,” Clinton replied, “I want to work with you to try and bring an end to this, but I don’t believe there is any way to call off the first round of strikes because Milosevic continues to displace thousands of people every day… I don’t want this to be a great source of a split between Russia and Europe and Russia and the US. We have worked too hard. There are too many economic and political things for us to do together, and I regret this more than I can say.”

The American president was outright lying to his Russian counterpart – the events in Kosovo were unfolding along the lines of a carefully scripted game plan that had been in motion for some time. War was inevitable because the US, through the CIA, had shaped the narrative to make it so. Worse, the US president was willing to sacrifice relations between the US and Russia in pursuit of this NATO objective. This fact was driven home by Yeltsin in his closing remarks.

“[O]ur people,” Yeltsin lamented, “will certainly from now on have a bad attitude with regard to America and NATO. I remember how difficult it was for me to try and turn heads of our people, the heads of politicians towards the West, towards the United States, but I succeeded in doing that, and now to lose all that. Well, since I failed to convince the President, that means there is in store for us a very difficult, difficult road of contacts, if they prove to be possible. Goodbye.”

Act Three: The Bomb

On the evening of March 24, 1999, the secretary general of NATO, Javier Solana, a Spanish diplomat, authorized aircraft operating under the auspices of NATO to begin bombing targets in Serbia. It was no coincidence that the first aircraft to drop bombs on Serbia were F/A-18s belonging to the Spanish Air Force.

March 1999, several facts stick out. First is that Spain, as a member of the United Nations, is bound by its commitment to the Charter of that organization. When it comes to the use of force, the UN Charter is quite clear – there are only two acceptable conditions under which such force might be legitimately employed by a member state. One is an enforcement action to maintain international peace and security, carried under the authority of a resolution passed by the Security Council under Chapter VII of the Charter. The other is the inherent right of individual and collective self-defense, as enshrined in Article 51 of the Charter.

As Spanish bombs fell on Serbian soil, two things were quite clear – there was no Chapter VII resolution in existence which authorized an enforcement action against Serbia, and Serbia had committed no act of aggression against either Spain or its NATO allies that would justify any claim of self-defense in explaining the Spanish (and NATO) military assault on Serbia.

In short, by dropping bombs on Serbia, the Spanish Air Force was initiating an illegal war of aggression. “To initiate a war of aggression,”the judges who comprised the International Military Tribunal convened in Nuremburg to judge the crimes of Nazi Germany, declared, “is not only an international crime; it is the supreme international crime differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulative evil of the whole.”

Spain wasn’t alone that night – aircraft from the air forces of the United States, Great Britain, Germany, France, and other NATO members participated in this “supreme international crime.” Viewed individually, there is no doubt that each nation involved in the attack on Serbia violated the UN Charter and, as such, is guilty of the crime of initiating an illegal war of aggression.

Not so fast! NATO, it seems, had crafted a novel legal argument built around the notion that it had a right to anticipatory collective self-defense under Article 51 of the UN Charter, and that this right was properly exercised under “normative expectation that permits anticipatory collective self-defense actions by regional security or self-defense organizations where the organization is not entirely dominated by a single member.” NATO, ignoring the obvious reality that it is, indeed, dominated by the United States, postulates that it is, indeed, such an organization, comprised as it is of “a number of powerful states, three of which are permanent members of the Security Council.”

The credibility of the NATO claim of “anticipatory collective self-defense,”however, arises from its characterization of the Kosovo crisis as a humanitarian disaster infused with elements of genocide which created not only a moral justification for intervention, but a moral necessity.

Tell that to Kurtz, the man who, together with his fellow CIA operatives acting under the authority given them by the president of the United States, Bill Clinton, worked to create conditions on the ground inside Kosovo that could then be used to manufacture the very narrative of a humanitarian crisis sufficient in scope and scale to allow NATO to craft its novel legal justification for attacking Serbia.

The problem for NATO is that its legal justification was built on a foundation of lies. The fiction that NATO is an organization not entirely dominated by the United States evaporates the moment one understands the role played by the CIA in preparing the script used by NATO to justify its actions. The fact that this script promulgated outright fabrications of alleged crimes perpetrated by Serbia to justify NATO military intervention only underscores the criminal nature of the entire NATO enterprise.

There is no escaping the fact that when the first bomb dropped by the Spanish Air Force on Serbia that evening 23 years ago to this date impacted on the ground, Spain and every other member of NATO had committed the “ultimate crime.”

That this crime remains unpunished is a travesty of international justice. That this crime remains unrecognized by those who perpetrated it is a testament to the hypocrisy of nations. That this crime set in motion the events that have led to the current state of affairs between the US and NATO on the one hand, and Russia on the other, is a global tragedy.

via RT

by Tom Fowdy

Tom Fowdy is a British writer and analyst of politics and international relations with a primary focus on East Asia.

Protesters hold placards as they take part in a rally against the extradition bill ahead of 2019 G20 Osaka summit at Edinburgh Place in Central district on June 26, 2019 in Hong Kong, China. © Anthony Kwan / Getty Images

A recent article published by Joshua Kurlantzick in the Council of Foreign Relations dissects what he describes as the declining public image of China. At first glance, he isn’t wrong. Over the past two years, positive opinion of China has indeed collapsed in Western and US-aligned countries. But the reasons he states for why that has happened are as disingenuous as they are outright false. The piece goes off on a tirade listing all the ways he thinks China is bad. From Covid-19, to so-called “wolf warrior diplomacy,” to the Belt & Road Initiative (BRI) “being a debt-trap,” to “aggressive and coercive behavior,” to Chinese vaccines apparently being “ineffective” and so on.

What is curious about these reasons is that they do not seem to resemble actual facts as much as anti-China cliches which are commonplace in American discourse, irrespective of whether they’re true or not. For example, he claims that “BRI is stalling” – but there is no evidence of this happening, with much to the contrary.

The author obliviously fails to mention what is in fact truly going on here concerning opinions of China in the West: The United States is and has been, in conjunction with its closest partners, waging a propaganda war against Beijing in order to legitimize its goals of containing China.

If you believe this conventional narrative, China is to be disliked now because all of a sudden it one day started doing bad things, such as those mentioned above, and became an “aggressive” country, alienating everyone with its “wolf warrior diplomacy.” It is as if this randomly happened for no reason, and other countries are perfectly vindicated in their response to it.

At least that’s how the average Westerner has been conditioned to understand it. They would not believe that China is effectively the same state it has been since 1949, with the same ruling party, with highly consistent territorial claims and goals, even if it has different policies to achieve those, but only that it suddenly started “changing for the worse” under Xi Jinping who set it on a course for “world domination.”

What Westerners might never be inclined to think is that they have been manipulated into these beliefs by a deliberate US campaign to change public opinion against China, to demonize, discredit and isolate the country, to derail its international engagement and justify Washington’s new priorities against it.

However, that, of course, is exactly what has happened. America’s foreign policy engine relies on a playbook which is known as “manufacturing consent” – the weaponization of the resources of the state to coordinate experts, think tanks and journalists to focus attention on issues which subsequently sway public opinion to create organic support for Washington’s policy preferences.

It is a strategy designed to create a “self-fulfilling prophecy” by masking aggression under the guise of inciting a “moral case” against the target in question. This is often done using the mantra of human rights, exploiting and manipulating people’s goodwill through the theatrical orchestration of crisis, and subsequently masking the intended foreign policy objectives as a justified act of benevolence and“concern.” It’s what the US has done in the build-up to every war, and it’s what they are doing now regarding China.

It was in 2018 that America, under the Trump administration, launched its public opinion war against China. After having “dealt” with the North Korea issue, the White House turned its focus on Beijing and unleashed a swathe of initiatives against it. It was that year that the national security strategy labeled China a “geopolitical competitor” and launched wars against Chinese trade and technology. In conjunction, the march to manufacture public consent against China began. It was no matter of coincidence that allegations and coverage regarding Xinjiang suddenly began to emerge. There is evidence showing how the wheels were placed in motion here.

The Victims of Communism group, a vitriolic right-wing think tank in Washington, reported that its donations suddenly surged from $2 million to $12 million in 2018. What was going on? Where did the sudden influx of donations come from? And more importantly: Why? The answer was Washington’s new focus on China. This organization suddenly went from something obscure into an important voice advocating anti-China content on Xinjiang through the scholar Adrian Zenz. Other hawkish think tanks, such as the Australian Strategic Policy Institute in Canberra, which receives US State Department funding, also rose to prominence, publishing allegations of“forced labor.” Again, Xinjiang was the focus, and Western mainstream media followed in tandem. The campaign to demonize Beijing was underway.

The Trump administration then used the Covid-19 pandemic to build on this new consensus, scapegoating China for an alleged cover-up. Utilizing this “atrocity propaganda” and jibes about the “China virus” was designed to whip up paranoia and fear against all things China-related. Every Chinese company, organization, or individual were vehicles for espionage, such as Huawei and the Confucius Institutes. Governments who sought to engage with Beijing favorably were denounced, lobbied, and strong-armed into changing their minds.

This is the art of “manufacturing consent” – the US uses its extensive networks to big up dissidents, coordinate mainstream media, set the agenda, poison civil society by weaponizing human rights activists against the target country by giving them preferential coverage and resources (whilst ignoring atrocities elsewhere), and create a self-sustaining narrative that conforms to its own foreign policy goals.

The US conducted an active and successful sledgehammer operation on Western opinion of China. When Beijing has the temerity to hit back at this propaganda war against it, then, insidiously, as you can see with articles like the Council of Foreign Relations, its own analysts blame Beijing for the geopolitical context they created.

The discourse of “wolf warrior diplomacy” in this light is dishonest, misleading, and unhelpful because it frames China as the perpetrator when it is simply reacting to hostility weaponized against it. Beijing is scorned for being forced to make political responses to hostile moves by the US. For example, by the kidnapping of Huawei executive Meng Wanzhou in Canada in 2018 and forcing China to respond in turn, Beijing is then framed as the aggressor and “commits hostage diplomacy.” Likewise, China’s positions on Taiwan, the South China Sea, Hong Kong, and so on, are not new at all, but America has gaslighted these issues by moving the goalposts on them and seeking to force Beijing’s hand.

In a nutshell, there is scant analysis in the West as to how America’s active and deliberative stoking of geopolitical conflict creates such hostility, or any holding Washington to account for its global propaganda.

However, its cold war against China is very much real. It can only truly be understood in the framework of the rivalry between the two powers and appreciating US foreign policy in the dynamics of its continuing desire for sole power, and not the facade of a righteous and heroic nation having “concerns” about certain issues. Such articles as Kurlantzickin’s ultimately insult the public’s intelligence, who are fed an endless array of lies teaching them to hate and fear China. It’s time to wake up to the truth.