http://www.wvwnews.net/story.php?id=3789
by http://www.wvwnews.net/story.php?id=3328
On March 20, 2003, American forces began their invasion of Iraq. According to the Emperor himself, the purpose of the war was to “disarm Iraq of weapons of mass destruction, to end Saddam Hussein’s support for terrorism, and to free the Iraqi people.”
Five years later, U.S. troops are still occupying Iraq. Four thousand of them have died, and tens of thousands have been injured, many seriously. The Iraqi death toll runs in the hundreds of thousands (the Empire refuses to “keep score”), and the number of displaced Iraqis is over a million.
The path to that war was “paved with false assumptions and lies,” in the words of http://www.wvwnews.net/story.php?id=3945. There were no weapons of mass destruction. Terrorism in Iraq and elsewhere had nothing to do with Hussein. And the only things people of Iraq have been “liberated” from were their lives, property, and dignity. By every reasonable standard, and a few unreasonable ones, the Iraqi adventure has been a complete and utter fiasco.In today’s America, it is a popular belief among those against the Iraq war that Bush the Lesser is to blame, and that things will turn around after he is replaced. That is a dangerous folly. The road to damnation did not begin in March 2003 – or in September 2001, for that matter – but in March 1999. Iraq was not the first instance of an illegal, aggressive war launched from Washington. That dubious honor goes to the 1999 attack on then-Yugoslavia, in support of the terrorist Kosovo Liberation Army. The Kosovo war provided as precedent for Iraq, a “pattern of aggression,” as British historian Kate Hudson famously noted in August 2003.
Bombs Over Belgrade
Operation Allied Force (incorrectly known in Serbia as “Merciful Angel”) was launched on March 23, 1999, without UN approval or even a pretext. Even though the press today claims that NATO’s air war was launched to stop or prevent “repression” of Albanian rebels by Yugoslav and Serbian forces, the actual justification invoked as the attack began was that Serbia had to be bombed into signing the “Rambouillet agreement” – a disgraceful ultimatum demanding NATO occupation of Kosovo and a free hand in the rest of Serbia. Even Empire’s war planners quickly recognized the abject absurdity of “bombs for peace” and directed the media to change the official line in a “humanitarian” direction. The war thus became about “saving the Kosovars” (sic). Tales of alleged Serbian atrocities abounded, routinely compared to those of the Nazis: mass deportations, mass executions, mass graves, mass rapes.
They proved as real as the “Iraqi WMDs.”
Even though Allied Force was officially a NATO operation, the vast majority of sorties were flown by American warplanes. As in Iraq, the assumption of the U.S. leadership was that the war would be short and victorious. It was neither; instead of capitulating within a week, the government of Slobodan Milosevic fought on for 78 days, agreeing to let NATO occupy Kosovo only after receiving explicit guarantees of Serbian sovereignty. When Yugoslav troops retreated from Kosovo, they did so nearly unharmed and in perfect order, showing that the bombing was primarily directed against civilian targets and intended to terrorize.
Kosovo was a Rubicon that the Empire needed to cross: a demonstration that it could attack anyone, anywhere, for any reason.
http://antiwar.com/malic/?articleid=12588