Title: Degraded Capability
Author/Artist: Ed. Phillip Hammond and Edward Herman
Publisher: Pluto Press
Media: Book
Reviewer: Pan
How many people were killed in Kosovo by the Serbs? 10 000? 100 000? The figures rose steadily in the run up to NATO's attack on Serbia, and with these rising figures, echoed unfailingly by a lazy and compliant mass media, so too did the horror stories. Mass graves, concentration camps, ethnic cleansing, massacre. The Serbians became the new Nazis, and no atrocity story could be considered too extreme or too unlikely.
After NATO's war on Serbia how did these body count figures measure up? Where were these tens of thousands of dead? Where were these mass graves? Where were the camps likened to Treblinka? After the bombing campaign the body counts dropped steadily, from hundreds of thousands to tens of thousands to a couple of thousand. The mass graves and the concentration camps turned out to be largely fictitious, yet the media which were so happy to trumpet the inflated figures pumped to them from Brussels were strangely silent. The truth is that we were lied to. Yes, Serbian aggression took place in Kosovo, nobody can deny that. Nor can it be denied that Kosovans were tortured and killed, but the scale of the violence bore little relation to the black propaganda emanating from NATO spokesmen and their political masters in Washington, London and Berlin. Even those of us who were opposed to the war may be surprised by the audacity and the scale of the propaganda war that was an integral part of the NATO campaign. In 'Manufacturing Consent' Chomsky and Herman set out to document the complicity of the media during the Vietnam war, in Nicaragua and El Salvador. 'Degraded Capability' repeats the exercise for NATO's war on the people of Serbia. In this important collection of essays all aspects of the medias role in the war are examined. The background to the conflict in Kosovo is discussed in some detail, including the issues at stake during the Rambouillet talks. The actions of the American government are described, including the fact that conditions were set with the knowledge that Serbia could not comply with them, thus pushing the situation further into crisis. These conditions included the provision that NATO troops be allowed free reign throughout all of Serbia, and that the Kosovo region be committed to a free market economy. What nation-state on earth would allow the presence of hostile troops on its territory? By imposing the clause in the Rambouillet agreement American officials deliberately forced Serbia's hand. Once the talks were forced off the rails the propaganda war really took off. State Department officials talked of 100 000 dead Albanians, and the figure was parroted by a Western media which had already decided that Serbia was the guilty. Those few who questioned the official line were either refused air-time or dismissed as dupes of Milosevic. There were many on the Left who swallowed the NATO party-line completely, thus sowing confusion and indecision in those sections of the population which have traditionally protested against NATO's actions. That the politicians who prosecuted the war were largely from the social-democratic Left meant that the bombing of civilians (on both sides) could be given a 'moral' spin. The fact is that NATO killed more civilians than the Serbians did. This isn't an exercise in weighing up the dead on each side in order to paint one side as white and the other as black. However it is important to distinguish between the way the media has treated the victims of the Serb army and paramilitaries as 'worthy' victims (to quote from 'Manufacturing Consent'), while the Serb and Albanian victims of NATO bombs are 'unworthy'. It is also important to view the NATO campaign in broader terms. Not only was the action against that useful fiction 'international law', it served to illustrate once and for all that the United Nations now play second fiddle to NATO. That this should happen around the time of the fiftieth anniversary of the founding of the organisation, and a time when it was looking for a post-Cold War reason to exist we are asked to accept as coincidence. The mass media lie to us day in and day out. Sometimes those lies are documented and exposed, as they have been here. When that happens it is important that as many people as possible find out about it. For that reason alone this is a book that deserves to be read and talked about. Highly recommended.