To kill a nation The attack on Yugoslavia

For 78 days in 1999, the United States and NATO forces responded to the violence in Kosovo by conducting aerial attacks against Yugoslavia. Parenti gives an unabashedly critical assessment of this intervention, based on a solid and passionate rejection of Western leaders' "lies" about events in the Balkans and Western interests in that part of the world. Readers not familiar with his leftist analysis may find Parenti's dismissal of NATO's justification for its 1999 bombing campaign shocking or silly; others may find it thought-provoking. He argues that Western intervention in Yugoslavia was driven not by a humanitarian desire to stop ethnic cleansing, but rather by a self-interested determination to subjugate formerly Communist countries to the forces of free-market globalization. The government-controlled media in the U.S., he claims, was unfairly prejudiced against Slobodan Milosevic, once he was no longer of use to the West. Parenti makes compelling points about biased media coverage of Serbia, but he seems to misunderstand the huge role that the Serbian government played in creating the conditions for violence in Yugoslavia. While other Balkan political and military leaders may also deserve blame, Milosevic does not deserve a defense. Sometimes Parenti's assessments seem paranoid, as in his claim that an elementary school was bombed because it bore the name of a Socialist leader. And his economic and political arguments, as well as his accounts of U.S. involvements in other parts of the world not covered by mainstream media, though they may give one pause, will appeal mostly to readers who share his leftist perspective. (Jan.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

Prominent social critic Parenti (History as Mystery, 1999, etc.) pens a fierce, elegantly constructed elegy not just for the lives sacrificed in the Balkan wars, but for concepts of national sovereignty and constitutionality, which appear to be lost to a corporate-sanctioned new world order. Parenti dissents from every piece of conventional wisdom about the former Yugoslavia’s breakup, the Kosovo crisis, and the NATO bombing campaign against the Serbian state in purported support of the Kosovar Albanians. Instead, he assembles a scarily persuasive alternate history in which an American-led coalition backed by aggressive financial interests precipitated the civil war and the profoundly destructive air campaign that killed at least 3,000 civilians. He assumes the difficult defense of the Serbs with gusto, questioning the “publicized size, scope, and frequency of Serbian [war] crimes” and prodding readers to reconsider fundamental notions about the Milosevic regime. (One of Parenti’s many effective tangents addresses the issue of why the US supports certain brutal dictatorships, but not others.) His explorations of Croatian, Bosnian Muslim, and Kosovar Albanian violence, quasi-fascism, and mediated falsification of wartime reality are shocking, as are his dissections of the KLA’s organized-crime ties and of the roles played by other European nations, principally Germany, in precipitating the crisis. Nor does the mainstream press, especially the New York Times, escape criticism for consistently biased, compromised reportage. Parenti is keenly attuned to the war’s economic implications, postulating that the real target of American-led aggression was Yugoslavia’s efficient socialist system and that post-bombardment recovery prospects are grim. He writes with a taut cadence that exudes conviction. At times he elides opposing viewpoints, the same sin he ascribes to NATO-controlled media and governmental sources, but taken as a whole his work is passionately convincing. Like Thomas Frank’s recent One Market Under God (p. 1443) and Ken Silverstein’s Private Warriors (p. 947), this book raises serious questions about the rise of militarized free-market privatization. Extremely disturbing, but, for the brave, jolting and necessary reading.