On March 24, 1999, most Americans believed the United States was embarking on an idealistic humanitarian crusade to put a stop to the ethnic cleansing in Kosovo. While the suffering of the Albanian Kosovars by the heavy handed Serbian police is certainly unjust and contemptuous, the commission of humanitarian atrocities have not been limited to Serbia. Tragically, all sides are guilty, including the United States.

President Clinton sold the war to America by pointing to alleged massacres by Serb police of ethnic Albanians in Kosovo like the one which allegedly occurred in Racak in January. Returning from his European tour in early May, he reiterated, "...if the U.S. walks away from an atrocity like this where we can have an impact, then these types of situations will spread."

According to further investigations, many of these "massacres" were staged by the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) to get NATO involved. U.S. and European intelligence reports also revealed Clinton and NATO were warned well in advance that the air strikes would bring Serb retaliation against Albanians in Kosovo once the NATO military operation commenced. When White House spokesman Joe Lockhart was asked about this, he replied, "We knew he was going to do this."

Worse, Clinton even knew the bombing would not work. On March 30th NATO European Commander Wesley Clark admitted that from the very beginning, "we never thought that through air power we could stop these killings on the ground." The only way the Kosovar tragedy could have been avoided was to stop Milosevic before he started his military buildup in Kosovo, which was never seriously considered.

The fact that Clinton and NATO knew in advance that their "humanitarian" effort was going to precipitate a humanitarian crisis of gargantuan proportions, yet made no serious efforts to prepare for it, is as contemptuous as Milosevic’s ethnic cleansing. NATO’s bumbling and ambiguous policy not only failed to provide humanitarian protection for the Kosovars, but greatly amplified the Kosovar tragedy.

When KLA officials were warned that NATO air strikes against Yugoslavia would trigger retaliatory violence by Serb forces in Kosovo, the Chicago Tribune reported one KLA leader as saying: "We don’t care. 400,000 Kosovars can be sacrificed for our independence."

Kosovo represents a complete reversal of previous NATO policy. One only needs to look back four years to Croatia where 500,000 terrorized civilians were driven from the land in which they had lived for centuries. Fourteen thousand civilians were killed and additional tens of thousands fell victim to plunder, rape and mass murder. At the time, observers described it as the largest human population displacement in Europe since WWII.

The victims were not ethnic Albanians but rather ethnic Serbs driven from the Krajina Province of Croatia by troops under the command of Croatian dictator Franjo Tudjman. No threats of military retaliation were issued by the Administration or NATO following these humanitarian atrocities. NATO actually encouraged it.

Like the Albanian Kosovars, the Krajina Serbs were secessionists seeking independence in a land that they considered an ancestral ethnic homeland. Unlike the KLA, the AP reported the Krajina Serbs were fearful of the consequences of further resistance and were willing "to discuss terms for reintegrating territory they hold into Croatia’s domain." Croatia was not interested. On August 4, 1995, they commenced their ethnic cleansing of the Krajina Serbs.

In sharp contrast, the KLA seeks to seize Kosovo from Serbia and integrate it into a "Greater Albania" which would include parts of Montenegro, Macedonia, and Greece. The London Times reported the KLA, in "the judgment of senior police officers across Europe," is "a Marxist-led force funded by questionable sources, including drug money." "More remarkable still, and even more unsettling," remarked U.S. Representative Helen Chenoweth, "is the fact that the beneficiary in the case of Kosovo — the KLA — is a collection of Maoist drug-peddlers and terrorists who have been armed by Iran and provided with training and support by Saudi terrorist financier Osama bin Ladin, who is the world’s most notorious sponsor of international terrorism." Bin Ladin allegedly masterminded the embassy bombings in Africa last year, making him America’s number one enemy.

What kind of foreign policy supports terrorists to defeat a tyrant? Why did the United States go to war over Kosovo while supporting Croatia? Why did the Clinton Administration rush to the aid of the ethnic Albanians and seem to ignore immeasurably more heinous violations against basic human rights in China, the Sudan, Rwanda, Tibet, Turkey, and others? Apparently, an event qualifies as a humanitarian catastrophe only when it suits the purposes of the global power elite.

Unless the U.S. is now supporting a policy of destroying a people in the name of saving them, Kosovo cannot be about humanitarianism.