Salon.com > David Rieff

Love-bombing bin Laden

Sat, 20 Oct 2001 02:21:00 +0000

On Telegraph Avenue in Berkeley, near the Sather Gate entrance to the University of California campus, hawkers sell a T-Shirt adorned with a hammer and sickle and with the legend, "People's Republic of Berkeley." In the past, that seemed like a joke -- an ironic reference to the kind of fanatical 1960s radicalism that no longer held sway even in Berkeley. But apparently, the T-shirt is a more accurate description of reality in the nation's premier university town than anyone could have imagined. It is a satirist's dream and must be any sensible Berkeleyite's nightmare: Five weeks after the terrorist attack on the World Trade Center and little more than a week after the United States began its retaliatory attacks on Afghanistan and on Osama bin Laden's al-Qaida network, the Berkeley City Council called for the United States to stop fighting.

Enough ill can never be said about the depraved rationalizations of the antiwar faction with regard to the Sept. 11 attacks -- rationalizations that can be summed up as arguing that while the U.S. did not deserve to be struck so horribly by terrorism, the complaints that terrorists have about U.S. policy are absolutely correct. The movie director Oliver Stone spoke for far too many American leftists at a recent New York Film Festival panel when he referred to Sept. 11 as a "revolt," and suggested that the anti-globalization movement would soon make common cause with it.

There is no alternative to war

Wed, 26 Sep 2001 02:37:00 +0000

We will resume our normal lives, but the fear will not go away. The airliner as bomb, the bomb in the stadium, the sarin gas in the subway: These are the prospects that will haunt us. Such thoughts will be paranoid, of course, and somewhat self-indulgent. Obviously most people will live out their lives with no more contact with terrorism than the horrific images they see on their television sets. But it will be enough.

The terrorists chose their targets well when they struck on Sept. 11, 2001. By destroying the symbolic center of international capitalism -- the World Trade Center; what name could be more alluring if your aim was to bring globalization to its knees? -- and the military command center of the most powerful nation in the world, the reality that no person, no place and no institution is beyond the terrorists' reach was driven. It will not be forgotten in the lifetime of anyone alive when the towers fell, whatever the outcome of the war against terrorism to which the United States has committed itself.

Congo needs help, not Western posturing

Mon, 08 May 2000 16:00:00 +0000

Washington has taken not one but several contradictory approaches to the interrelated crises now unfolding in Rwanda, Burundi and the Democratic Republic of Congo -- that tragedy masquerading as a country that was formerly known as Zaire. Policymakers agree that something needs to be done about the first general war in Africa since decolonization in the late 1950s and early 1960s, but none of the approaches that have been proposed seems very promising. Most seem like the triumph of hope over experience.

Last week four U.N. peacekeepers were killed in Sierra Leone, and more than 300 were taken hostage by revolutionary forces. They were part of a mission that was supposed to be a dry run for a U.N. deployment in the Congo -- its outcome only shows how dangerous wishful thinking can be.

Until recently, the confusions of U.S. policy didn't matter all that much. For all the pious talk to the contrary, the great powers and the United Nations were doing little to try to stop the fighting. Peacekeeping was correctly viewed as inappropriate in the context of African wars, where there was no peace to keep.

Who will save Albania?

Mon, 24 May 1999 16:00:00 +0000

The Kosovo crisis is proof, as if proof were needed, of the old adage that the road to hell is paved with good intentions. Whatever the outcome of the NATO bombing campaign, post-war Kosovo will have been left in ruins, its people murdered by the thousands and deported by the hundreds of thousands, and the entire south Balkans region will be both economically devastated and in political turmoil. And of all the countries that are going to need global help to recover from this crisis, Albania may be worst off.

Albania will have a lot of competition, of course. The arrival of so many Kosovar refugees in Macedonia, for instance, has destabilized the fragile ethnic and political balance there. The destruction of the economic infrastructure of Serbia and the interdiction of vital commerce along the Danube river is already having a disastrous effect on Bulgaria and a considerable one on Romania, Greece and, as if they needed further economic bad news, Russia and Ukraine. The sense that the whole area is unsafe will gravely harm the tourist revenues expected by Croatia, whose fragile economic recovery depends on them, and even affect Greece.

Will Macedonia unravel?

Wed, 05 May 1999 16:00:00 +0000

Throughout the Bosnian war, European and American policy makers trying to resolve the conflict were at least as worried about the possibility of the fighting spreading south to Kosovo and Macedonia as they were about securing a peace agreement. I remember at the height of the siege of Sarajevo in 1993 being told by a senior American official that "what's going on here is going to look like a walk in the park if things blow up down there."

It seemed like a callous remark at the time, and no doubt in human terms it was. But Slobodan Milosevic's "ethnic cleansing" of Kosovo, and NATO's sluggish and ham-fisted response to it, has shown how well-founded the anxieties of Western diplomats were. The long-anticipated slide into general war in the south Balkans, that chronicle of death foretold, could not only destroy what is left of the former Yugoslavia, but destabilize Greece and Turkey as well. We are moving rapidly from human catastrophe -- first of the Bosnian Muslims and now of the Albanian Kosovars -- toward political apocalypse. And nowhere is this clearer than in Macedonia.

The bleak gets bleaker

Wed, 07 Apr 1999 09:15:00 +0000

Few operations in modern military history have produced so many unintended and, in some instances at least, disastrous consequences so quickly as Operation Allied Force, NATO's long-overdue attempt to confront and subdue Slobodan Milosevic's Yugoslavia. Unfortunately, this should not have come as a surprise. If ever there was a case of the road to hell being paved with good intentions, it is Operation Allied Force. In the name of preventing a great crime -- the mass murder and forcible expulsion of the Kosovar Albanians -- the West has given an extraordinary demonstration of its own impotence. And there is no end, at least no good end, in sight.

In fairness, the NATO air campaign was never, even in the minds of its planners, anything more than the best of a series of terrible options. A month before Operation Allied Force was launched, the NATO secretary-general, Javier Solana, had warned President Clinton and the other Western political leaders that the Yugoslav army and police were preparing a campaign of "ethnic cleansing" in Kosovo on a level that had not been seen since Serbian forces expelled the majority of the Muslim population from northern and eastern Bosnia in 1992 and 1993. NATO military planners could only restate the obvious -- that the only way to insure that the Kosovar Albanians were not murdered or driven from their homes was a full-scale ground assault on the Serbs by NATO forces.