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Via Workers World News Service
Reprinted from the Nov. 28, 1996
issue of Workers World newspaper
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Sounds like Nixon

Clinton says troops to stay in Bosnia

By Gary Wilson

It seems like oldies week in Washington. And the tune sounds kind of like Vietnam.

First the president sent troops into Bosnia with a promise that they'd be out before the end of 1996. Now, with the elections over, Clinton says U.S. troops will occupy Bosnia for another two years-in order to get the job done.

Sounding like the Vietnam-era presidents who constantly predicted a quick end to the U.S. military's "police action," Clinton told a Nov. 15 news conference, "We will propose to our NATO allies that by June of 1998, the mission's work should be done and the forces should be able to withdraw."

Clinton added, with the bluster typical of an imperialist chief, "There will be an American commander and tough rules of engagement." Again, the Pentagon will be the biggest bully on the block.

Another way Bosnia is like Vietnam is that what is said is not what is meant. Official statements from Washington don't give the real reasons the U.S. military is in the Balkans region.

There was never a humanitarian goal. There have been bloodier battles around the world without Pentagon intervention. So there must be other reasons.

The driving force behind the breakup of socialist Yugoslavia and the ethnic divisions that have emerged has been obscured. But the roots lie in the Cold War drive of the U.S. and Western Europe to destroy socialism in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union.

And the U.S.-led NATO force is the front line of an expanding U.S. empire into the former socialist countries as well as the Middle East.

The point is imperialism

In January 1996, a Prague Appeal signed by representatives from 32 organizations in 21 countries on three continents declared "NATO must be stopped now."

The statement came out of a conference in Prague that linked the NATO occupation of Bosnia with NATO's expansion. The statement gives a clearer understanding of what's behind the expanding U.S.-NATO occupation of Bosnia:

"Current efforts to expand NATO eastward and southward have nothing to do with strengthening the security of any country in Eastern Europe or the Mediterranean. Their sole purpose is to protect what the major Western Powers, notably the United States and Germany, conceive to be their vital interests abroad. They are part of a new and aggressive imperialist threat in Eastern Europe, the Commonwealth of Independent States and the Middle East," the statement declares.

"NATO has never been a defender of human rights. It has, in its first major military actions, taken sides in the Yugoslav civil wars. Its actions against the Croatian Serbs and the Bosnian Serbs demonstrate what NATO is capable of. There are clear signs that NATO is considering interventions elsewhere in Europe already, notably in the Transcaucasus.

"Even Western analysts are saying that the purpose of such intervention is to begin another and tighter encirclement of the countries of the former Soviet Union," the statement continues.

"It should be made clear that the expansion of NATO is not fundamentally aimed at ensuring the security of the peoples of Eastern Europe and the Mediterranean. Rather it is aimed at stabilizing the market system in Eastern Europe.

"This means ensuring the permanence of economic disintegration and decline there. It means locking the peoples of Eastern Europe into a state of underdevelopment," the statement adds.

It concludes: "We call upon the peoples of Eastern Europe, the Commonwealth of Independent States and the Mediterranean to join in reviving, expanding and reconstructing a world peace movement. ... The enlargement of NATO must be stopped now."

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