[Excerpts from] Debate: Are Bush and Obama War Criminals?

World-class attorney David Rivkin speaks about the legal issues surrounding the Iraq and Afghanistan wars at a debate held by the Center for Study of Responsive Law in Washington, D.C.

When it comes to war crimes, certainly Clinton’s 1999 actions in Kosovo must qualify.

In that NATO-led assault – which according to some estimates cost as much as $75 billion – we bombed Belgrade for 78 days, killed almost 3,000 civilians, and deliberately shredded the civilian infrastructure (including every bridge across the Danube.)

We devastated the environment, bombed the Chinese embassy, came very close to engaging in armed combat against Russian forces, and in general, pursued a horrific and inhumane strategy to rain misery on the civilian population of Belgrade in order to pressure Milosevic into surrendering.

Why did we do all that? The US did not even have an arguable interest in the Balkans, and no one ever tried to claim that Serbia represented any kind of threat to our nation or our interests.

But for months the Clinton administration had told us that Milosevic was waging a vicious genocide against Albanians Muslims, and needed to be stopped. The New York Times called it a “humanitarian war.” In March 1999 – the same month that the bombing started – Clinton’s State Department publicly suggested that as many as 500,000 Albanian Kosovars had been murdered by Milosevic’s regime. In May of that year, as the bombing campaign was drawing to a close, Secretary of Defense William Cohen lowered that estimate 100,000.

Five years after the bombing, after all the forensic investigations have been completed, the prosecutors at Milosevic’s “War Crimes” trial in the Hague were barely able to document a questionable figure of perhaps 5,000 “bodies and body parts.” During the war, the American people were told that Kosovo was full of mass graves filled with the bodies of murdered Albanians. But none were ever found.

And yet, we never heard any protestors screaming: “Where are the mass graves?” – even though, in fact, there weren’t any.

It is my very strong opinion that ANYONE who opposed the War in Iraq, but failed to condemn the Bill Clinton/NATO war crime in Kosovo at the time it was happening, has absolutely nothing to say that is worth listening to about the Bush administration’s decision to overthrow Saddam.

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