Cracking the Poise

Warren Christopher, former U.S. Secretary of State, passed away yesterday at the age of 85. According to the Washington Post obituary:

“Writers and commentators characterized him as dour, attentive to detail, patient, steady and poised, but rarely, if ever, charismatic. Clinton once joked that Mr. Christopher was “the only man ever to eat presidential M&Ms with a knife and fork.” No one was surprised when, on an official stopover in Ireland, he ordered Irish coffee, decaffeinated and without alcohol.”

Reading this, I thought I remembered something I'd read in Richard Holbrooke's memoirs, way back in 1999. So I dug through my ancient notes, and sure enough, there it was: the one time Christopher's poise cracked.

In Chapter 18 of “To End A War,” describing the 1995 peace talks in Dayton, Ohio, there is a point where the Americans' eagerness to help the “Bosnians" (Muslims) backfires. Having secured 55% percent of the territory for the Muslim-Croat Federation, they had to cede some land back to the Serbs, to conform to their own principle of splitting the country 51/49. In marathon talks lasting late into the night, Haris Silajdzic, Izetbegovic's foreign minister, ceded back some “worthless land” (Holbrooke's words) to the Serb Republic. It was 4 AM, and the deal seemed done. Except for one tiny little detail - all the land Silajdzic ceded was in Croat hands. When Tudjman's delegation saw the map, they went ballistic. Holbrooke describes the situation:

“Izetbegovic still had not said a word. I turned to him, fearing his response, ‘What do you think, Mr. President? Can we finish the negotiation right now?’
His answer sealed the long day. ‘I cannot accept this agreement,’ he said in a low voice, in English.
‘What did you say?’ Christopher asked, in astonishment.
More loudly: ‘I cannot accept this agreement.’”

The Americans were exasperated.

“'Do you think Izetbegovic even wants a deal? Carl [Bildt, Swedish diplomat] asked. It was a question that Warren Christopher had also been asking. ‘I’m never quite sure,’ I replied... Chris Hill, normally highly supportive of the Bosnians, exploded in momentary anger and frustration. ‘These people are impossible to help,’ he said. It was a telling statement from a man who had devoted years of his life to the search for ways to help create a Bosnian state.”(emphasis added)

The Serbs were willing to accept “rocks, swamps, hills – anything, as long as it gets us to 51-49.” Tudjman offered to contribute 75% of the retro-ceded land, but the Muslims had to give something.

“To our consternation, Izetbegovic refused to budge. While Silajdzic sat silent, Sacirbey argued that the Croat position was still unfair. And, to Christopher’s amazement, Izetbegovic began talking again about Brcko, Srebrenica and Zepa. We returned to my rooms, where Christopher expressed himself in unusually vivid terms on the performance we had just witnessed.”(emphasis added)

Sic Transit Holbrooke

It is an ancient Roman custom to speak no ill of the dead. Not being Roman, I don't feel bound by it. I shall speak truthfully instead.

Richard Holbrooke - who died yesterday, at age 69, of a ruptured aorta - was somewhat of a symbol of this age: a diplomat who took pride in his absence of tact. His job was to "lie for his country" - and did he ever! But he also enjoyed killing, cheating and stealing. This is the man who urged his superiors to "give us bombs for peace" (NATO intervention in Bosnia in 1995); who admitted in his own memoirs that he tried to swindle the president of Serbia during the Bosnia peace talks; and who took up investment banking when on sabbaticals from diplomacy (Credit Suisse, Lehman Brothers). Ironically, it was the latter that got him in the only spot of trouble in his career, when he had to settle charges of ethical violations before becoming Empire's ambassador to the UN.

Yes, he ended the Bosnian War - on America's terms, and only after Washington sabotaged every attempt to end it any other way. He then spent years on trying to undermine and destroy the very treaty he helped broker.

In 1998, he famously sat down with the KLA - shadowy militants his colleague Robert Gelbard had labeled a "terrorist organization". The photo of the shoeless Holbrooke sitting on the floor next to the bearded (and booted) KLA terrorist went around the world.



Later he told TIME magazine that he had been "furious". If he was, it never showed. He went to Belgrade as the Emperor's envoy again, and tried to repeat his 1995 performance. He bought the KLA three months to prepare for the coming NATO attack and set up the Racak "massacre," a pretext for it. But when the time came to try and bully Serbia into accepting the so-called Rambouillet Agreement, it was Holbrooke's boss, Madeleine Albright, who took over the limelight.

Holbrooke hitched his diplomatic career horse to John Kerry's wagon in 2004 and Hillary Clinton's in 2008. As a result, he never became the Secretary of State. He would eventually become Emperor Obama's special envoy for Afghanistan and Pakistan. Before that, he would pontificate once a month from the pages of the Washington Post, a newspaper that's never seen a Russian or a Serb it did not love to hate - unless the said Russian or Serb did Empire's bidding without a second thought; then he merely could not be trusted.

In one such column, in July 2008, gloating over the arrest of former Bosnian Serb president Radovan Karadzic, (in a piece called "The Face of Evil" no less), Holbrooke put forth at least four verifiable lies:
- that the war "had already taken the lives of nearly 300,000 people";
- that his colleagues, Bob Frasure, Joe Kruzel and Nelson Drew traveled through "sniper-filled, Serbian-controlled territory" when their vehicle slid off the road into a mine-filled ravine;
- that his meeting with Karadzic in Belgrade "resulted in the lifting of the siege of Sarajevo," and
- that Serbian PM Zoran Djindjic was assassinated in 2003 "as a direct result of his courage in arresting Milosevic and sending him to The Hague in 2001."

When I challenged those lies, I called Holbrooke a "sanctimonious, uncouth, arrogant, corrupt slimebucket," and I stand by that assessment. Yet I've always had a measure of respect for him due to one thing, and one thing only. He was arrogant enough to eschew hiding what he thought and felt. This is why his 1998 memoir, "To End A War," is an invaluable source in understanding his mind, and the motives of Imperial diplomacy.

By way of example, he quoted a note Robert Frasure had slipped to him during a meeting in Zagreb:

Dick: We "hired" these guys to be our junkyard dogs because we were desperate. We need to try to "control" them. But it is no time to get squeamish about things.

Sure enough, Holbrooke was not squeamish at all. If it took the establishment of a fundamentalist Islamic regime, a Nazi revival and the expulsion of half a million people to re-establish American hegemony in Europe and in the Balkans, so be it. Arrogance of power, or power of arrogance? He lived long enough to see that hegemony begin to crumble, though.

As someone who helped bring the American Empire into being, Richard Charles Albert Holbrooke was a perfect embodiment of the vices it extolled as virtues. Ultimately, his brand of bullying "diplomacy" did America and Americans no favors. Oderint dum metuant didn't work even for Caligula. It absolutely debased the country that claimed to stand for values and principles, then went around the world violating them. Holbrooke either never realized this, or refused to let it stop him.

May God, whom he had forsaken to serve the earthly power instead, have mercy on his soul.

Harping Has-Beens

What do Paddy Ashdown and Richard Holbrooke have in common? If you said "Serbophobia" that would be correct, though entirely too obvious. No, another thing they have in common is that Bosnia was the high point of their careers. Holbrooke had famously "negotiated" the peace agreement that ended the fighting in the 1992-1995 civil war (but not the war itself, which merely moved to the political sphere). Ashdown was the viceroy of Bosnia for three years, ruling the Balkans country like a personal fief.

After Bosnia, Holbrooke served for a while as the U.S. ambassador to the UN. He hoped to become Secretary of State in either the Gore or Kerry administration, but his hopes were foiled both times. He had gambled on Hillary Clinton, and lost. Though he still likes to pontificate in the U.S. press, Holbrooke is in effect a private citizen.

Ashdown was likewise spurned after his disastrous Bosnia reign. In what could be considered the ultimate humiliation for an aspiring colonial government, he was rejected out of hand by the Karzai regime as the proposed special envoy for Afghanistan. I'm not entirely sure what he's into these days, except that he's not involved with his former party, the Liberal Democrats. Since they got rid of Ashdown, they seem to be doing better than ever, by the way.

Now, Paddy has tried to raise a ruckus in the British media for several months now, claiming that the sky is falling in Bosnia and that the Empire needed to "do something" to stop the evil, genocidal Serbs hell-bent on destruction of that multi-ethnic paradise. After his first hysterical episode, back in July, Ian Banks demolished his argument and demonstrated that Ashdown was either clueless, or malicious. I'll say he's probably both.

Two days ago, Ashdown teamed up with Holbrooke, and once again they ranted, raved and railed against the evil Serbs threatening Bosnia, supposedly as proxies of the even eviler Russians, and "Europe" and the U.S. had to "do something" to stop it, or else. It's fact-free, Serbophobic, imperialistic rubbish, really, typical of those two.

Normally I would not give a flying rodent's posterior that two Serbophobic has-beens are polluting the press with their drivel. Most Balkans coverage is offal, really, and the latest Ashdown-Holbrooke oeuvre doesn't stand out in any way. However, their screed has resonated in the region and beyond; apparently, it was republished by the Muslim nationalist daily "Dnevni Avaz." At that point, it showed up on the radar of the local Reuters correspondent, so it made the wires. Somehow, in the process of quoting the opinions of two imperialist has-beens, they begin to sound like facts. Idiotic nonsense, such as the claim that Croats want a strong central government, or that Muslim leader Haris Silajdzic wants to "end ethnic division" (so that is how one spins "desires Muslim dominance" these days), was thus presented as self-evident truth.

The disturbing amount of attention and approval the Ashdown/Holbrooke philippic seems to have attracted suggests that the spirit of Empire is still alive and well in the West, even as the body of it is shrivels and dies from fatal financial disease. In truth, I would be a whole lot more alarmed if the Atlantic Empire and the EUSSR actually had the wherewithal to mess with Bosnia again, as they have done over the past twenty years or so. But it is no longer 1992, or 1995, or 2004. The Empire they helped create by lying through their teeth in and about Bosnia is finally collapsing under the weight other lies.

That isn't to say they can't try, if they come into positions of power once more. There's still a whole lot of potential for mischief in the Empire, and still entirely too many willing quislings in the Balkans who seem as oblivious to Empire's current condition as others were to the fate of the USSR in the early 1990s. Vigilance is definitely called for.

Still, I can't shake the impression that Dick and Paddy are just trying to bring back the good ol' days when they had their grubby little paws on the closest thing to absolute power any diplomat or politician had ever seen. I can certainly understand why they would want it back. But why should the rest of us give a damn?

The Real Face of Evil

Mark Twain once famously said, "It is better to keep your mouth shut and appear stupid than to open your mouth and remove all doubt."

Richard Holbrooke probably never read Twain, and even if he had, that would hardly stop him. The man who ended the Bosnian War on America's terms (after Washington sabotaged every attempt to end it any other way), known for a complete absence of tact and only a loose attachment to the truth, Holbrooke is somewhat of an idol to Clinton-era interventionists, some of whom have been reborn as Obamamaniacs.

Once a month, he pontificates from the pages of the Washington Post, a newspaper that's never seen a Russian or a Serb it did not love to hate (unless the said Russian or Serb did Empire's bidding without a second thought; then he merely could not be trusted). He used this month's opportunity to gloat over the capture of Radovan Karadžić, former leader of the Bosnian Serbs.

Now, I'll give Holbrooke this; he doesn't hide his Serbophobia. He wears it proudly, like a badge of honor. That doesn't make him much different than the hordes of Serbophoboes-for-hire that infest Western capitals and media, but they usually have an excuse ready if someone brings it up, because their greatest fear is being accused of "intolerance". (Not that anyone cares about calling people on hatred of Serbs; in this day and age of political correctness, not hating Serbs is a hate crime.) But Holbrooke hates openly, and with pride. Fair enough.

Lies are another matter, though. His Post column today contains at least four verifiable untruths. I know, I know, a Serb-hater engaging in lies? What's the world coming to?! Well, I for one am sick and tired of lies. And I'm going to do something about it.

Lie the first: The one and only time he met Karadžić, Holbrooke and his team were in Belgrade, "trying to end a war that had already taken the lives of nearly 300,000 people."

This is what editors would call a "gross factual error" that should get any journalist fired on the spot. Not so Holbrooke, apparently. But the official demographic study of the ICTY (the same tribunal Holbrooke praises in his diatribe) from 2003 established the total death toll in Bosnia at just over 100,000 civilians and military. Subsequent research by a Bosnian commission reached the final figure of 92,000 dead. Yet the 250,000 or even 300,000 have been routinely used in reports of Karadžić's arrest as verified fact. It is, however, a lie.

Lie the second: Holbrooke blames Karadžić, Gen. Ratko Mladić, Slobodan Milošević and God only knows who else for the deaths of three of his colleagues, Bob Frasure, Joe Kruzel and Nelson Drew. They died when their vehicle slid off the road into a mine-filled ravine. In his Post column Holbrooke claims the road they traveled went through "sniper-filled, Serbian-controlled territory." In fact, the road they took went over Mt. Igman, a supposedly demilitarized zone under nominal UN control which was in fact occupied by the Muslims and used as their army's base of operations.

Furthermore, as Holbrooke reveals in his memoir, he blamed the Serbs because they would not give Frasure and his team a safety guarantee if they tried flying in. But the Serbs could not give any such guarantee, not because they were willing to shoot the plane down, but because they could not stop the Muslims from doing so. So the American diplomats used the road through Muslim territory and died. May as well blame the Serbs for the mountain being there in the first place...

Lie the third: Holbrooke claims his meeting with Karadžić resulted in the lifting of the siege of Sarajevo. Complete and utter nonsense. All he did was reopen the airport, which was closed due to ... drumroll... the NATO bombing of Bosnian Serb positions around the city! That was the bombing Holbrooke refers to in the column as threatening to continue (and he actually did, pleading with NATO to "give us bombs for peace," as detailed in his book). Even after the war ended, Sarajevo remained under an internal blockade, as residents needed permission from the Muslim authorities to leave the city.

Lie the fourth: Holbrooke claims that former Serbian PM Zoran Đinđić was assassinated in 2003 "as a direct result of his courage in arresting Milosevic and sending him to The Hague in 2001." Holbrooke may well believe this, as do many fanatical "democrats" in Serbia, but there has never been any actual evidence to prove it. To this day, it's just a conspiracy theory, which Holbrooke here presents as fact. Alright, then, Holbrooke was an agent of Al-Qaeda, tasked to arrange a deployment of American troops in Bosnia so they would present easy targets for terrorists and weaken America for the upcoming conflict with the Faithful. See how easy it is to just make up bullshit on the go?

I've just about had it with this sanctimonious, uncouth, arrogant, corrupt slimebucket. He actually had the temerity to title his Post column today "The Face of Evil." He ought to look in the mirror.

Post scriptum:

In addition to the four whoppers in Holbrooke's venomous diatribe, there is one passage that ought to be of interest to Balkans observers: "the negotiating team (meaning Holbrooke) had decided to marginalize Karadžić and Mladić and to force Milošević, as the senior Serb in the region, to take responsibility for the war and the negotiations we hoped would end it."

Here is the open admission that Milosevic was forced to negotiate on behalf of the Bosnian Serbs, and that he did not, in fact, exercise control over them, effective or otherwise.

Furthermore, Holbrooke's turn of phrase ("senior Serb in the region") suggests that neither he nor his superiors cared a whit about actual legitimacy of countries and leaders, but saw the Serbs as some savage tribe to be cowed into submission by a display o violence. Had this taken place somewhere in Africa, Holbrooke and his government would have rightly been accused of racism. But since the target of their hatred and contempt are the Serbs, no one cares.