Strong show on Democracy Now today. Highlight was last two minutes, with Jeremy Scahill giving this excellent summary of Holbrooke and Yugoslavia:
Richard Holbrooke was a central player in the disintegration of Yugoslavia in the 1990s. Everyone knows. The whole world knows. Slobodan Miloševic was a mass murderer and a thug. Radovan Karadžic, Ratko Mladic, all of these Bosnian Serb leaders, they were thugs. What never gets talked about is that what Richard Holbrooke and other U.S. officials were doing was supporting Croatian ethnic cleansers that were trained by U.S. private military company MPRI to engage in the single-greatest ethnic cleansing of the war against the Serbs in Krajina.
Then you fast-forward to later in the Clinton administration, Richard Holbrooke was a key player in essentially providing a false pretext for war over Kosovo against Slobodan Miloševic, known as the Rambouillet Accord. The U.S. essentially said to Slobodan Miloševic, "If you don’t sign an agreement that would allow us to occupy your country, allow you to take control of your media outlets, allow our forces to be immunized from prosecution in your country, we are going to bomb you." Richard Holbrooke delivered that ultimatum to Slobodan Miloševic following the Rambouillet discussion. Miloševic, like any leader in the world, rejected an occupation agreement, and so the United States bombed. Holbrooke, when you and I questioned him later at the Overseas Press Club in April of 1999, denied that he had ever said that that wasn't an occupation agreement, when in fact he had said it on Charlie Rose’s show.At that same event where you and I confronted Richard Holbrooke, the Overseas Press Club Award, he celebrated the bombing of Radio Television Serbia, after Eason Jordan, the president of CNN International, told him it had been bombed. And he said that it was a positive development. On a night when they were honoring foreign correspondents, Richard Holbrooke was praising the outright murder of media workers—16 media workers, including make-up artists and engineers—none of Miloševic’s propagandists killed. RTS was not taken off the air. It was a war crime according to Amnesty International, and praised by Richard Holbrooke. To me, that’s the embodiment of what his career has meant in terms of its projection of U.S. power around the world. There are good victims and bad victims; the media workers of Radio Television Serbia, they deserved to die that day, but the journalists of the United States or China or North Korea who get imprisoned in foreign countries, those are worthy victims. The same can be said about the way the U.S. prosecuted its war in Yugoslavia and in Iraq, Turkey with the Kurds, Richard Holbrooke at the center of it for his whole career.