Masters of the Universe Nato's Balkan Crusade [Paperback]

NATO’s war on Yugoslavia in the spring of 1999 was unleashed in the name of democracy and human rights. This view was challenged by the world’s three largest countries, India, China and Russia, who saw the bombing of Serbia and Kosovo as a naked attempt to assert US dominance in an unstable world.

In the West, media networks were joined by substantial sectors of left/liberal opinion in supporting the war. Nonetheless, a wide variety of figures emerged to challenge the prevailing consensus. Their work, gathered here for the first time, forms a collection of key statements and anti-war writings from some of democracy’s most eloquent dissidents—Noam Chomsky, Harold Pinter, Edward Said and many others—who provide carefully researched examinations of the real motives for the US action, dissections and critiques of the ideology of ‘humanitarian warfare’, and chartings of the unnecessary tragedy of a region laid to waste in the pursuance of Great Power politics.

This reader presents some of the most important texts on NATO’s Balkan crusade and forms a major intervention in the debate on global geo-political strategy after the Cold War.Tariq Aliis a writer and filmmaker. He has written more than a dozen books on world history and politics—includingPirates of the Caribbean,Bush in Babylon,The Clash of FundamentalismsandThe Obama Syndrome—as well as five novels in his Islam Quintet series and scripts for the stage and screen. He is an editor of theNew Left Reviewand lives in London.

Giovanni Arrighi(1937–2009) was Professor of Sociology at Johns Hopkins University. His books includeThe Long Twentieth Century,Adam Smith in Beijing, and, with Beverly Silver,Chaos and Governance in the Modern World System. His work has appeared in many publications, includingNew Left Review—who published