Posted on 12/15/2010 7:04:17 PM PST by Ravnagora
A few hours before Richard Holbrooke’s death last Monday, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton told a group of America’s top diplomats gathered at the State Department for a Christmas party that he was “practically synonymous with American foreign policy.” Her assessment is correct: Richard Holbrooke’s career embodies some of the least attractive traits of contemporary American diplomacy.
As assistant secretary of state for East Asian and Pacific affairs under Jimmy Carter, Holbrooke was instrumental in securing continued U.S. support for Indonesia’s occupation of East Timor. In 1997 he authorized arms deliveries to Indonesia in violation of the supposed U.S. arms embargo against Suharto’s regime. It was during this period the suppression of the Christian Timorese by the Muslim Indonesians reached genocidal levels, killing 200,000 people or about a third of the island’s population. Holbrooke’s 1997 response to a reporter’s question about the tragedy to which he had directly contributed was illustrative of his character and style: “I want to stress I am not remotely interested in getting involved in an argument over the actual number of people killed. People were killed and that always is a tragedy but what is at issue is the actual situation in Timor today… [As for the numbers of victims] … we are never going to know anyway. “
True to form, Holbrooke lied to Congress in 1979 that the famine in East Timor – caused by the Indonesian army’s scorched-earth campaign – was a belated consequence of Portuguese colonial misrule. Over two decades later, in a lavish tribute to the diplomatic skill of his friend Paul Wolfowitz – who was the US ambassador to Indonesia at that time – Holbrooke boasted how “Paul and I have been in frequent touch to make sure that we keep East Timor out of the [1980] presidential campaign, where it would do no good to American or Indonesian interests.”
Far from “bringing peace to Bosnia” at Dayton in 1995, Holbrooke presided over the imposition of a package broadly similar to the 1992 Lisbon Plan brokered by the European Union – the deal which could have avoided the war altogether but which was deliberately torpedoed from Washington. The chief outcome of the Bosnian war was a NATO transformed into a tool of U.S. hegemony, and the renewal of American dominance in European affairs to an extent not seen since Kennedy. The settlement at Dayton was not unlike a plausible compromise that would have been reached much earlier had America remained on the sidelines; but the meaning of Dayton was evident from Holbrooke’s boast, a year later, “We are re-engaged in the world, and Bosnia was the test.”
As special representative to Cyprus in 1997, Holbrooke irritated the Europeans by his strident advocacy of Turkey’s membership in the European Union. His bias in favor of Muslim Turks against Christian Greeks in the divided island reflected a consistent bipartisan trend in U.S. foreign policy making. Holbrooke was not the creator of that trend, but he was its enthusiastic supporter – from Indonesia to Bosnia, from Cyprus to Kosovo.
In 1998 Holbrooke was back in the Balkans, preparing the ground for Clinton’s Kosovo war against Serbia. On June 24 of that year he met with the KLA commander Gani Shehu in the village of Junik, near the Yugoslav-Albanian border, dutifully taking his shoes off like a good dhimmi. He promised American support for the the KLA campaign of violence against the Serbs. Earlier that year Clinton’s Balkans envoy Robert Gelbard correctly characterized the KLA as a terrorist organization, but Holbrooke’s visit signified a change of policy and directly led to Racak, Rambouillet, NATO bombing, and Kosovo’s transformation into the Jihadist mafia state that it is today.
The most eloquent epitaphs are crafted while the person is still alive. Borrowing a page out of Richard Holbrooke’s diplomatic manual, Vice President Joe Biden called him “the most egotistical bastard I’ve ever met.” Norwegian diplomat Kai Eide, until last March the top UN official in Afghanistan, said five weeks ago of Holbrooke’s Afghan performance, “This is not the Balkans, where you can bully people into accepting a solution.” Eide added that the U.S. Special Envoy did not fully grasp “the complexity of the Afghan political scene.”
Holbrooke’s grasp of the complexities was illustrated by his calling the Serbs “murderous assholes” and by referring to Radovan Karadzic as the Osama Bin Laden of Europe. He was “synonymous with American foreign policy,” indeed: he was a coarse, arrogant bully who understood diplomacy as the art of imposing one’s will at the point of a gun. Richard Charles Albert Holbrooke was a bad man advocating and implementing bad policies.
*****
Not in my books.
I come to bury Caesar, not to praise him.
All elections have consequences. Dumbed down plantation electorate is what brings these communist one-worlders to the fore. It takes decades to undo their damage. They are accessories to genocide. In Liberal-speak, — enablers.
Yeah yeah. I’ll tune out until you get to the “HAVOC!!!!” part, then.
The man is a traitor who was actively working to destroy our sovereignty as a leader in the NWO / globalist elitest societies. CFR, Bildeburgers, Trilateral Commision, God knows what else.
Even scumbags like him die. Good riddance to bad rubbish.
Dickie Holbrooke was not "bad", he was pure Evil.
At the sole behest, direction and intent of the Clintons.
Never forget that part.
That hit the nail on the head.
December 16, 2010
The Los Angeles Times
Letter to the Editor
Dear Editor:
Showing Richard Holbrooke sitting next to a KLA commander in Kosovo without identifying this brutal thug who murdered hundreds of Serbs was a clear example of partisan journalism.
This “Balkan peace negotiator’s” bloody legacy stretched from Vietnam and Indonesia to Belgrade. He was a rabid Serbophobe who perpetrated the concept of collective guilt of all Serbs. In front of the five heads of UNMIK on a hot August night in Pristina in 1999 he bellowed: “Forget multi-ethnic Kosovo. Forget Resolution 1244. We only signed that to get rid of the Serbs.” And those official representatives of the “international community” remained coolly silent. Only one official, Dennis MacNamara, head of UNHCR spoke up, questioning why the UN took on the mission if the expulsion of the Serbs was a foregone conclusion. Holbrooke brushed off his inquiry; the other “dignitaries” remained quiet, much like the Times when it comes to Serbian victims of Holbrooke’s hidden Balkan agenda.
Today there are 1.2 million Serbian refugees from Croatia, Bosnia and Kosovo. Twice the number of all other ethnic refugees. It is apparent who was the most successful at “Ethnic Cleansing.” Since the end of the war and the arrival of NATO the Albanians have destroyed 513 ancient Christian Serbian churches, right under the noses of 14,000 NATO troops, fulfilling Holbrooke’s plan of “getting rid of the Serbs.”
And the Times sings his praises?
William Dorich
Los Angeles
The writer is the author of 5 books on Balkan history and music including his 1992 book, Kosovo.
******
Raging bull diplomacy leaves countries in ruin
By Liz Milanovich, Edmonton Journal January 3, 2011
Re: ‘The raging bull of U.S. diplomacy,’ The Journal, Dec. 26, 2010
The very apropos title equates the diplomacy of the late Richard Holbrooke to a raging bull. We all know that raging bulls are anything but diplomatic, and most often act with little forethought about the damage that will result from their rage. Somehow those who wrote the article missed that point completely. To this day, Bosnia is erroneously held up as a successful template of “Holbrooke diplomacy.”
On the contrary, the wool continues to be pulled over our eyes, all done to ignore the raging headache that has resulted from international interventionism in former Yugoslavia. The tiny sovereign country of Yugoslavia was dismembered into even tinier entities. Bosnia and Kosovo are prime examples of international meddling and so-called nation building gone amok.
Better that we pay closer attention to what Canada’s Maj. Gen. Lewis Mackenzie had to say in The Real Story Behind Srebrenica, readily accessible on the Internet. And, it is advisable to read Council of Europe investigator Dick Marty’s recent report on suspected murky activities in Kosovo.
We may yet get to the truth about the calamities that international bullying tactics have wrought in former Yugoslavia.
Liz Milanovich
Edmonton
*****
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