...the More Washington’s Quest for Global Dominance Stays the Same.. 

The war waged by the U.S.-led North Atlantic Alliance against Serbia started ten years ago and it is substantively unfinished to this day. That Clinton’s war was illegal, illegitimate, aggressively premeditated, justified by blatant falsehoods, and “objectively” disastrous in its consequences, is eminently beyond dispute to the remaining thinking men. We are still facing the complex task of defining the geopolitical essence of that war, however.

That essence is apparent in the fact that the attack’s key architects believe that it was successful. Not one has had any second thoughts over the past decade. Particularly noteworthy is the position of the U.S. Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton, who remains proud of having pressed her husband to start the Kosovo war in 1999. In her 2003 Senate speech just before the Iraq war vote she pointed approvingly to his decision. She has reiterated that position during last year’s presidential campaign. At a time when the power and authority of this country are increasingly challenged around the world, she sees the Balkans as the last geopolitically significant area where the U.S. can continue to assert its “credibility” along the lines charted in the spring of 1999.

From the standpoint of its initiators, the Kosovo war was successful because it has achieved three objectives:

1. The immediate objective of weakening the Serbian factor in the Balkan equation, which had been the salient feature of the U.S. Balkan policy in the preceding decade;
2. The medium-term goal of redefining NATO’s mission and operational doctrine as a tool of U.S. policy, at a time when the collapse of the USSR and the abolition of the Warsaw Pact had removed the Alliance’s original raison d’etre.
3. The long-term strategic objective of legitimizing the doctrine of full-spectrum global dominance that treats every country as America’s “near-abroad,” and (at least potentially) every nook and cranny of the planet as the U.S. “vital interest.”

The fact that Serbia was the material loser in the 1999 war is self-evident. The loss of life and massive damage, tens of billions of dollars’ worth, remain uncompensated, ignored, and unatoned. One-seventh of Serbia’s sovereign territory–Kosovo–remains occupied, cleansed of most Serbs, with their cultural legaly largely destroyed, and run by the KLA as a mono-ethnic criminal fiefdom.

Over the past decade, NATO has been successfully redesigned in accordance with the requirements of global hegemonist requirements. Non-U.S. NATO troops outnumber GIs in Afghanistan, but all aspects of policy determining their deployment remain strictly controlled by Washington. An independent European defense force, under whatever acronym, has been effectively shelved. De Gaulle’s heir at the Elysee Palace is every bit as firmly Atlanticist as his colleague at No. 10 Downing Street.

It is the third, strategic objective of the 1999 war that merits particular attention. That war was based on the Clinton Doctrine of “humanitarian intervention,” which claimed the right of the United States to use military force without UNSC authorization, to prevent or stop alleged human rights abuses as defined by the American Administration. This doctrine explicitly denied the validity of international legal norms and treaty obligations in favor of a supposedly higher objective. It paved the way for the Bush Doctrine of global dominance that asserted the right of the United States to resort to preventive war, “regime change” and unilateral action as it deems fit. This doctrine was formally codified on September 20, 2002, in a truly remarkable NSC document, the “National Security Strategy of the United States.”  The concept of preemption was further elaborated in March 2006 by Mr. Bush and the NSC.

The recently-inaugurated President of the United States and his administration will not give up on this bipartisan legacy, which is evident from the retention of Bill Gates at the Pentagon, the appointment of Mrs. Clinton, and the return of old Balkan hands like Richard Hollbrooke to the center stage. The essence of the Bush Doctrine will be merely concealed by a variety of ostensibly multilateralist devices and by the use of neoliberal quasi-humanitarianist rhetoric.

The model of U.S. foreign policy over the past decade, founded upon the 1999 war against Serbia, represents the global extension of the Soviet model of relation with Moscow’s satellites of 40 years ago that was applied in the occupation of Czechoslovakia in August 1968. Ideological justification for that intervention was provided by the Brezhnev Doctrine, which was defined by its author, the late Secretary-General of the CPSU, as the obligation of the socialist countries to ensure that their “freedom for determining the ways of advance of their respective countries” should not “damage either socialism in their country or the fundamental interests of other socialist countries.” “The norms of law cannot be interpreted narrowly, formally, in isolation from the general context of the modern world,” Brezhnev further claimed. By belonging to the “socialist community of nations,” its members had to accept that the USSR—the leader of the “socialist camp”—was not only the enforcer of the rules but also the judge of whether and when an intervention was warranted. No country could leave the Warsaw Pact or change its communist party’s monopoly on power.

Thirty years after Prague 1968, the USSR was gone and the Warsaw Pact dismantled, with NATO expanding into its former heartland. The principles of the Brezhnev Doctrine were not defunct, however. They were given a new life in the “neoliberal” guise.

The nineties were an era of global institution-building. In 1991 the Maastricht Treaty speeded up the erosion of EU member countries’ sovereignty by transferring their prerogatives to the Brussels regime of unelected bureaucrats. On the western side of the Atlantic the passage of NAFTA was followed by the 1995 Uruguay round of GATT that produced the WTO. The nineties thus laid the foundation for the new, post-national order.

By early 1999 the process was sufficiently far advanced for President Bill Clinton to claim in the New York Times in May 1999 that, had it not bombed Serbia, “NATO itself would have been discredited for failing to defend the very values that give it meaning.” This was but one way of restating Brezhnev’s dictum that “the norms of law cannot be interpreted narrowly, formally, in isolation from the general context of the modern world.”

The international system in existence ever since the Peace of Westphalia was signed in 1648 was dead as far as the United States was concerned. That old system, based on the principle of state sovereignty, was imperfect and often violated, but nevertheless it provided the basis for international discourse from which but few powers had openly deviated.

Like his Soviet predecessor, Clinton used an abstract and ideologically loaded notion as the pretext to act as he deemed fit, but no “interests of world socialism” could beat “universal human rights” when it came to determining where and when to intervene. The key difference between Brezhnev and Clinton was in the limited scope of the Soviet leader’s self-awarded outreach. His doctrine applied only to the “socialist community,” as opposed to the unlimited, potentially world-wide scope of “defending the values that give NATO meaning.” The “socialist community” led by Moscow stopped on the Elbe, after all. It was replaced by the “International Community” led by Washington, which stops nowhere.

The credentials of a “democracy” are easy to establish in this scheme of things: democratic governments act in accordance with the will of the U.S.-led “international community” – like the late Franjo Tudjman in 1995, say, or Saakashvili last year. When they don’t, like Serbia did not when asked to sign the Rambouillet document, they are ipso facto undemocratic (regardless of whether they have elections and free media or not), and liable to punishment. The less logic and predictability, the stronger the position of the Hegemon.

The subsequent Bush Doctrine now stands, under George W. Bush’s successors, as the ideological basis and fully developed self-referential framework for the policy of permanent global interventionism. By postulating America as “the good,” and those who resist her will as the incarnation of evil, and by telling the rest of the world that the choice is clear and had to be be made, the President precluded any meaningful debate about the correlation between ends and means of American power: we are not only wise but virtuous; our policies are shaped by “core values” which are axiomatic, and not by prejudices.

The two “American” doctrines—the one inaugurated by the war against Serbia in 1999 and its elaboration triggered off by 9-11—both suffer from the same problem, however, as the Brezhnev Doctrine. Each act of resistance, however costly for the defender, undermines the hegemon’s credibility and self-confidence. After 1968, just beneath the drab surface of “Real Socialism,” anti-Sovietism was rampant. Three decades later, Serbia’s resistance was impressive both militarily and morally. That is why so much energy and resources have been devoted, in subsequent years, to the breaking of Serbia’s will, up to the present point when this country’s current government prefers not to mention at all that unpleasant episode from the spring of 1999.

Neoconservative strategists who were in charge under Bush and their neoliberal colleagues who run Obama’s show believe that the job in Serbia is almost complete, and they are no longer bothered by what Belgrade has to say. They are not giving up on tightening the cordon sanitaire around Russia by extending NATO along the northern shore of the Black Sea, or on meddling in the Middle East. They are still neurotically hyperactive and convinced that the U.S. hegemony can be maintained in the decades to come as a divinely ordained, morally mandated, open-ended and self-justifying mission. They are blind to the fact that, after a brief period of American monopolar dominance (1991-2008), the world’s distribution of power is gaining characteristics of asymmetric multipolarity. This is, as it happens, the most unstable model of international relations, which (on past form) leads to a major war.

For almost half-century after World War II (1945-1991) the world system was based on the model of bipolarity based on the doctrine of Mutual Assured Destruction (MAD). The awareness of both superpowers that they would inflict severe and unavoidable reciprocal damage on each other was coupled with the acceptance that each had a sphere of dominance or vital interest that should not be infringed upon, which was evident in the muted U.S. reaction to Hungary (1956) or Czechoslovakia (1968). Proxy wars were fought in the grey zone all over the Third World, most notably in the Middle East, but they were kept localized even when a superpower was directly involved (Vietnam, Afghanistan). Potentially lethal crises (Berlin 1949, Korea 1950, Cuba 1963) could be de-escalated due to the implicit rationality of both sides’ decision-making calculus.

The bipolar model was the product of unique circumstances without an adequate historical precedent, however, which are unlikely to be repeated in the foreseeable future.

The most stable model of international relations that is both historically recurrent and structurally repeatable in the future is the balance of power system in which no single great power is either physically able or politically willing to seek hegemony. This model was prevalent from the Peace of Westphalia (1648) until Napoleon, from Waterloo until around 1900, and from Versailles until 1933. It demands a relative equilibrium between the key powers that hold each other in check and function within a recognized set of rules that has come to be known as “international law.” Wars do occur, but they are limited in scope and intensity because the warring parties tacitly accept the fundamental legitimacy and continued existence of their opponent(s).

If one of the powers becomes markedly stronger than others and if its decision-making elite internalizes an ideology that demands or at least justifies hegemony, the inherently unstable system of asymmetrical multipolarity will develop. In all three known instances—Napoleonic France after 1799, the Kaiserreich from around 1900, and the Third Reich after 1933—the challenge could not be resolved without a major war.

The government of the United States is currently acting in a manner structurally reminiscent of those three powers. Having proclaimed itself the leader of an imaginary “international community,” it goes further than any previous would-be hegemon in treating the entire world as the American sphere of interest. Bush II is gone, but we are still stuck with the doctrine that allows open-ended political, military, and economic domination by the United States acting unilaterally and pledged “to keep military strength beyond challenge.”

Any attempt by a single power to keep its military strength beyond challenge is inherently destabilizing, and results—sooner or later—in the emergence of an effective counter-coalition.  Neither Napoleon nor Hitler knew any “natural” limits, but their ambition was essentially confined to Europe. With the United States today the novelty is that this ambition is extended—literally—to the whole world. Not only the Western Hemisphere, not just the “Old Europe,” Japan, or Israel, but also unlikely places like Kosovo or Bosnia, are considered vitally important. The globe itself is now effectively claimed as America’s sphere of influence, Russia’s back yards emphatically included.

Anti-hegemonistic coalitions against Napoleon, the Kaiser and Hitler were constructed regardless of ideological differences and potential or real rivalries between the partners. Today, Russia, China, India and Brazil also have potential or real causes of dispute, but they are overshadowed by the existential need to curtail the hegemonistic power devoid of natural checks and balances yet no longer able to impose its will like it did in the 1990s.

We are witnessing an ironic switch of roles. The Soviet Union had been for decades the revolutionary power, while the United States was the “conservative,” i.e. status-quo power seeking to maintain the given configuration. With the war against Serbia in 1999 the roles were finally reversed: the U.S. became the agent of revolutionary dynamism with global ambitions, in the name of ideological norms of “democracy, human rights and open markets.” That neurotic dynamism is resisted by the emerging coalition of weaker powers acting on behalf of the essentially “conservative” principles of state sovereignty, national interest, and reaffirmation of the right to their own spheres of geopolitical dominance.

Still convinced that ten years ago in the Balkans they completed a good job in accordance with their global ambitions, the “foreign policy community” in Washington is yet to grasp that the doctrine of global interventionism sooner or later must reasult in the emergence of a counter-coalition. It remains to be seen when, and at what price for America and for the rest of the world, the neoliberal-neoconservative duopoly will grasp this fact.

Meet the Man Who Wants to Rule the World

With the ascension of Barack Obama in Washington, the proponents of the International Criminal Court (ICC) are entertaining fresh hopes that the United States will ratify the 1998 Rome Statutes and join 108 countries that have signed up to the Court thus far.

Designed as a key instrument of an “evolving” system of transnational criminal justice, the ICC has an open-ended mandate to investigate and prosecute loosely defined war crimes as its UN-appointed officials deem fit. It is the antithesis of fundamental American precepts and key constitutional principles of sovereignty, checks and balances, and national independence.

Roger Cohen summed up the internationalists’ demands in the New York Times last December: “After the terrible decade of the 1990s, with its genocides in Bosnia and Rwanda … it is unconscionable that America not stand with the institution that constitutes the most effective legal deterrent to such crimes.” Similar calls have come from an array of influential NGOs, such as Amensty International and the New York-based Human Rights Watch, and bien-pensants like Desmond Tutu, Cora Weiss, and Elie Wiesel.

The question seems to be not whether Obama will relent, but how soon and how thoroughly. “Now that it’s operational, we are learning more and more about how the ICC functions,” he said approvingly during the campaign. “It is in America’s interests that these most heinous of criminals, like the perpetrators of the genocide in Darfur, are held accountable. These actions are a credit to the cause of justice and deserve full American support and cooperation.”

The Democrats had never opposed the concept in principle. The Clinton administration had been in the forefront of efforts to create international hybrid courts, notably the Yugoslav war crimes tribunal at The Hague. The humanitarian interventionists welcomed the veil of supranational legal propriety that could be invoked ex post facto to justify unilateral acts, such as their Balkan meddling. They were wary, however, of having a court that could theoretically prosecute American officials for pursuing American policies.

In July 1998 the ICC made some concessions to get the U.S. to sign on. The Rome Statute establishing the Court allowed a state to have primary jurisdiction over a crime “unless [it] is unwilling or unable genuinely to carry out the investigation or prosecution.” But then came the catch: the ICC judges themselves were the only authority that could determine whether a state is “unwilling” or “unable” to investigate and prosecute, and how “genuine” are its investigative or prosecutorial efforts and procedures. More significantly, the Rome Statute made a final break with long-standing international legal tradition by asserting ICC jurisdiction over nationals and military personnel from states that are not party to the treaty or even those that had specifically rejected the court’s jurisdiction.

In spite of so problematic a brief, President Clinton signed the Rome Treaty in December 2000, in the final days of his presidency. The Bush Administration, to its credit, “unsigned” it in 2002 invoking issues of substance and insisted on signing bilateral immunity agreements with ICC member states. As John Bolton summed it up in late 2002, the ICC could not fit into an international “constitutional” design that delineates how laws are made, adjudicated or enforced—let alone how they are subjected to popular accountability and structured to protect liberty:

In the ICC’s central structures, the Court and Prosecutor, these sorts of political checks are either greatly attenuated or entirely absent. They are effectively accountable to no one. The Prosecutor will answer to no superior executive power, elected or unelected. Requiring the United States to be bound by this treaty, with its unaccountable Prosecutor and its unchecked judicial power, is clearly inconsistent with American standards of constitutionalism.

At the same time the Bush Administration weakened this principled position by remaining willing to collaborate with the UN in the development of ad-hoc hybrid institutions that incrementally legitimized the judicial machinery of the “international community.”

The discretionary power of the ICC prosecutor to investigate cases on his own initiation, to act without third-party restraint, and to claim universal jurisdiction, offer the scope for considerable legal creativity. Such sweeping power was denied even to Vishinsky or Freisler. A precedent does exist, however, in a Western liberal democracy of our own time.

Enter Baltasar Garzón, prosecuting magistrate of Chamber 5 of Spain’s national criminal court. He has, not only by Anglo-Saxon standards, unprecedented authority to initiate investigations, to jail or bail suspects, and to decide whether to bring charges.

The media-savvy “Superjuez” first attracted limelight in October 1998, when he sent to London a warrant for the arrest of visiting former Chilean president Augusto Pinochet over the alleged deaths of Spanish citizens during his rule. Garzon’s claim to de facto universal jurisdiction was breathtakingly audacious. Eventually his request was turned down by British Home Secretary Jack Straw, not because Pinochet enjoyed diplomatic immunity—which he did—but on far feebler grounds of his poor health.

In subsequent years Garzon has tried to lay his hands on former U.S. secretary of state Henry Kissinger (in connection with the U.S. support of Latin American death squads in the early 1970s), on Italian prime minister Silvio Berlusconi (for tax evasion), on unspecified U.S. government officials (for alleged abuses at Guantanamo Bay and Abu Ghraib), and on 98 leaders of the 1976-1983 Argentine military junta. Only one lower-ranking officer, Adolfo Scilingo, had the bad luck to be extradited—from Mexico—on Garzon’s “Dirty War” warrant. He was sentenced to a thousand years in jail, reduced on appeal to 640.

Garzon’s behavior has grown increasingly erratic of late. Last October he declared the acts of repression by General Franco during and immediately after the Civil War (1936-39) to be “crimes against humanity,” which he would start prosecuting. A month later, however, Garzon sullenly announced that he was dropping the case against Franco and his close aides, after his colleagues finally questioned his jurisdiction over acts committed 70 years ago by people who are all dead and whose alleged crimes were covered by the 1977 general amnesty.

Garzon’s showmanship would be merely irritating, in the manner of other self-promoting Euro-leftists—Bernard Kouchner, say—were it not for the fact that he uses self-appropriated powers to destroy the lives and reputations of his less well known targets.

Take the case of Gennady Petrov, a Russian millionaire resident in Spain who was arrested last June on Garzon’s odrers on the suspicion of money laundering and organized crime connections. Following a spectacular military-style invasion of his villa in Mallorca, Petrov, his wife and their 10-year old daughter were kept naked at gunpoint for hours in their bedroom while the search was going on. Garzon used a Franco-era law to keep Petrov and other suspects arrested under the same warrant incommunicado for months on end, deprived of bail or legal assistance, while the investigation was proceeding in inquisitorial secrecy. The defense continues to be denied access to the evidence that prompted Garzon to act, in direct violation of the standards set by the European Court in Strasburg. Spain, being a signatory of the European Convention on Human Rights, is obliged to observe the rulings of the Court, but Garzon appears to give precedence to his country’s legislation when it suits his purposes—even if it was enacted by bête noir Francisco Franco.

Last October Garzon went a step further when he ordered the Guardia Civil to raid the Spanish villa of Petrov’s alleged associate Vladislav Reznik, a deputy of United Russia party and chairman of the State Duma Financial Markets Committee. The seizure of valuable property (including artwork) was a case of deja-vu. Garzon’s subsequent attempt to get hold of Reznik, who was not in Spain at the time of the raid, was different—although by no means new: it reflected his customary dislike of established international legal rules. Garzon tried to issue a summons through the office of Reznik’s Spanish lawyer, in disregard of proper channels that exist under the legal assistance agreement between Spain and the Russian Federation.

This latest attempt by Garzon to exert universal jurisdiction over a foreign national, in violation of international legal norms and in disregard of the would-be defendant’s immunity in his own country of citizenship, indicates that the “Superjudge” primarily wants to create a scene. His real target was not Reznik, but the principle of sovereignty and national independence itself.

Garzonism is spreading. His colleague at the National Court, Eloy Velasco, announced in early January that he would investigate 14 Salvadoran military officers for the 1989 killings of six Jesuit priests in El Salvador. Velasco asserted point-blank that “under the principle of universal jurisdiction” he is competent to investigate Salvadoran citizens for their alleged participation in a crime allegedly committed in the Central American republic two decades ago.

Two weeks later another Spanish judge, Fernando Andreu, announced that he would pursue a crimes against humanity complaint against seven senior Israeli military figures over a 2002 bombing in Gaza The complaint, which includes former defence minister Benjamin Ben-Eliezer as one of its targets, was lodged in Madrid by the Gaza-based Palestinian Center for Human Rights. Judge Andreu also invoked the principle of universal jurisdiction, promting an Israeli politician to ask the courts in Israel to open proceedings against Spain for taking part in the 1999 NATO bombing of Serbia.

Garzonism à la mode is catching on in another, equally unpleasant manner: in the apparent anti-Russian bias of Spanish investigators, in their heavy-handedness that would elicit howls of “racism” or “discrimination” if directed against a minority group—Muslims, say—deemed worthy of protection by the Euro-elite class.

Take the case, unrelated to either Reznik or Petrov, of Aleksandr Gofstein, a prominent Russian lawyer and former legal counsel for Mikhail Khadarkovsky’s Yukos conglomerate. Gofstein was arrested in 2006 on a warrant issued by Fernando Andreu, investigator with the National Justice Chamber, on charges of money laundering for bringing $500 to his client, fellow Russian Zakhar Kalashov who is under arrest in a Spanish jail. Gofstein is currently out of prison on a quarter-million-dollar bail. Garzon’s influence has permeated the entire Spanish justice system.

Garzon’s histrionics reflect his abiding commitment to the assertion of borderless, transnational authority in disregard of the law. That same commitment is the moving force behind the ICC; it is the vision that moves its proponents, here and abroad. Theirs is the ideology of universal human values—that is to say, of a common culture identical for the whole world. It is the enemy of liberty as understood and practiced in the West for centuries, an enemy on par with the menace of Jihad. Its proponents are invariably also the upholders of multicultural diversity, while in fact promoting a soul-numbing social and legal monism.

The moral absolutism that is at the core of Garzon’s world view, identical to that of the ICC enthusiasts, is morally unsustainable. Genuine dilemmas about our human responsibility for one another must not be confused with their doctrine of global authoritarianism. Their disdain of the principle of sovereignty may be motivated by a genuine conviction that the war against the Westphalian order is a just one. But they are still less than forthright regarding the methods of justice they are willing to use as well as the real implications of countries subjecting themselves to «international justice.» 

Judge Baltasar Garzon’s illustrious career confirms that the more arrogant and universalist the doctrine behind the ICC, the more willing its devotees are to lie for the truth. “International justice” is a poisoned chalice that even Barack Obama should find the strength to reject.