"Superpower Vulnerability"
Henry C.K. Liu
[The author notes that "this article was rejected by Asia Times without explanation."]
That the US is now the world’s sole remaining superpower is above challenge. This unchallenged status has affected US approach to formulating foreign and domestic policies in the post-Cold War era. In foreign policy, the US has been operating on the basis that its national values have been validated by triumph in the Cold War and that its resultant sole superpower status now earns it both the moral right and the military means to spread such values over the whole world. Resistance to such self-righteous values is now deemed evil by US moral imperialism, in need of elimination not by persuasion but by force. This new approach has made the world less safe than it was during the Cold War, the end of which briefly entertained a false hope for a new age in which a world with only one superpower could thereafter live without war, hot or cold. Instead, the world has been plunged into successive holy wars of imperialistic moral conquest by the sole remaining superpower, bringing escalating terrorist attacks onto the US homeland. The impact on domestic policy from terrorist threats has in turn been the wholesale suspension of civil liberties in the name of homeland security.
Such holy wars of moral imperialism cannot be blamed entirely on neo-conservatives in the second Bush administration. While the two wars on Iraq were initiated by the two pere et cie Bush administrations that sandwiched eight years of Clinton rule, the Bosnia and Kosovo wars were the handiwork of Clinton administration neo-liberals. The faith-based foreign policy of George W Bush echoes the value-based interests of the foreign policy of Bill Clinton, such as the grandiose aim of enlarging democracy by force around the world and preventing mass starvation and ethnic genocide by spilling more blood.
The US under Clinton sent troops into Bosnia with a host of policy delusions, such as revitalizing an outmoded NATO to perpetuate European security dependence on the US, ending a local war that could spill beyond the borders of Croatia and Serbia, establishing a closer relationship with the Russian military, demonstrating that the US is willing to use its super military power to spread its national values overseas even though the security of the US was not threatened and neutralizing domestic criticism of amorality in a foreign policy based of realpolitik. The wary US military demanded and received clear rules of engagement towards these flamboyant political objectives, allowing soldiers who were attacked, or threatened with attack, field authority to respond with lethal force quickly and massively; exempting the military from having to perform jobs of refugee resettlement, monitoring elections, controlling civilian traffic, supplying food, clothing, fuel or other basic needs to the civilian population; no hard time lines for moving forces into Bosnia, hence allowing the military to enter Bosnia slowly with deliberation and in the safest possible way; committing to a clearly-defined departure date (December 1996) for military forces; limiting the mission to peacekeeping and not peace enforcement and if there were major attacks on the Implementation Force, US forces would withdraw; a solid understanding that “mission creep” would be firmly resisted; provision of the best of the newest equipment to US forces on the ground in the air and on the sea and the State department arrangement for military cooperation from neighboring states, especially Hungary, Albania, Croatia, Serbia. In fact, the military served notice that it was the wrong tool for achieving the administration’s limited-war political objectives. It was a perfectly appropriate position. The US military is arguably the best in the world, best led, best equipped and best trained. But its performance and morale are steadily eroded by assignments to missions that are best handled by non-military means. When a well-oiled machine is use inappropriately, both the machine and the task suffer.
The experience in Bosnia, a nation which existed only in the imagination of US ideologue policymakers, should have served as a clear warning for Kosovo and Iraq. It was Bosnia that “animated our policy towards Kosovo,” Nicholas Burns, US ambassador to Greece, told Doug Bandow, Senior Fellow at the conservative Cato Institute. Even though the US spent $12 billion and occupied Bosnia for more than three years, Clinton’s arm-twisting Dayton scheme was a policy failure. To this date, nationalist Serbs continue to dominate local politics and refugees are not returning home. There is little home-grown economic growth. The kind of democracy being introduced by the US “more represents Boss Tweed than George Washington” as the US and its NATO allies force Bosnians to live under a government that represents none of them. Internecine local conflicts always have a longevity that exceeds US political attention span.
Bandow testified on March 10, 1999 before the House International Relations Committee Hearing on “The US Role in Kosovo” that the Clinton administration attempted to impose “an artificial settlement in Kosovo with little chance of genuine acceptance by either side.” A US diplomat in Belgrade was reported to have said: "If you're a Serb, hell yes the KLA [Kosovo Liberation Army] is a terrorist organization." Even moderate ethnic Albanians admit that the KLA had targeted Serb policemen and other government employees, any Serbs viewed as abusing Kosovars, as well as Albanian collaborators. Each cycle of violence spawned more deadly violence. Belgrade understandably accused the US of aiding and abetting terrorists in Kosovo directly but remotely from Washington.
