War is hell, but it is also lies, and the Pentagon, State Department, Clinton Administration, and the major networks have fallen right into old patterns as the expanded bombing of Serbia and Kosovo enters its fourth week. So far the bombings have achieved no discernable military goals, but they have: united Serbs behind Slobodan Milosevic; created, before the closing of the borders, a torrent of Kosovar refuges that were apparently fleeing not from Serb atrocities but from the bombing itself; targetted and destroyed a wide range of civilian targets and caused an untold amount of "collateral damage" (that's weasel-speak for civilian deaths); and been a financial bonanza for weapon-makers, especially Lockheed-Martin.

One of the more interesting aspects of this conflict is that it is the first time the target country ('90s wars, as fought by the United States, are inevitably one-sided affairs, more massacre than war) has had extensive access to the Internet. This has led to the curious practice of Serb nationalists spamming U.S. and European addressing with angry pleas to stop the bombing; it has also allowed a clearer, more thoughtful presentation of the opposing side's view than we usually get in a war, and allowed a much more immediate portrayal of what it's like to get bombed. And it has also meant the U.S. government media has had a harder time than usual maintaining a happy face and an information blockade, with more honest international coverage readily available. To wit:

"The NATO bombing of Yugoslavia must stop, the moderate Kosovo Albanian political leader Ibrahim Rugova told journalists in Pristina Wednesday_. Rugova was speaking at his home in the Kosovo capital after reports that he was in hiding and his house had been destroyed." [Agence France-Presse, March 31]

"U.S. diplomatic and Kosovo Albanian sources on Wednesday contradicted an earlier claim from NATO that two prominent Kosovo Albanian leaders were summarily executed by the Serbs." [MSNBC, March 31]

"A football stadium in the Kosovo capital Pristina stood empty Wed nesday, one day after reports that Serbian forces were herding ethnic Albanians there in an apparent prelude to a massacre. An AFP report er who visited the site said the stadium, whose galleries can host some 25,000 spectators, was completely empty and there were no signs of any mass groupings." [Agence France-Presse, March 31]

"Mirvei, a tall Albanian woman clutch ing her four-month-old baby, looked bewildered when asked if Serbian troops had driven her out. `There were no Serbs,' she said. `We were frightened of the bombs.' Red Cross officials say many of the most recent arrivals [in Macedonia] intend to return to Kosovo as soon as the NATO bombardment stops." [London Sunday Times, March 27]

An excellent source for information throughout the war has been Z Magazine's web site, ZNet (http://www.zmag.org), which posted the following useful compendium of information:

BALKAN STATS I

FROM A COLUMN BY TONY SNOW: Key members of the United States Senate sat slack-jawed through a confidential briefing last Thursday from the Clinton administration foreign-policy team. After the foreign-policy wise men asserted that the United States has a moral imperative to stop the murderous Serbian president, Slobodan Milosevic, one senator asked: How many Albanians have Milosevic's troops massacred this year? The president's emissaries turned ashen. They glanced at each other. They rifled through their papers. One hazarded a guess: "Two thousand?" No, the senator replied, that was the number for all of last year. He wanted figures for the last month--or even the year to date, since the president had painted such a grisly picture of genocide in his March 24 address to the nation. The senator pressed on. How often have such slaughters occurred? Nobody knew. As it turns out, Kosovo has been about as bloody this year as, say, Atlanta. You can measure the deaths not in the hundreds, but dozens. (I'm not trying to deny Milosevic's brutality here; only to provide some comparisons.) More people died last week in Borneo than have expired this year in Kosovar bloodshed--more died in a single Russian bomb blast; in a single outburst of violence in East Timor; in a single day in Rwanda. China has been bloodier this year.

BALKAN STATS II

--Estimated number of persons killed in Iraq due to American-led sanctions: over 1,000,000 --Estimated number of persons killed in the Sudan over the past 15 years: 1,500,000 --Estimated number of persons killed in Rwanda over the last five years: 500,000 --Estimated number of persons killed in Chechnya: 80,000 --Estimated number of people dying each day around the world because of lack of water, clothing, shelter, food or medicine: 100,000 --Estimated number of people in the world who go to bed hungry: 800,000,000 --Estimated number of persons killed in Kosovo last year: 2,000

BALKAN STATS III

--Estimate of new households watching CNN thanks to its war coverage: 472,000

BALKAN STATS IV

--Cost of America's 21 B-2 bombers: $42 billion --Value of Yugoslavian GDP: $43 billion --UN budget as a percentage of the Pentagon budget: 5%

For a sampling of the untold international consequences of the bombing, there is this, from an interview with Dmitri Glinski Vassiliev, a research associate at George Washington University:

"...Polls show that 92 percent of Russians condemn the bombings, and 70,000 young people have registered as would-be volunteers for Yugoslavia. U.S. actions have given a big boost to militant anti-American politicians in Russia. They may win the December elections and unseat Yevgenii Primakov's moderate reformist government that has been trying to abstain from an open confrontation with NATO. The American-led operation against Yugoslavia is an egregious violation of international law. The Clinton administration and its allies have arrogated the authority of the virtually defunct United Nations. The aggravation of the humanitarian disaster as a result of the bombing undermines the claims that Cold War institutions could be converted

to humanitarian purposes."

At this point, the most important contest is not in the Balkans but in the United States: a race between the steadily louder calls for ground troop intervention, and the access of an already ambivalent public to information that puts the lie to the war rationale. Thus far, in a neat summary of the trick that has marked Bill Clinton's career, the most ardent supporters for an essentially reactionary policy are liberals. Their anti-war instincts have been paralyzed by the alleged massacres unfolding and the spectre of Rwanda and other tragedies where nothing was done. It is becoming more and more apparent that not only is this not a comparable situation, but the results of the attacks have increased, not lessened, the danger to Albanian Kosovars--who, after all, never asked for this intervention in the first place. (That's in contrast to, say, Rwanda, where the desperate pleas of an unfolding horror fell on deaf ears, including Bill Clinton's.)

The bombing of Serbia has been, quite simply, a foreign policy debacle. It is a quicksand, and the current instinct of sinking policy-makers has been to get out by jumping up and down harder. Instead, as many othre countries have been suggesting, we need simply to stop: call a ceasefire, and attempt the negotiations that have never seriously been tried. Preferably without the United States and other NATO countries--one of whose negotiation concessions could be to pay reparations for this folly--as mediators.