No whisper of challenge to Clinton

As President Clinton urged his audience in Dundalk last Tuesday night to commit themselves to peace today, tomorrow and every day for the rest of their lives, did it occur to nobody commenting on those events in the print or broadcast media that there was a certain incongruity in the President of the United States urging such restraint? And if it did occur to them, why did they not say it? Even a passing reference to the incongruity?

Just two years ago Bill Clinton ordered the bombing of a factory in Sudan suspected of links with international terrorism. Several innocent people were killed. The same night he ordered the bombing of a site in Afghanistan. The precision bombers of the US Air Force bombed not just the wrong site but the wrong country.

At the height of the Monica Lewinsky crisis in his Presidency, he ordered the bombing of hundreds of targets in Iraq, and more innocent people were killed. And less than two years ago he, along with the other peacenik visitor to this island, Tony Blair, was responsible for thousands of bombs that rained down on Yugoslavia in what they portrayed as a humanitarian mission.

In that latter escapade they were egged on by the usual warmongers here but also, more curiously, by a phalanx of lefties and liberals who previously were perceived as against the killing of innocent people. This phalanx might be interested in a recently published report of the House of Commons Defence Committee, Lessons of Kosovo.

The decision to wage and continue a 78day air bombardment of Yugoslavia was made in the context of widespread media reports that the Serbs had massacred up to 100,000 people in Kosovo. It is now known that fewer than 1,000 Kosovars were killed by the Serbs, an appalling figure but one which is one-hundredth of the figure that was bandied about to embolden public determination to persist with the bombardment.

The defence committee notes that NATO, the Pentagon and British Ministry of Defence sources did not officially state the 100,000 figure, but it is obvious from the report where it came from. The bombardment decision was also taken after efforts to secure a legal sanction for it failed: two British-sponsored resolutions at the UN Security Council which would have authorised "all necessary measures" were dropped. Messrs Clinton and Blair pressed ahead, however, because, the report makes clear, not to have done so would have undermined the credibility of NATO.

Having conned world opinion into a false belief on the scale of Serbian atrocities, operating without legal sanction and having made a diplomatic resolution impossible, Clinton and Blair started the air bombardment on March 24th, 1999.

Almost certainly more people were killed in the bombardment than in the Serbian campaign it was intended to deter. The defence committee report concentrates on the British part of this bombardment. A total of 1,618 sorties were carried out by British aircraft, of which 1,008 were strike sorties. The report states: "Of these, 244 were precision-guided weapons, 230 were gravity bombs and 531 were cluster weapons".

The committee noted, without comment, a recent report stating that only 2 per cent of the 1,000 lb unguided bombs (dumb bombs) could be confirmed as hitting the target. This means that 225 bombs of 1,000 lb each were dropped from British aircraft on Yugoslavia and hit unintended targets. (The Omagh bomb that massacred 33 people in August 1998 was just one bomb and was less than 1,000 lb.)

The report is even more interesting on the cluster-bombs. It says: "Each of these weapons contains 147 bomblets, primarily firing a plasma-jet able to penetrate armour but having a secondary anti-personnel effect with over 2,000 sharpened pieces cutting into the casing."

The report states that between 8 and 12 per cent of these cluster-bombs (i.e. between 42 and 64 bombs), each with 147 bomblets and 2,000 shrapnel pieces, failed to explode and therefore are lying around on the ground in Yugoslavia. It quotes a report which states that only 31 per cent of these cluster-bombs hit their targets, and a further 29 per cent cannot be accounted for. The British continued to drop cluster-bombs even after the massacre in the market town of Nis on May 7th, 1999.

Is this the kind of "humanitarian" intervention that the EU rapid reaction force is designed to undertake, to which Ireland has recently committed 850 troops? Yes, we know about the opt-out clause on this and the guff about the necessity for UN Security Council sanction. But does anyone seriously believe that Ireland will have the nerve to withstand pressure to join in such an escapade when the credibility of some important institution is at stake and even when there is no UN sanction?

All the more so, when the liberals and lefties think that what was done in Yugoslavia was just fine and when nobody has the nerve to utter a whispered reserve about Bill Clinton's admonitions about peace.

Postscript: the 150 citizens at the back of the council offices in Tallaght that were without electricity for three weeks had the electricity supply turned back on last Friday. However, the supply is entirely erratic.

vbrowne@irish-times.ie