07/07/15 – David Gibbs – The Scott Horton Show

Yeah, check it out.
Y'all want to win a free vacation to the jungles of Costa Rica this summer and help support the Scott Horton Show?
You can.
Joshua Hughes, peace activist and permaculturalist, runs Verde Energia Pacifica, an intentional community in the mountains of Llanes de Periscal, Costa Rica, and he's offered a raffle off a week's stay to listeners of this show.
Airfare is on you, but transportation to and from the airport, as well as a seven-day stay for you and a guest in your own private house with three meals a day is covered.
You can learn and practice some skills, or just go for a swim in the river, pool, or waterfall, walk jungle trails, enjoy the views, do yoga or dance in the studio, make art, play music, check out a local soccer game, or simply relax in a hammock by the river and read.
Raffle tickets are just $50.
Stop by scotthorton.org slash raffle for details, and anyone who enters will get half off on any future stay down there. scotthorton.org slash raffle.
Alright y'all, welcome back.
Just in time.
Cutting it close here.
Alright you guys, so it's my show, the Scott Horton Show.
I'm on the Liberty Radio Network live here weekdays from noon to 2 p.m.
Eastern, and next up is David Gibbs, and he wrote this article in jacobinmag.com, the Srebrenica precedent.
Oh man, here I go trying to say it.
Usually I can say it.
Now I'm live on the radio, so I can't.
Srebrenica massacre was 20 years ago, and he says here, was a tragic event, but for the last 20 years it's been used to justify more war and U.S. intervention.
Welcome to the show, David.
How are you?
Fine, thank you for having me.
Good, good.
Very happy to have you on the show here, and I really appreciate this article.
I was too young and not paying attention at the time of this war.
I was paying attention by the time of Kosovo in 99, but most of this went by me, and it's such a complicated story, and I have to tell you, I actually have a couple of books about it that I never got around to reading, and it's always just been kind of a blank spot in my education here about what really led to the war, the Bosnia war in the early 1990s, and not just, oh well, Yugoslavia broke up and then everybody started killing everybody and this kind of stuff, but you really take us through step by step what really happened and what could have been if America hadn't screwed it up and all that, so could you please tell that story to the people here?
Well, the Yugoslav breakup, I would say was obviously very complicated, but I think the key one was that you had a sort of economic collapse in the 1980s in a country that had been relatively successful, actually.
It was ethnically heterogeneous.
No ethnic group really dominated Yugoslavia, but as Communism was sort of losing credibility, and Yugoslavia was doing so in the context of an economic depression, the ethnic groups began sort of engaging in kind of a pathological competition for power, and basically all the major ethnic groups adopted essentially aggressive and kind of racist policies towards each other, leading to the breakup of the country and a civil war.
The Serbs had the advantage of getting most of the weapons in the context of the breakup, and so they did engage in a kind of aggressive war against the other ethnic groups, but none of the ethnic groups behaved especially well.
I think what you had was a kind of lobby that went on that was initially Croatians and Bosnian Muslims that hired lobby groups and tried to create the impression that what was going on in Yugoslavia was not just a civil war with massacres, but it was a genocide similar to what the Nazis were doing, a Holocaust, a replay of World War II, which it wasn't.
That was a gross exaggeration, but nobody knew anything about Yugoslavia, and so quickly a lot of people I think seized upon this as a great moral crusade, and it became a kind of religious fervor associated with the moral crusade.
That was phase one.
Phase two, if you had the United States, which was looking for a new justification for U.S. power after the end of the Cold War, and didn't quite know where to go, and found all of a sudden this very sensational war going on in Yugoslavia, and I think it was included in power circles in Washington and also in Brussels for NATO.
This would be an ideal context in which to re-justify U.S. and NATO power for the post-Cold War era.
In other words, NATO would no longer fight the Soviet Union, which didn't exist anymore, but NATO would now become a genocide prevention enterprise.
I think that's how it's widely seen by many now, as a genocide prevention enterprise, and it was the war in the Balkans, and particularly the massacre at Srebrenica in 1995, that gave everybody that impression.
And people might not remember now, but in the 90s it really was kind of a discussion and a controversy whether they were going to have an EU army that would be based, I guess, mostly on the Germans and the French together, and maybe with the British, but the British said, no, no, we've got to keep America in, it's all about NATO, we don't want a separate EU army.
This was a real controversy over which way it was going to go back then.
That's another angle to this, is that in the 1990s, there was a real effort by the Europeans, led by the Germans and the French, to try and adopt an independent foreign policy, including an independent military policy, that would, to some extent, be a check on American unilateralism.
And that was seen very dimly in Washington, and there was an effort to try and humiliate the Europeans, and to undermine any effort they would make at achieving independence.
Yugoslavia proved to be the arena of the US-European competition.
You see, the US wanted to weaken the EU, but strengthen NATO.
NATO was presented as an alternative, really, to, as a locus of power in Europe to the EU.
And again, that played out in the Yugoslav context.
Do you want to ask a question, or should I go on with that?
Well, if you could, can we rewind a little bit to the split between the Bosnian Muslims, the Serbs, and the Croats on the ground there?
Because the way you described it, they had a deal.
They were working a deal where...
Well, go ahead.
Well, what I find very disturbing about the Bosnia case, and the Srebrenica case, is it's always presented as an iconic event that justifies, first of all, the use of NATO force, that you always have to use force to prevent human rights abuses, including genocide.
But simultaneously, you should forego diplomatic efforts to settle conflicts, because that shows lack of moral fiber.
It's appeasement, and it's a claim that the Europeans and the United Nations were appeasing the Serbs too long.
And that's just not really accurate.
The fact of the matter is, there probably could have been a diplomatic settlement of the Bosnian war.
The whole war probably could have been prevented.
The European Union had a preliminary plan for decentralizing power in Bosnia, that was accepted by all the major ethnic groups of Bosnia, and probably would have prevented the war from even occurring in the first place.
And the main thing that prevented this plan from going into effect was that, on instructions from Washington, the U.S. Ambassador to Yugoslavia, Warren Zimmerman, urged the Bosnian Muslim side, and also it would seem the Croats, to renege on their commitments, and not to go along with the plan.
But I guess the implication that the United States would support them in any forthcoming war, and that torpedoed the whole peace plan, and war followed very soon.
And so I think, you know, the main lesson from this is that diplomacy, rather than warfare, is a better way of dealing with these types of ethnic conflicts.
But that's not the lesson people have learned.
Well, there's a huge lesson there about what they don't tell us about what's going on in the world when they start these wars, too.
I mean, the way that you portray this, where the Muslims and the Croats, they had the coalition and the majority, but the Serbs, the odd men out, they were happy with the deal anyway, because it provided them with so much autonomy that they didn't mind so much being the minority-ruled party.
I mean, this is paradise for the breakup of a multi-ethnic state along lines like this.
This is the best bet you could have possibly dreamed of, and America came in and screwed it up.
I think it's basically accurate that, in essence, the Serbs were getting what they wanted, at least at that point in time.
And there's really no evidence that they were negotiating in bad faith or that they were bent on war at this point in time.
So, yes, I would agree with that assessment.
I mean, that's just amazing, and that's the part of the narrative that I never, no one ever really explained.
Okay, here was the deal.
It's split in three parts.
They had a negotiation.
The EU brokered it.
It was going to be these two were going to be the coalition.
The odd men out were cool with it and celebrated.
Their terrible later war criminal leaders celebrated this great deal was going to hold Bosnia together, but then America wanted to keep the European army down and NATO up and the U.S. in and the American taxpayers on the line, and so they ruined it and got a bunch of people killed and then a bunch more mess.
And more details after this.
Hey, y'all, guess what?
You can now order transcripts of any interview I've done for the incredibly reasonable price of two and a half bucks each.
Listen, finding a good transcriptionist is near impossible, but I've got one now.
Just go to Scott Horton dot org slash transcripts, enter the name and date of the interview you want written up, click the PayPal button, and I'll have it in your email in 72 hours max.
You don't need a PayPal account to do this.
Man, I'm really going to have to learn how to talk more good.
That's Scott Horton dot org slash transcripts.
All right, guys.
So welcome back to the show.
The Sabra needs a Serber needs a precedent.
It's at Jacobin mag dot com.
The author is David Gibbs.
And so we're going back to 1992, I guess it is.
The Europeans had brokered a deal.
The Americans came and screwed it up in order to maintain their own interest in the region.
A terrible war broke out.
I'm not sure how many thousands of people were killed.
I guess you can feel some hundred thousand died.
One hundred thousand people were killed.
Right.
And then came the Dayton Accords, which everybody likes to pat themselves on the back and say, oh, look, us Americans brought peace.
When, as you explain, is the Americans war in the first place, in a sense, in a large sense.
In fact, you you elaborate in the article how NATO really backed the Croat and and Muslim armies against the Serbs there for a long time and including Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and them who were fighting with the Muslims at the time.
And then and then.
But the point being, at Dayton, and this is the one thing I've actually been able to learn about this complicated mess in all these years, is that at Dayton, the way Nebojsa mileage puts it is Holbrook came and took a black magic marker and drew hard international borders where there had been kind of these softer lines between the different opposing sides.
And what that meant was you had people of all different ethnic and religious factions who were, quote, stuck on the wrong side of the line and had to get to the other side before they got killed.
And so that just led to a whole new round of violence and ethnic cleansing after that.
Well, that's right.
Basically, you know, in the context of the Bosnia war, the Serbs undoubtedly were the aggressors most of the time.
On the other hand, the Bosnians and the Croats also committed atrocities, including some very significant atrocities, fewer than the ones the Serbs committed, but significant all the same.
That is a forgotten aspect of this episode.
And after Dayton Accords occurred, there was I should have the Dayton Accords were preceded by ground offensives by Croatian and Bosnian troops, both in the Republic of Croatia and also in Bosnia, directly supported by the U.S. that resulted in very substantial ethnic cleansing and atrocities against civilians.
And then after the Dayton Accords occurred, there was another round of ethnic cleansing and about 100,000 people were ethnically cleansed.
As far as I could tell, NATO did little or nothing to stop it, and it escaped the tension of, you know, world public opinion.
And so, you know, the legacy of the Dayton Accords is viewed as this wonderful accomplishment that ended the war, but I think that ignores two things.
One is a very similar agreement could have been achieved three and a half years before, as the Europeans proposed, and would have prevented the war in the first place, but the U.S. stopped it.
But also, it was done at the cost of some of the largest rounds of ethnic cleansing the war had seen done with U.S. support that helped lay the groundwork for Dayton.
And so the Dayton legacy is far less positive, I think, than it's often presented as being.
Yeah, sure sounds like it.
All right.
So now two big subjects still here to cover the massacre itself, and then the aftermath, as you do such a great job explaining in here the precedent set.
So first of all, what happened with the massacre there 20 years ago?
Well, it seems very well documented, and the basic facts aren't in dispute.
What happened was that the Bosnian government forces withdrew their main body of defenders from Srebrenica, and there are circumstances that are still mysterious, and strongly suggest, at least, that the Bosnian government may have made a decision to let the city fall as part of their overall strategy, which was to deliberately expose their own civilians to atrocities in order to increase international outrage and likelihood of intervention.
The Serbs undoubtedly were the main perpetrators, and they bear the overwhelming responsibility for the massacre, but the Bosnian government is not altogether innocent here, and they very likely contributed to it as well by not defending their own city.
In any case, the Serbs attacked the city, which was largely undefended.
They unexpectedly overran it, and then they immediately began undertaking mass atrocities.
They expelled the women and children, for the most part, and then rounded up thousands of males over the age of 16, and began executing them, executing around 8,000 males over the age of 16, which undoubtedly is a terrible war crime, and one that should be punished.
It's been called genocide, and I find that problematic.
I should say that a lot of legal experts find it problematic.
William Schabas of the International Association of Genocide Scholars has questioned it.
Robert Hayden at the University of Pittsburgh has questioned it.
There are many people who have questioned the designation of it as genocide.
It's definitely a major war crime.
That's not disputable, but is it genocide on the level of, say, Auschwitz and Treblinka?
I think there's a lot of controversy about that particular issue.
In any case, that is what happened at Treblinka.
Well, pardon me.
Before that, as far as the controversy of what it means, you talk about this in the article, and pretty frankly here, there's a difference between killing millions of people, at least attempting to eradicate an entire type of person off the planet, an ethnicity or nationality or religious group or something, compared to some real bad, as you say, absolute war crimes, horrible massacre.
There's not an apologetic word for it, other than it's just not multiplied by 50,000.
If it was, then we'd be having a different discussion, maybe.
I have a background as an Africanist, and I began my career studying the Democratic Republic of the Congo.
In the same period, the Congo had a war that killed 4 to 5 million people, which is around 50 times the total number of people killed in Bosnia.
It just seems very arbitrary to me that somehow people focused with this laser-like focus on a single war that, by African standards, would have been considered a medium-sized war.
The comparison people like to make is the genocide against the Jews in World War II, but it's really not an appropriate comparison.
In the areas under Axis control, the vast majority of the Jews were killed off systematically, whereas the percentage of people killed by the Serbs was much smaller than that.
In my view, nowhere near what would be required to meet the level of a genocide, so I've always found this designation of genocide a very problematic one, but it serves a political purpose, which is it helps to justify not only U.S. policy in Bosnia, but all U.S. intervention afterwards as a genocide prevention program that's elevated to the level of high principle rather than real politique.
That's an enormous advantage if you're an interventionist-powered.
I think that's a significant factor in why this has been viewed as a genocide, as opposed to a war crime.
You can see the way they've ratcheted down the level of evidence required, where Bill Clinton pretended that 100,000 Kosovar Albanians had been killed in order to justify starting that war in 1999.
Obama, fast forward to 2011, he pretends that 100,000 people might be killed if we don't intervene now, and that's a good enough reason not to intervene in one country invading another, which maybe they could invoke some part of the U.N. charter, but this is a civil war.
That's none of the U.N. or America's legal business as far as legal cover goes.
You're touching on how this was used, I think, to justify American power and American intervention.
I would say that's the critical factor of interest to me here, which is how this war was simplified, in terms of people's understanding of the war, into a simple villains and victims narrative that doesn't entirely fit the facts, and one where intervention saved the day and if anything, caved in too late.
It's been used to justify American intervention in Kosovo.
We needed to do it to prevent another Srebrenica.
It was, to some extent, done to justify the U.S. war in Iraq.
Christopher Hitchens openly said that he supported the war because it prevented another Srebrenica.
In Libya, it was invoked.
In Syria, it's been invoked.
Every time there's a call for intervention, it seems the Srebrenica precedent is invoked.
I think that's the most pernicious feature of this, that it's a justification for more war and ignoring all the enormous damage that war does to lives.
I think that's the main legacy of this, is that they elevated an atrocity into an iconic event as a justification for war intervention by distorting the facts.
Right.
Yeah, exactly.
If you want to talk about modern precedents, how about Fallujah 1 and 2 in 2004?
How about the slaughter of Ramadi or whatever?
Pick.
This is why I remember talking to Juan Cole in 2011, and he's all gung-ho for the war in Libya.
I'm going, hey, if you want to lend moral support to the jihadis in Libya, I guess go ahead, but you want the American empire to get involved in Libya after what just happened in Iraq?
Are you kidding?
I guess wishes come true, dreams come true, to a certain extent, except how many Srebrenicas have we had since then in Libya?
Thank God they're not using as an excuse to reinvade that place yet, but important point.
Anyway, Jacobin Mag for David Gibbs, the Srebrenica precedent.
Thanks.
Great work.
Appreciate the interview.
Thank you very much.
You hate government?
One of them libertarian types?
Maybe you just can't stand the president, gun grabbers, or war mongers.
Me too.
That's why I invented libertystickers.com.
Well, Rick owns it now, and I didn't make up all of them, but still, if you're driving around and want to tell everyone else how wrong their politics are, there's only one place to go.
Libertystickers.com has got your bumper covered.
Left, right, libertarian, empire, police, state, founders, quote, central banking.
Yes, bumper stickers about central banking.
Lots of them.
And, well, everything that matters.
Libertystickers.com.
Everyone else's stickers suck.
This part of the Scott Horton Show is sponsored by audible.com.
And right now, if you go to audibletrial.com slash scotthortonshow, you can get your first audio book for free.
Of course, I'm recommending Michael Swanson's book, The War State, The Cold War Origins of the Military Industrial Complex and the Power Elite.
Maybe you've already bought The War State in paperback, but you just can't find the time to read it.
Well, now you can listen while you're out marching around.
Get the free audio book of The War State by Michael Swanson, produced by Listen and Think Audio at audibletrial.com slash scotthortonshow.
Hey, all.
Scott here.
If you're like me, you need coffee.
Lots of it.
And you probably prefer it tastes good, too.
Well, let me tell you about Darren's Coffee Company at darrenscoffee.com.
Darren Marion is a natural entrepreneur who decided to leave his corporate job and strike out on his own, making great coffee.
And Darren's Coffee is now delivering right to your door.
Darren gets his beans direct from farmers around the world, all specialty, premium grade with no filler.
Hey, the man just wants everyone to have a chance to taste this great coffee.
Darren's Coffee.com.
Use promo code Scott and get free shipping.
Darren's Coffee.com.