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The last war of the 20th century

Foreword

The idea for this book was born during the time that NATO war planes were flying daily from military bases in Italy in order to drop bombs on Yugoslavia. The Socialist Party, which was the only political party in the Netherlands to take a stand against Operation Allied Force, organised regular public debates during this time under the slogan 'Better than Bombs'. The huge interest in these evenings, the quality of the contributions from the various speakers, and the concern and commitment of the audiences have been an important source of inspiration for this book. We had at the time, and still have, the impression that the war in Kosovo marked a turning point in thinking in our country regarding the international (legal) order. The government of the Netherlands, a large section of the Dutch political caste, but also an important section of the media and of the population at large appear at the beginning of the new millennium no longer to have very much faith in the international legal order in general, or the United Nations in particular. In its place has come a belief in the potential of NATO as an instrument to bring order to a chaotic world, a world full of conflict, and if necessary to do this by violence. These developments deserve, in our view, critical consideration, and this book attempts to take the initiative in this.

We owe many thanks to the people who allowed us to interview them for this book. They all of them have full diaries, but nevertheless found more time for us than we had dared to hope for. We have tried to render their words as carefully as possible, and to do justice to the nuances and to the context in which they made their pronouncements. Of course none of the interviewees can be held responsible for the standpoints taken by the authors. On the other hand neither are the authors responsible for what the interviewees say, nor are they always in agreement with them. We hope, however, that we have succeeded in clearly distinguishing our own opinions from those of the people with whom we spoke.

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Jan Marijnissen was at the time of writing the leader of the Socialist Party of the Netherlands (SP)

Karel Glastra van Loon was a novelist and journalist, closely associated with the SP, who has died, at the age of only 43, since this book was published in the original Dutch. His best known work in English was The Passion Fruit

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Contents

• Foreword

Part I : Explorations

• 1.1 : Our last war
• 1.2 : Ethnic cleansing! Genocide! Hundreds of thousands dead!
• 1.3 : A college of applied social studies
• 1.4 : Foreign Policy for Beginners
• 1.5 : Strategy for advanced players
• 1.6 : Men of steel
• 1.7 : The law of the strongest
• 1.8 : From old Russians, the things which do not fade
• 1.9 : Noam Chomsky in Van Aartsen's Paradise

Part II : Conclusions

• 2.1 : Hangover on the morning after Kosovo
• 2.2 : Exercise in discretion
• 2.3 : Europe saves the world (not)
• 2.4 : A new ‘new world order’

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Please note: This book is based on De Laatste Oorlog, written almost a decade ago. Since its writing, Karel Glastra van Loon has died, and the tapes he made of the interviews cannot be located. Where these interviews were originally conducted in English, this means that they have had to be retranslated back from the Dutch. We have obviously attempted to reproduce the speakers' words as faithfully as possible, but nevertheless apologise to them for the inevitable changes of wording, which we trust have not affected the substance of what they had to say.