Masters of the Universe: NATO's Balkan Crusade

The essays in this book on the Balkans, notes editor Tariq Ali in his introduction, "share one common approach to the region: all regard the break-up of Yugoslavia as a major European disaster." They are also uniformly and often vituperatively negative when it comes to NATO's 1999 war against Serbia. This event dominates the book, and the contributors have nothing good to say about it. The war gave a "green light" for Russia to assault Chechnya ("Could it be that this is Moscow's reward for helping to end the war in Kosovo?"), intensified poor relations between India and Pakistan, and made China more aggressive toward Taiwan and Tibet. Ali even asserts that the Chinese embassy in Belgrade--whose bombing was called an accident at the time--was "clearly included" on the NATO hit list. (Stranger still is Ali's approving quotation from Hitler's Mein Kampf on the subject of English media manipulation; his point is the moral equivalence of NATO's press relations and Nazi propaganda.)

All the views contained in Masters of the Universe? are way to the left of mainstream opinion; essay authors include Noam Chomsky and Edward Said. A spirit of anti-Americanism also pervades the book. Gilbert Achcar, for instance, notes "the current level of the U.S. defense budget corresponds rationally to the U.S. aspiration to imperial expansion and exclusive global hegemony." In other words, the United States fought in Kosovo because it wants to rule the world. Somewhat underscoring this claim, Ellen Meiksins Wood cites an ill-advised comment by President Clinton about Kosovo's importance: "If we're going to have a strong economic relationship that includes our ability to sell around the world, Europe has got to be a key.... That's what this Kosovo thing is all about." But, overall, the left-wing slant of the contributors of Masters of the Universe? makes it a less-than-balanced assessment of what has happened in the Balkans. --John J. Miller