Reflections on Lawlessness

There’s been quite a stirring in Belgrade, Serbia. Serbs have attacked the U.S. embassy there, and the U.S. is now lecturing the country it chose to illegally bomb in 1999. It’s lecturing it on legal conventions and lawful behavior, and on being reprehensible. Stuff like that. The U.S., it seems, has such high moral standing in the world that its representatives feel it their duty to let others know what is acceptable behavior, what is not.

Serbians attacked the Belgrade embassy after the State of Kosovo announced its independence from Serbia last week. This is the culmination of a long process that started before Clinton’s 1999 attack. His bombing campaign caused a massive migration of Albanians, which the U.S. then blamed on the Serbs. He then sent in troops to ‘protect’ these Albanians. The result was Camp Bondsteel, a new U.S. military installation in Kosovo that just happens to be guarding an oil pipeline as well.

Clinton also bombed the Chinese embassy during that 1999 attack. Nice touch.

It’s high comedy. Here’s what Undersecretary of State for Political Affairs R. Nicholas Burns had to say:

“They’d better get it, because they have a fundamental responsibility to protect our diplomats and our embassy and to protect American citizens. What happened yesterday in Belgrade was absolutely reprehensible.”

“This kind of thing should not happen in a civilized country. It doesn’t happen in the United States of America. It doesn’t happen in most world capitals. So the Serb government needs to reflect seriously about the responsibility it has under the Vienna Convention.”

Burns makes no mention of the Chinese embassy bombing, and in the audio, when he says “Vienna”, he does a Freudian, and says something like “Veneva”, blending “Geneva” and “Vienna”.

Said the Serbs: “The “new paradigm” of the 1999 American attack on Serbia and the Chinese embassy bombing render obsolete Vienna’s strict limitations on embassy protection and render quaint some of its provisions.”