who also detail the horrible bungling of the kosovo air campaign, that Clark commanded.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/Kosovo/Story/0,2763,208056,00.htmlA month later, with Nato getting increasingly frustrated about Milosevic's refusal to buckle, Mary Robinson, the UN human rights commissioner, said Nato's bombing campaign had lost its "moral purpose". Referring to the cluster bomb attack on residential areas and market in the Serbian town of Nis, she described Nato's range of targets as "very broad" and "almost unfocused". There were too many mistakes; the bombing of the Serbian television station in Belgrade - which killed a make-up woman, among others - was "not acceptable".
Nato, which soon stopped apologising for mistakes which by its own estimates killed 1,500 civilians and injured 10,000, said that "collateral damage" was inevitable, and the small number of "mistakes" remarkable, given the unprecedented onslaught of more than 20,000 bombs.
Y et once Nato - for political reasons, dictated largely by the US - insisted on sticking to high-altitude bombing, with no evidence that it was succeeding in destroying Serb forces committing atrocities against ethnic Albanians, the risk of civilian casualties increased, in Kosovo and throughout Serbia. Faced with an increasingly uncertain public opinion at home, Nato governments chose more and more targets in urban areas, and experimented with new types of bombs directed at Serbia's civilian economy, partly to save face. By Nato's own figures, of the 10,000 Kosovans massacred by Serb forces, 8,000 were killed after the bombing campaign started.
Nato does not dispute the Serb claim that just 13 of its tanks were destroyed in Kosovo - a figure which gives an altogether different meaning to the concept of proportionality. Nato fought a military campaign from the air which failed to achieve its stated objectives.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/Kosovo/Story/0,2763,208123,00.htmlNo sooner are we told by Britain's top generals that the Russians played a crucial role in ending the west's war against Yugoslavia than we learn that if Nato's supreme commander, the American General Wesley Clark, had had his way, British paratroopers would have stormed Pristina airport threatening to unleash the most frightening crisis with Moscow since the end of the cold war.
"I'm not going to start the third world war for you," General Sir Mike Jackson, commander of the international K-For peacekeeping force, is reported to have told Gen Clark when he refused to accept an order to send assault troops to prevent Russian troops from taking over the airfield of Kosovo's provincial capital.
Hyperbole, perhaps. But, by all accounts, Jackson was deadly serious. Clark, as he himself observed, was frustrated after fighting a war with his hands tied behind his back, and was apparently willing to risk everything for the sake of amour-propre .
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The Russians had made a political point, not a military one. It was apparently too much for Clark. According to the US magazine, Newsweek, General Clark ordered an airborne assault on the airfield by British and French paratroopers. General Jackson refused. Clark then asked Admiral James Ellis, the American commander of Nato's southern command, to order helicopters to occupy the airport to prevent Russian Ilyushin troop carriers from sending in reinforcements. Ellis replied that the British General Jackson would oppose such a move. In the end the Ilyushins were stopped when Washington persuaded Hungary, a new Nato member, to refuse to allow the Russian aircraft to fly over its territory.
Jackson got full support from the British government for his refusal to carry out the American general's orders. When Clark appealed to Washington, he was allegedly given the brush-off.
http://www.commondreams.org/views03/0923-08.htmGiven our collective recurring political amnesia, let's turn to an eye-opening August 1999 report from our British friends at The Guardian, concerning Clark's role as Supreme Allied Commander - a post viewed by Clark supporters as a major qualification to be our next president.
"NATO justified the bombing of the Belgrade TV station, saying it was a legitimate military target. 'We've struck at his TV stations and transmitters because they're as much a part of his military machine prolonging and promoting this conflict as his army and security forces,' U.S. General Wesley Clark explained - 'his,' of course, referring to Yugoslavian President Slobodan Milosevic. It wasn't Milosevic, however, who was killed when the Belgrade studios were bombed, but rather 20 journalists, technicians and other civilians... The targeting of the studio was a war crime, perhaps the most indisputable of several war crimes committed by NATO in its war against Yugoslavia."
If you think the Guardian editors were being overly harsh in describing this as a "war crime," keep in mind that a panel of 16 judges from 11 countries who, at a people's tribunal meeting in New York before 500 witnesses, found U.S. and NATO leaders guilty of war crimes against Yugoslavia in the March 24 to June 10, 1999, "humanitarian" attack on that country.
As for Clark's reputation among the rank and file in our military establishment, the highly decorated and straight-talking Col. David Hackworth has written that Clark is "known by those who've served with him as the 'Ultimate Perfumed Prince.' (He) is far more comfortable in a drawing room discussing political theories than hunkering down in the trenches where bullets fly and soldiers die."
And we haven't even scratched the surface in discussing Clark's idealization of the Powell Doctrine, which led to NATO forces dropping tons of depleted uranium bombs on Kosovo, creating widespread civilian sickness as a result of contamination associated with DU.
http://www.commondreams.org/headlines/060700-02.htmAmnesty records that NATO aircraft flew 10,484 strike missions over Serbia and that Serbian statistics of civilian deaths in NATO raids range from 400-600 up to 1,500. It specifically condemns NATO for an attack on a bridge at Varvarin on 30 May last year, which killed at least 11 civilians. "NATO forces failed to suspend their attack after it was evident that they had struck civilians," Amnesty says.
When it attacked convoys of Albanian refugees near Djakovica on 14 April and in Korisa on 13 May, "NATO failed to take necessary precautions to minimise civilian casualties".
The report says NATO repeatedly gave priority to pilots' safety at the cost of civilian lives. In several investigations of civilian deaths, Amnesty quotes from reports in The Independent, including an investigation into the bombing of a hospital at Surdulica on 31 May. The Independent disclosed in November that Serb soldiers were sheltering on the ground floor of the hospital when it was bombed but that all the casualties were civilian refugees living on the upper floors.
Amnesty says: "If NATO intentionally bombed the hospital complex because it believed it was housing soldiers, it may well have violated the laws of war. According to Article 50(3) of Protocol 1,
'the presence within the civilian population of individuals who do not come within the definition of civilians does not deprive the population of its civilian character'.
"The hospital complex was clearly a civilian object with a large civilian population, the presence of soldiers would not have deprived the civilians or the hospital compound of their protected status." Some of Amnesty's harshest criticism is directed at the 23 April bombing of Serb television headquarters. "General Wesley Clark has stated, 'We knew when we struck that there would be alternate means of getting the Serb Television. There's no single switch to turn off everything but we thought it was a good move to strike it, and the political leadership agreed with us.'
"In other words, NATO deliberately attacked a civilian object, killing 16 civilians, for the purpose of disrupting Serb television broadcasts in the middle of the night for approximately three hours. It is hard to see how this can be consistent with the rule of proportionality."