Albright and Cohen prepare to "prevent genocide" again for Obama
The team of Madeleine Albright, Secretary of State under Bill Clinton, and William Cohen, Defense Secretary under Clinton, have offered advice to the Barack Obama administration on preventing genocide. Under Albright, the United States actually exacerbated genocide by carrying out covert and overt military and intelligence programs in the Great Lakes region of Africa, the Balkans,Iraq, Afghanistan, Sudan, Lebanon, Jordan, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Tibet, Pakistan, East Timor....etc....
Albright and Cohen rolled out a report titled "Preventing Genocide: A Blueprint for U.S. Policymakers" at a pre-inaugural conference, called "Passing the Baton," held in Washington and sponsored by the neocon U.S. Institute for Peace, Lockheed Martin, Raytheon, McDonalds, and Coca Cola.
The Albright-Cohen report was funded by the U.S. Institute for Peace, the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, and the American Academy of Diplomacy. The report is rife with references to Darfur, East Timor, Liberia, Yugoslavia, Rwanda, and Sierra Leone but is silent on the genocide carried out by Israel against southern Lebanon, the West Bank, and Gaza.
The report talks about the genocide committed by the Khmer Rouge's Santebal and the Pinochet junta's Caravan of Death in Chile but fails to mention the support for these operations given by Albright's and Cohen's old friend Henry Kissinger, who was recently tapped as Obama's special envoy to talk to the Kremlin.
Nor does the report mention the genocide of Serbs carried out by Albright's "boy toy," Kosovo Liberation Army terrorist leader Hashim Thaci, who now governs independent Kosovo, a state beholden to organized criminal syndicates that hosts one of the largest U.S. military bases in Europe, Camp Bondsteel.
Arab Middle Easterners still painfully recall the days when Clinton's foreign policy was dictated by the "ABC team" of Albright, Berger [National Security Adviser Sandy Berger], and Cohen, all of whom were known to be pro-Israeli due to their family backgrounds.
Similarly, Albright's Czech roots and the Yugoslav warrant issued for the arrest of her professor-diplomat father, Joseph Korbel, for the theft of art from Prague, brought forth extreme anti-Serbian policies by Albright, much as Zbigniew Brzezinski's Polish heritage evoked almost-pathological hatred of Russia while he served as Jimmy Carter's National Security Adviser.
For aficionados of the Clinton-era interventionist policies that saw the first aerial bombing of a European city, Belgrade, since the days of Adolf Hitler, the Albright-Cohen report does not disappoint. The two argue for a continuance of such tactics to combat "genocide" as arms embargoes (such as the disastrous embargo of Iraq that resulted in hundreds of thousands of deaths of Iraqis, including children), radio and cell phone jamming, no-fly zones, "covert operations," covert military training and assistance, "safe havens," economic threats, increased intelligence collection and surveillance, use of satellites and unmanned aerial vehicles to collect intelligence, jam media and "hate radio," precision targeting and air campaigns.
In a tip of the hat to the Bush administration's much-riduculed "coalition of the willing," the Albright-Cohen report seems to fail to grasp facts from recent history. The "coalition of the willing" in Iraq was a propaganda gimmick and a failure. However, Albright and Cohen suggest that if the Obama administration cannot convince the UN, NATO, or the African Union to take the above actions abroad, "the only choice for the United States may be to try to assemble a coalition of like-minded nations to act." That really worked well the last time the United States took such a path...
