Hawkins Says Maffei Rally with Gen. Wesley Clark Highlights Democrats' Militarism
Howie Hawkins for Congress
25th District, New York
www.howiehawkins.org
Media Release
For Immediate Release: Saturday, September 27, 2008
For More Information: Howie Hawkins, 315-425-1019, hhawkins@igc.org
Howie Hawkins, the Green Populist candidate for Congress, said today that voters who want peace should stop voting for the pro-war Democrats.
"Maffei's embrace of General Clark today at a campaign rally is a stark reminder that the Democratic Party remains committed to military aggression as a central instrument of American foreign policy. Too many voters have allowed their anger at the Bush's war in Iraq to blind them to the Democrats' complicity. The Democrats only disagree with the Republicans on the tactics of US invasions and occupations, not on the underlying strategy of so-called ‘full spectrum dominance' aimed at global military and economic domination," Hawkins noted.
"During World War II, the US fought the invaders. Now the US is the invader. Gen. Wesley Clark supports this interventionist military posture, which he has extolled as ‘coercive diplomacy.' Clark supports the School of the Americas and the eastern expansion of NATO. He commanded NATO's bombing of Serbia and Kosovo in 1999 without UN authorization. Clark's order for air strikes against Russian troops at the Pristina airfield in Kosovo was only stopped by a British general who refused to carry out Clark's order because it might start World War Three," Hawkins said.
"The Democrats had their chance. They said in 2006 they would end the war in Iraq with a Democratic majority in Congress. Instead, that Democratic-majority Congress passed three rounds of supplemental funding for the Iraq war," added Hawkins, who supports an immediate withdrawal of US military forces from Iraq and Afghanistan.
Hawkins said that there are many retired military officers speaking out these days who could be called to a rally against aggressive wars by the United States. He cited the examples of former US Army Col. Andrew Bacevich, author of The New American Militarism, and former Marine Corps officers Daniel Ellsberg, who leaked the Pentagon Papers history of Vietnam, and Scott Ritter, a former intelligence officer and UN weapons inspector who has been outspoken in his opposition to US attacks against Iraq, Afghanistan, and Iran.
Hawkins, who is a former Marine, also recalled the important role that David M. Shoup, the Marine Corps Commandant under Presidents Eisenhower and Kennedy (1960-63), played in the anti Vietnam War movement. Shoup received the Congressional Medal of Honor for his actions in the battle of Tarawa. As a young Marine in the China Expeditionary Force in1927, Shoup had served under and got to know a Marine Corps general named Smedley Butler, who in the 1930s became a highly visible antiwar speaker and whose "War is a Racket" essays have been widely quoted by the antiwar movement ever since. To this day, every Marine in boot camp is taught about the military career of Butler, who is the only two-time recipient of the Congressional Medal of Honor. It was during the China campaign that both Butler and Shoup concluded that most of the frequent US military expeditions abroad were advancing the special interests of big business rather than the broad interests of the American people and the defense of the United States.
Gen. Shoup was lifelong opponent of imperialism and concentrated economic power. He became a prominent early opponent of the Vietnam War as result of a May 16, 1966 speech in Los Angeles in which Shoup famously said, "I believe that if we had and would keep our dirty bloody dollar crooked fingers out of the business of these nations so full of depressed exploited people, they will arrive at a solution of their own."
Shoup also wrote an article with Col. James Donovan, US Marine Corps (ret.), for April 1969 The Atlantic Monthly called "Our New American Militarism," which was widely distributed in the antiwar movement in a pamphlet published by Clergy and Laity Concerned about Vietnam. The article was scathing critique that extended and updated President Eisenhower's parting warning about the military-industrial complex coming to dominate the government, economy, and culture of America.
"If I were to feature a member of the military at a campaign rally, it would be someone like a Shoup or a Butler who believed in fighting against foreign invasions and occupations, not someone like Clark who continues to offer his advice on how the US can best invade and occupy other countries. I would invite the Iraq Veterans Against the War to send a member to speak," said Hawkins, who remains a member of Vietnam Veterans Against the War as well as Veterans for Peace.
"Clark's high profile as a military spokesperson for the Democrats shows why we cannot expect the Democrats to end the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. If most pro-peace voters keep voting for the Democrats as the lesser evil, the Democrats are going to keep taking their votes for granted. The Democrats will keep joining with the Republicans in support of the same old bipartisan militarism. Peace movement protests will remain powerless pleading unless the pro-war major parties also lose substantial votes and some elections to independent Green peace candidates," Hawkins said.
General Clark commanded the 78-day NATO bombing campaign against Yugoslavia in 1999. The bombing of primarily civilian targets in Serbia killed several thousand Serbian civilians and destroyed or damaged schools and hospitals as well as much of the industrial infrastructure of the country. In his book Fighting Modern War, Clark explained how the NATO powers opted for warfare as a political weapon, choosing "coercive diplomacy, the use of armed forces to impose the political will of the NATO nations." General Clark argued for bombing civilian infrastructure targets in order to force the Yugoslav leadership to retreat and allow NATO troops to occupy Kosovo.
NATO's bombing campaign was carried out in defiance of the UN Security Council, which defeated a resolution authorizing NATO military intervention in Kosovo. The bombing campaign was also in violation of Article 5 of NATO's charter, which restricts NATO's use of force to situations where a NATO member has been attacked. Yugoslavia, including its Kosovo province, was not a NATO member.
The Clinton administration pushed ahead with Kosovo campaign outside of NATO's original purpose and transformed it into a vehicle for US-led military intervention around the world. The Clinton administration's bombing of Serbia and occupation of Kosovo, in defiance of the UN and by expanding NATO's scope for military intervention, set the precedents for Bush's wars, first the US-led NATO occupation of Afghanistan and then the Iraq invasion without UN authorization. Many of the Clinton officials who pushed for defying the UN and expanding NATO's mission in order to intervene in Kosovo and Serbia, including Madeleine Albright, Warren Christopher, William Perry, and Anthony Lake, are now members of Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama's "senior working group on national security." Obama and his advisors have been calling for an increase in US and other NATO military forces for the counter-insurgency war in Afghanistan and for strikes against insurgent bases inside Pakistan, using rationales similar to those used by the Nixon administration to expand the Vietnam War into Cambodia and Laos.
100,000 Kosovars became refugees during the conflict between ethnic Albanians and ethnic Serbs during the year before the NATO bombing campaign. The civil unrest was instigated by Kosovo Liberation Army attacks on ethnic Serbs and Yugoslav armed forces in Kosovo, who responded in kind with often brutal violence against ethnic Albanians. However, NATO's bombing campaign in 1999 escalated the violence radically, swelling the refugee population to 800,000 and increasing deaths from 2000 in 1998 to over 10,000 in 1999. 250,000 Serb refugees have never returned to the homes in Kosovo since they fled NATO's bombs. NATO's bombing campaign supported ethnic cleansing of Serbs from Kosovo by the ethnic Albanians. After the bombing campaign paved the way for a US-led NATO occupation of Kosovo, the US constructed Camp Bondsteel, the biggest overseas military base built by the US between the Vietnam and Iraq wars.
While the US government says ancient ethnic rivalries explain Yugoslavia's disintegration, Western elites and the US government actively encouraged the break up of modern Yugoslavia. Yugoslavia had been the one country in Eastern Europe that had remained stubbornly independent of both the US and the Soviet Union and neutral during the Cold War. As the Soviet bloc disintegrated in 1989, Yugoslavia remained neutral and independent, rejected the capitalist economic model the West was encouraging in other Eastern European countries, and remained committed to its own unique model of market socialism. Yugoslavia refused to privatize public services, convert worker-owned firms to capitalist-owned firms, and deregulate its markets when demanded to do so by the IMF and World Bank as "structural adjustment" criteria for refinancing their foreign loans. Yugoslavia had become heavily indebted to foreign banks from loans to finance the growth of its economy.
At the end of 1990, the US enacted the Foreign Operations Appropriations Law 101-513, which cut off all aid, trade, credits, and loans from the United States to Yugoslavia. It also cut off loans from international institutions heavily influenced by the US like the IMF and the World Bank.
The CIA predicted this law would cause severe economic distress in Yugoslavia and might precipitate civil war. The law encouraged ethnic partition. It stipulated that for aid and loans to be resumed, separate elections had to be held in each of the six Yugoslavian republics, and that the US State Department had to approve the election procedures and results in each republic. Meanwhile, the US supplied money and technical expertise to fascist and nationalist parties in each republic who sought the breakup of Yugoslavia. When Croatia declared independence in 1991, led by a party that had collaborated with the Nazis during World War II, Germany and the US immediately recognized it diplomatically.
The CIA trained both the Croatian and Bosnian Muslim militias prior to the breakout of civil war. When the Croatian military drove over 200,000 Serbs from their homes in the Krajina section of Croatia in 1995, the US provided air support.
Clark was accused of almost starting a war with Russia during the Kosovo campaign. On June 12, 1999, at the end of NATO's air war against Yugoslavia, a small contingent of Russian troops rushed to occupy the Pristina airfield in Kosovo. Clark ordered an airborne assault on the Russians. British General Michael Jackson, commander of K-FOR, NATO's international force to occupy Kosovo, refused to follow Clark's order, telling him: "Sir, I'm not starting world war three for you." Clark was forced into retirement shortly after this incidence.
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