Collapsing Empire: Yemen Shatters the Illusion of US Air Power, Yet Again
‘Significantly damaged’
In April 1996, then USAF Chief of Staff Ronald R Fogleman boldly declared that a “new American way of war” was emerging.
While traditionally the Empire had “relied on large forces employing mass, concentration, and firepower to attrit enemy forces and defeat them,” now technological advances and “unique military advantages” – specifically in the field of air power – could be used “to compel an adversary to do our will at the least cost to the US in lives and resources.”
At the time, the Empire was riding high on the perceived success of NATO’s Operation Deliberate Force, an 11-day saturation bombing of Bosnia conducted the previous August/September.
Multiple US officials eagerly attributed the campaign to ending the three-year-long civil war in the former Yugoslav republic by precipitating negotiations. They omitted to mention that the airstrikes’ predominant military utility was allowing US-armed, trained, and directed Bosniak and Croat proxy forces to overrun Bosnian Serb positions without significant opposition, or their brazen sabotage of prior peace settlements.
Nonetheless, the narrative that wars could be won via airpower alone, and the US and its allies should invest in and structure their military machines accordingly, palpably percolated thereafter. The illegal March – June 1999 bombing of Yugoslavia provided the Empire with an opportunity to put this theory to the test. For 78 straight days, NATO relentlessly blitzed civilian, government, and industrial infrastructure throughout the country, killing untold numbers of innocent people – including children – and disrupting daily life for millions.
The purported purpose of this onslaught was to prevent a planned genocide of Kosovo’s Albanian population by Yugoslav forces. As a May 2000 British parliamentary committee concluded, however, it was only after the bombing began that Belgrade began assaulting the province.
Moreover, this effort was explicitly concerned with neutralising the CIA and MI6-backed Kosovo Liberation Army, an Al Qaeda-linked extremist group, not attacking Albanian citizens. Meanwhile, in September 2001, a UN court determined that Yugoslavia’s actions in Kosovo were not genocidal in nature or intent.
On June 3rd 1999, Yugoslav leader Slobodan Milosevic folded under Russian pressure, agreeing to withdraw Belgrade’s forces from Kosovo. While Western officials celebrated a resounding victory for NATO, and airpower more generally, the mainstream media – at least initially – told a very different story. The LA Times observed that the Yugoslav army “still has 80% to 90% of its tanks, 75% of its most sophisticated surface-to-air missiles and 60% of its MIG fighter planes.” Meanwhile, its key barracks and ammunition depots weren’t impaired one iota.
The LA Times observed that the Yugoslav army “still has 80% to 90% of its tanks, 75% of its most sophisticated surface-to-air missiles and 60% of its MIG fighter planes.” Meanwhile, its key barracks and ammunition depots weren’t damaged at all.
The New York Times reported that post-war Kosovo was bereft “of the scorched carcasses of tanks or other military equipment NATO officials had expected to find.” While NATO and Pentagon apparatchiks “[claimed] to have significantly damaged” Yugoslav forces, the outlet acknowledged Belgrade’s units withdrawing from Kosovo “seemed spirited and defiant rather than beaten.” They took with them hundreds of tanks, personnel carriers, artillery batteries, vehicles and “military equipment loaded on trucks” completely unscathed by the bombing campaign.
While NATO and Pentagon apparatchiks stood “by their claims to have significantly damaged” Yugoslav forces, the outlet admitted Belgrade’s units withdrawing from Kosovo “seemed spirited and defiant rather than beaten.”
They took with them hundreds of tanks, personnel carriers, artillery batteries, vehicles, and “military equipment loaded on trucks” completely unscathed by the bombing campaign.
‘Campaign analysis’
Contemporary declassified British Ministry of Defence files amply underline the catastrophic failure of the Empire’s blitzkrieg of Yugoslavia. Once Milosevic finally capitulated and NATO and UN ‘peacekeepers’ were granted unimpeded access to Kosovo, they struggled to find a single “burnt out tank”, or other indications of vehicle or equipment losses on the ground. A June 7th “campaign analysis” noted, “NATO took a lot longer, required a lot more effort and damaged less than perhaps we believed we could achieve at the start of the air campaign.”
A June 7 “campaign analysis” noted, “NATO took a lot longer, required a lot more effort and damaged less than perhaps we believed we could achieve at the start of the air campaign.”
It added that Yugoslav “war-fighting doctrine” placed “great emphasis on dispersal, the use of camouflage, dummy targets, concealment and bunkers” to avoid detection, and “early assessments indicate that they appear to have applied this doctrine very successfully.” Adverse weather conditions were also routinely exploited as cover for anti-KLA operations. The memo further recorded “there was no evidence…of disintegration of Serb forces in Kosovo,” with Yugoslav military operations continuing apace until Milosevic agreed to withdraw from the province, “and beyond”.
Yet, these damning observations remained secret. At a June 11th 1999 press conference, US Chairman of the Joint Chiefs General Henry Shelton proudly displayed a variety of colourful charts, boasting how hundreds of Yugoslav tanks, personnel carriers and artillery pieces had been decimated by NATO, without the alliance suffering a single casualty. His crooked accounting of the bombing remained universal mainstream gospel, until a May 2000 Newsweek investigation exposed the wide-ranging “coverup” via which the Pentagon had spun the “ineffective” assault as a resounding success.
When NATO’s Supreme Allied Commander Wesley Clark, who oversaw the bombing, learned of the pronounced lack of damage to the Yugoslav military on-the-ground in Kosovo, he dispatched a dedicated team of USAF investigators to the province. They “spent weeks combing Kosovo by helicopter and by foot,” and turned up evidence of just 14 destroyed tanks. Meanwhile, of the 744 strikes on Yugoslav military equipment and installations claimed by Pentagon officials, just 58 were confirmed.
By contrast, USAF identified ample evidence of the Yugoslav military’s skill at deception. They found a key bridge had been protected from NATO bombers “by constructing, 300 yards upstream, a fake bridge made of polyethylene sheeting stretched over the river” – the military alliance “destroyed” the “phony bridge” many times.
Additionally, “artillery pieces were faked out of long black logs stuck on old truck wheels, and an anti-aircraft missile launcher was fabricated from the metal-lined paper used to make European milk cartons.”
Flummoxed, “Clark insisted that the Serbs had hidden their damaged equipment and that the team hadn’t looked hard enough.” So a new report was fabricated wholecloth, validating the fiction that NATO’s destruction of Yugoslav forces had been extensive. Newsweek noted its findings were “so devoid of hard data that Pentagon officials jokingly called it ‘fiber-free’.”
An official Department of Defense “After-Action Report to Congress” on the bombing campaign cited the report’s figures, although stressed no supporting evidence was forthcoming. With eerie prescience, Newsweek concluded:
“[This] distortion could badly mislead future policymakers…After the November 2000 presidential election, the Pentagon will go through one of its quadrennial reviews, assigning spending priorities. The Air Force will claim the lion’s share…The risk is policymakers and politicians will become even more wedded to myths like ‘surgical strikes’. The lesson of Kosovo is civilian bombing works, though it raises moral qualms…Against military targets, high-altitude bombing is overrated. Any commander in chief who does not face up to those hard realities will be fooling himself.”
Britain’s Secret Role In Yugoslavia’s Destruction
US backed ethnic cleansing of Serbs, top diplomat secretly told Croat leader
UN Srebrenica Resolution: Pandora’s Box Likely To Reignite Balkanization
My blog post with notes (Alija Izetbegović): Bosnia: US Sanctions, Foreign Judges, CIA-Asset Alija Izetbegovic, Lithium Discovery, and EU Accession*
The Bosnian War: What Lessons Has the World Learned?
Genocide games: Srebrenica gambit and reigniting the Bosnian War
Declassified: Yugoslavia’s ‘Propaganda Value’ for British Spies
25th Anniversary of the Srebrenica Massacre Big Lie that Won’t Die
CIA agent: They gave us millions to dismember Yugoslavia
The Politics of the Srebrenica Massacre
George Szamuely: Defining Genocide Down – The Case of Srebrenica
The Rational Destruction of Yugoslavia
The Demonization of Slobodan Milosevic
Breaking Up Is So Very Hard to Do by Wayne Madsen
*1992 Bosnian independence referendum: it was the CIA asset, Alija Izetbegović, that declared the independence of Bosnia and Herzegovina.
Diana Johnstone: Clinton’s ‘Good War’
Declassified intelligence files expose inconvenient truths of Bosnian war
Trove of Declassified Docs Reveals What Putin Told Clinton About Kursk Sinking, Yugoslavia, Terror
1999: MISSION ACCOMPLISHED: The Congressman Who Pulled Strings For POWs’ Release (Blagojevich met with Vuk Draskovic)
CIA: Vuk Draskovic
1999: Ignoring Scars (archived)
Second, the United States and the West made an open embrace of opposition figures like Zoran Djindjic of the Democratic Party and his rival, Vuk Draskovic of the Serbian Renewal Movement, urging them to overthrow Milosevic in a popular uprising, without a democratic process. By meeting them in Montenegro, in public, and providing them with money, however late or limited, Western diplomats made it easy for Milosevic and his news media to portray the opposition as paid agents of NATO, continuing its war against Belgrade.
2000: U.S. Funds Help Milosevic’s Foes in Election Fight (USAID, National Endowment for Democracy, National Democratic Institute,PR firm – PSB Insights)
2000: U.S. Advice Guided Milosevic Opposition
2000: U.S. Aid to Milosevic’s Foes Is Criticized as ‘Kiss of Death’
2001: This Ain’t Your Momma’s CIA
THE COVERT WAR AGAINST YUGOSLAVIA
U.S. Policy Toward Yugoslavia (NSC-NSDD-133)
Propaganda in the War on Yugoslavia
Kosovo War at 25: Blair’s secret invasion plot to ‘topple Milosevic’ revealed
GEORGE SZAMUELY: THE YUGOSLAV CRISIS – ORIGINS AND THE BEGINNING
Who Really Brought Down Milosevic?
Nato bombed Chinese deliberately
25 years have passed since this shocking bombing, and the world and China have never forgotten it!
18+: War Crimes of NATO in the Territory of The Former Yugoslavia (PDF)
Propaganda Trip: Why Franjo Tudjman’s Biographer Rebelled
Interview on YouTube: “I was a paid propagandist” for the President Tudjman in ex-Yugoslavia: Joe Tripician
The Politics of the Srebrenica Massacre* (archived)
Genocide Inflation is the Real Human Rights Threat: Yugoslavia and Rwanda
The CIA’s Racak ‘Massacre’ Hoax
‘Big lie’ and breakup of Yugoslavia
Wars, lies and ‘mass rape’ charges
How Human Rights Watch Shattered Yugoslavia
Related links:
Neo-Nazi terror threat grows as Ukraine fighters jailed in France
Since the West initiated its covert program of supporting violent extremists in order to weaken and destabilize its geopolitical foes, blowback has come in various forms.
Throughout the Bosnian war in the 1990s, the US supported Mujahideen fighters. They arrived on CIA “black flights” from all over the world, especially Afghanistan, and received a seemingly endless flow of weapons, in breach of a United Nations embargo.
Quickly gaining a reputation for excessive brutality against enemy soldiers and civilians alike, and false flag attacks on their own positions and public spaces in order to precipitate Western intervention, their presence was pivotal to the Bosnian Muslims’ war effort. US Balkans negotiator Richard Holbrooke has stated they “wouldn’t have survived” without the Mujahideen’s assistance.
Under the terms of the 1995 Dayton Agreement, Mujahideen fighters were required to leave Bosnia. Immediately after it was signed, Croat forces fighting alongside British and American mercenaries in the country began assassinating the group’s leadership to send the Islamists scattering. Some fled to Albania along with their US-supplied weapons, where they joined the incipient Kosovo Liberation Army, another Western-backed entity filled with hardcore jihadists.
Others were intercepted with the assistance of the CIA, and deported to their countries of origin to stand trial for serious terror offenses. This was perceived as a gross betrayal by the Mujahideen’s senior overseas leadership, which included Osama bin Laden.
In August 1998, two US embassies in East Africa were simultaneously bombed in a suicide attack. A day earlier, the bin Laden-linked Islamic Jihad published a threat, explicitly referring to US involvement in the extradition of the group’s “brothers” from Albania. It warned that an appropriate “response” was imminently forthcoming:
“We are interested in briefly telling the Americans that their message has been received and that the response, which we hope they will read carefully, is being [prepared], because we – with God’s help – will write it in the language that they understand.”
The embassy attacks marked the beginning of bin Laden’s jihad against the US, which one way or another culminated in 9/11. Two of the purported hijackers, Nawaf al-Hazmi and Khalid al-Mihdhar, were veterans of the Bosnian war. As The Grayzone recently reported, both may have been knowingly or unknowingly working for the CIA on the day of the attacks.
Radovan Karadzic, a Titoist UDB spy since 1973, receives CIA funding to combat the Milosevic faction
1994-11-23 – BTF Assessment: The Milosevic-Karadzic Break: Stalemated for Now, November 23, 1994
How the US and NATO reuse the 1990s Yugoslavia wars playbook in Ukraine
Serbian Analyst: How war in Ukraine resembles past conflict in Yugoslavia
XINJIANG UYGHUR PROPAGANDA MIRRORS NATO’S YUGOSLAVIA NARRATIVES
Lesson Learned: Russia Is Now Doing in Venezuela What It Failed to Do in Yugoslavia, Syria
U.S.-led NATO still owes blood debt to Chinese people: Foreign Ministry
Websites:
Balkans Conflict Research Team
Slobodan Milošević International Committee
James Bissett, Canada’s ambassador to Yugoslavia, Bulgaria and Albania. He is widely recognized as one of the foremost authorities on Balkan politics. [2001] We created a monster
Videos:
YouTube playlist on the Balkans/Balkanization of Yugoslavia (There are duplicates of Parenti’s lectures just in case they get removed)
“The Murder of Yugoslavia. The Shadow of Dayton.” A Documentary by Alexei Denisov with English subtitles. (Includes transcript)
Recommended books:
“Srebrenica: Evidence, Context, Politics.” by Edward S Herman (PDF)
To Kill a Nation: The Attack on Yugoslavia by Michael Parenti
Fools’ Crusade: Yugoslavia, NATO, and Western Delusions by Diana Johnstone
Hidden Agenda: The U.S.-NATO War Against Yugoslavia
Bombs for Peace: NATO’s Humanitarian War on Yugoslavia, by George Szamuely
NATO in the Balkans: Voices of Opposition
Rethinking Srebrenica by Stephen Karganovic:
Ms. Cat’s Chronicles 