A pattern in Bushland

Two items of recent vintage well point out the nature of W's administration.

Al Jazeera has this story: Bush waives law to help Pakistan - George Bush, US president, has exempted Pakistan from a law that restricts funding countries where the legitimate head of state was deposed by a military coup, as in Pakistan.

In an article entitled The Troubled Birth of Kosovo Charles Simic has some interesting observations to make about Kosovo, Serbia and the US.

At some point in 1998, or perhaps earlier, the State Department decided to take the separatist Kosovo Liberation Army—whose members were being armed from Albania, where the US already had a military and CIA presence—off the US list of terrorist groups, and to describe its forces instead as an insurgency. The change most likely had more to do with the aim of maintaining a US military presence in that part of the world than with outrages committed by Serbs in what they saw as revenge for the gunning down of their policemen and civilians. The moment Kosovo was liberated by NATO forces in 1999, after weeks of US bombing of not only Kosovo but also Belgrade and other parts of Serbia, the US started building Camp Bondsteel on 955 acres of farmland near the Kosovar town of Urosevac, on what was then still Serbian territory. The US strategists clearly expected that this area would never again be part of Serbia.

Insurgency and not terrorists: Kosovo and Iraq parallels? As Chalmers Johnson described in his book Nemesis, bases around the world are a primary US strategic objective, part of a many-tentacled empire.

Still Serbian territory: a violation of the territorial integrity of another nation. Simic addressed that in the first sentence of his article.

The decision of the United States, Great Britain, France, Germany, and a number of other countries to break with international law, which regards the territorial integrity and sovereignty of states as sacrosanct, and to permit Albanian separatists in Kosovo to declare independence from Serbia was an act so extraordinary in international relations that it had to take place outside the United Nations, where its illegality would have been hard to justify.

Amazingly, Condi Rice justified this action.

After congratulating the Kosovars on their independence, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice explained that this was to be "a special case," the sole exception ever to the rule of territorial integrity of nations under international law, and that separatists elsewhere ought not to look upon this act as a precedent.

Huh? Sole exception ever? Why this one?