A skewed New World Order

by MICHAEL HARRIS

OTTAWA -- As one who is sick of NATO's half-truths, lies and bloody murder in the Balkans, some thoughts on the New World Order. Not Bill Clinton's airborne Hell's Angels, Vadar-esque heirs to the turf evacuated by the Evil Empire. I offer the iconoclast's version, based on what Woodrow Wilson said back in 1915: "No nation is fit to sit in judgment on any other nation."

In my New World Order, Bill Clinton makes porno flicks in Hollywood, not foreign policy. How can this decadent hypocrite, this masher of women, ooze paternal sympathy over high-school shootings in America, while blowing away children in Yugoslavia?

One of my readers, Dan Le Drew of Hamilton, said it better: "Bill Clinton is nothing more or less than a premature ejaculating mommy's boy ... He's raging inside because, like any spoiled brat, he couldn't get his own way. So he's taking it out on the Balkans." Pre-empt the bimbo news at all costs, wag that dog.

In my New World Order, Jean Chretien becomes a loanshark specializing in hotel financing in Shawinigan. He doesn't look all that good in dog-tags and an American army helmet anyway. The PM's new career would allow us to get away from the pepper-spray mentality writ large.

In my New World Order, Canada makes peace, not corpses. That means that under no circumstances should we involve ourselves in a land invasion of Yugoslavia, the bloody enterprise that the Choir Boy/Butcher Boy who currently runs Britain is so anxious to pursue. Tony Blair may think that this is a job for the Bengal Lancers. The rest of the world is waking up to the fact that it's a job for the International Tribunal of Justice at the Hague.

Personally, I am not so sure.

Despite her recent musings on the subject in Fredericton, Judge Louise Arbour is not the person for the job. I don't think she is about to investigate the Little Bomber from Shawinigan. After all, he may shortly be putting her on the Supreme Court of Canada. Her preliminary assessment of NATO's part in this atrocity is manifestly underwhelming.

Why am I so hard on the pin-up girl of the flabby Left? I guess it was something about her comment about it being "wildly premature" and "pure political polemic" to suggest that NATO leaders be held accountable for the open-air death dispensary they are operating over Yugoslavia.

Funny, that.

The War Crimes Tribunal doesn't mind engaging in wild speculation and pure political polemic when it comes to the alleged crimes of the Serbs. All those rapes, all those mass graves, backed up by hearsay and fake photographs. Besides, the Nuremberg Trials didn't shy away from holding the civilian and military leadership of Germany responsible for their atrocities. Arbour is well aware that this war is flatly illegal, under both the UN charter and NATO's constitution.

Judge Arbour thinks that NATO "may" have violated the esoteric "principle of proportionality." Think of that as using a low-yield nuclear weapon to stop a barroom brawl. Only a lawyer could reach that conclusion with such a straight face and such crooked logic. No one should be surprised. In law, the truth is always academic. Behind every judge there is as much political patronage as scholarship.

In the real world of lives violently taken, the truth is a funeral with someone crying real tears. What we have here is crimes against humanity, plain and simple. What else do you call an outlaw military adventure that blows up hospital patients, journalists, refugees, diplomats and just plain folks and then says it's sorry as it drops a new load of bombs?

In my New World Order, all the war criminals would face justice, not just the ones on the losing side. Which is to say, not just the ones who bomb Coventry, but the ones who level Dresden or vapourize Nagasaki as well.

Milosevic, by all means. But Clinton and his bumboys too. No one associated with NATO's civilian leadership, including Louise Arbour, should have any part of the justice process. I think that a tribunal of uninvolved countries, led by Russian and Chinese jurists, should conduct the search for impartial justice.

I can hear Gen. Wesley Clark swallowing his chewing tobacco at such a notion, but so what? Does anyone really believe that NATO will be brought to justice by a judge hailing from a member-country of the alliance, who also happens to be angling for the highest judicial posting in her own land?

In my New World Order, NATO would play no part in policing the peace it has so egregiously shattered in Yugoslavia. There is only one reason that NATO has insisted on overseeing the graveyard it has created; so that it can produce the post-game show. That way, NATO will be in charge of filtering the information in the next stage of this monumental propaganda exercise.

That's the phase where face and ass will be saved simultaneously, where NATO spokesman Jamie Shea will make all his announcements on Larry King, which is just Jerry Springer without the fist fights these days. CNN will be cranking out the documentaries, and the misinformation, until every Serb has horns and a long tail, and every NATO killer gets a medal. Evidence of NATO's atrocities would be buried with the civilian dead, while Yugoslavia's every war crime would be amplified and distributed around the world.

Everything about this war has been a lie, so don't expect the peace to be any different. NATO has created a refugee crisis of mammoth proportions. NATO has alienated Russia and China. NATO has de-stabilized an entire region. NATO has blown up the very refugees it purported to save with its humanitarian bombs. And as Svend Robinson recently observed, NATO has killed off the fragile democracy movement in Yugoslavia.

When Nancy E. Soderberg, a UN Security Council delegate and a member of the U.S. National Security Council, recently told an audience at Princeton University that the Rambouillet talks never called for stationing NATO troops in any part of Yugoslavia other than Kosovo, that was a lie. A necessary lie to make it look like Slobodan Milosevic was an unreasonable tyrant that left the West no alternative but F-18s. Really? Here is what Appendix B of the Feb. 23, 1999 peace accord for Kosovo says:

"NATO personnel shall enjoy, together with their vehicles, vessels, aircraft, and equipment, free and unrestricted passage and unimpeded access throughout the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, including associated airspace and territorial waters. This shall include, but not be limited to, the right of bivouac, manoeuvre, billet, and utilization of any areas or facilities as required for support, training, and operations."

That is an army of occupation. That is subjugation. No leader, not even a bad one like Milosevic, could sign such an accord.

Still, some people are buying the bull from the boys.

As Don Legere, a reader from Hamilton advised me about my take on Yugoslavia: "All you need to do now is sit on top of a Serb tank and you can become Canada's Jane Fonda."

Donny, I've been called worse.

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