Who Needs NATO?

• Author: FISK, ROBERT
• Position: NATO-Yugoslavia conflict

How much longer do we have to endure the folly of NATO's war in the Balkans? In its first fifty days, the Atlantic alliance failed in everything it set out to do. It failed to protect the Kosovo Albanians from Serbian war crimes. It failed to cow Slobodan Milosevic. It failed to force the withdrawal of Serb troops from Kosovo. It broke international law in attacking a sovereign state without seeking a U.N. mandate. It killed hundreds of innocent Serb civilians--in our name, of course--while being too cowardly to risk a single NATO life in defense of the poor and the weak for whom it meretriciously claimed to be fighting. NATO's war cannot even be regarded as a mistake; it is a criminal act.

It is, of course, now part of the mantra of all criticism of NATO that we must mention Serb wickedness in Kosovo. So here we go. Yes, dreadful, wicked deeds--atrocities would not be a strong enough word for it--have gone on in Kosovo: mass executions, rape, dispossession, "ethnic cleansing," the murder of intellectuals. Some of NATO's propaganda program has done more to cover up such villainy than disclose it.

And, as we all know, the dozens of Kosovo Albanians massacred on the road to Prizren were slaughtered by NATO--not by the Serbs, as NATO originally claimed. But I have seen with my own eyes--traveling under the NATO bombardment--the house-burning in Kosovo and the Albanians awaiting dispossession in their villages.

But back to the subject--and perhaps my first question should be put a little more boldly. Not: "How much longer do we have to endure this stupid, hopeless, cowardly war?" but: "How much longer do we have to endure NATO? How soon can this vicious American-run organization be deconstructed and politically `degraded,' its pontificating generals put back in their boxes with their mortuary language of `in-theater assets' and `collateral damage'?"

And how soon will Britain's own compassionate, socialist liberal leaders realize that they are not fighting a replay of the Second World War nor striking a blow for a new value-rich millennium? In Middle East wars, I've always known when a side was losing--it came when its leaders started to complain that journalists were not being fair to their titanic struggle for freedom/democracy/human rights/sovereignty/soul. And Tony Blair has started the whining. After fifty days of television coverage soaked in NATO propaganda, after weeks of NATO officials being questioned by sheep-like journalists, our...