Death of a Courtier,

And Other Vile Follies

by Chris Floyd

The career of the late imperial courtier par excellence Richard Holbrooke is summed up well here by Diane Johnstone. As she notes:

"The Dayton Peace Accords were presented as a heroic victory for peace extracted by the brilliant Holbrooke from a reluctant Milosevic, who had to be "bombed to the negotiating table" by the United States. In reality, the U.S. government was fully aware that Milosevic was eager for peace in Bosnia to free Serbia from crippling economic sanctions. It was the Bosnian Muslim leader Alija Izetbegovic who wanted to keep the war going, with U.S. military help.

In reality, the U.S. bombed the Serbs in order to get Izetbegovic to the negotiating table. And the agreement reached in the autumn of 1995 was not very different from the agreement reached in March 1992 by the three ethnic groups under European Community auspices, which could have prevented the entire civil war, if it had not been sabotaged by Izetbegovic, who withdrew his agreement with the encouragement of the then U.S. ambassador Warren Zimmermann. In short, far from being the great peacemaker in the Balkans, the United States first encouraged the Muslim side to fight for its goal of a centralized Bosnia, and then sponsored a weakened federated Bosnia – after nearly four years of bloodshed which left the populations bereft and embittered.

The real purpose of all this, as Holbrooke made quite clear in To End a War, was to demonstrate that Europeans could not manage their own vital affairs and that the United States remained the "indispensable nation". ... His victory was a defeat for diplomacy. The spectacle of bombing plus Dayton was designed to show that only the threat or application of U.S. military might could end conflicts."

1. John Caruso is excellent in this piece on how the Republicans are trying to save universal health care. An excerpt:

What I like best about the the health care drama in the US right now is how nearly everyone is fighting on the other side, unwittingly or otherwise.  We've got Democrats working to save Obama's nationalized version of Romneycare, while Republicans are doing everything possible to defeat insurance-purchasing mandates that would give even greater power and wealth to their corporate patrons in the health insurance industry.  I haven't had this much fun (politically, anyway) since the waning days of the Clinton administration, when give-peace-a-chance Republicans were trying to undermine Clinton's determined efforts to kill Yugoslavs and Iraqis, and Democrats and their "progressive" enablers were clamoring for more more more smart bombs.

Will Republicans be able to rescue universal health care in the US from the seemingly mortal blow it took from Obama and the Democrats?  Time will tell.

2. Robert Scheer is excellent in this piece on the true implications of Bill Clinton's recent appearance at the White House: a spectacle that revealed the utter political bankruptcy of the Obama regime; its moral bankruptcy has been evident from the beginning; indeed, from before the beginning. As Scheer puts it: the "sight of Bill Clinton back on the White House podium defending tax cuts for the super-rich was more a sick joke than a serious amplification of economic policy."

3. Speaking of moral bankruptcy, Glenn Greenwald outlines, in copious detail, the torture that Obama is inflicting on Bradley Manning in his endless months of captivity without trial. It is harrowing stuff.

4. Professor Michael Brenner is excellent in this description of the utter sham, the empty suit of clothes who may soon be ruling over us: the murderous Pentagon bureaucrat, David Petraeus.

5. Speaking of utter shams, Patrick Cockburn follows billions of dollars down the war profiteering hole in Afghanistan, where millions face "food insecurity" this winter -- a full nine years after their "liberation."