Tony Blair, one of the orchestrators of the NATO bombing of former Yugoslavia.
Today is a day for recommendations – this is an interview with two of my favourite people – Alex Krainer who is on Substack and outstanding anti-imperialist journalist Finian Cunningham whose work can be found at Strategic Culture Foundation.
Twenty-five years ago in March 1999, the US-led NATO alliance launched a 10-week bombing campaign on former Yugoslavia.
It led to the balkanization of Serbia and Kosovo. It also led to the further enlargement of the NATO military bloc and endless foreign military interventions in violation of international law.
The NATO campaign to bomb Yugoslavia – only eight years after the end of the Cold War – invoked a humanitarian pretext but it did not have a legal mandate from the UN Security Council. It therefore was an illegal aggression perpetrated largely on the say-so of Washington.
President Joe Biden, then a senator, was wholeheartedly in favor of the audacious military action in Eastern Europe.
Alex Krainer, author of Grand Deception, contends that the NATO military aggression in Yugoslavia in 1999 was a strategic gambit by the US-led Western powers to pursue hegemonic ambitions of dominating Russia and any other geopolitical rival.
The aggression 25 years ago fatally undermined international law and set a precedent for the next quarter century of endless US and NATO wars around the world, including in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria, across the Middle East and North Africa, and elsewhere.
The current US-led NATO proxy war in Ukraine against Russia can be traced back to the historic assault on Yugoslavia. In attacking Yugoslavia, says Krainer, the US and its NATO vassals were serving notice to the rest of the world that they would not be bound by international law.
In many ways, the conflict in Ukraine is the culmination of that hegemonic lawless mindset and conduct.
Also worth watching (if you haven’t already) this German documentary with English subtitles – “It Began with a Lie” German documentary about the Kosovo war and bombing of Yugoslavia in 1999. By Jo Angerer and Mathias Werth Production – WDR. I have uploaded because of YT age restriction nonsense again:
I also further recommend the book by Peter Brock – Media cleansing: Dirty Reporting: Journalism and tragedy in Yugoslavia.
Five years in exhaustive preparation and writing, Media Cleansing: Dirty Reporting, is the blockbuster book by American journalist Peter Brock that exposes the shocking record of the Western media’s war reporting in the breakup of Yugoslavia and their collusion that deceived the world during the wars in Bosnia and Kosovo.