Presswatch: wwwar.reporting
Caldwell, Christopher
PRESSWATCH by Christopher Caldwell wwwarseporting uring the Sarajevo conference D on rebuilding the Balkans, a British editor asked me for an article on Tony Blair. The prime minister, then...
...It thinks it increasingly likely that Russia will form anti-U.S...
...It had nothing in common with those websites —like antiwar.com — that sought to give "the other side of the story," and gave only that side...
...It was a threat to be taken seriously, since Thaci had arranged the assassination of a half dozen of his rivals in the past...
...In the English-speaking world, only Britain's Independent on Sunday raised similar questions...
...KLA head Hashim Thaci, whom our lack of a ground option led us to embrace (literally, once Jamie Rubin arrived in Pristina) as the de facto leader of Kosovo, had threatened the life of the semiofficial Kosovo president Ibrahim Rugova...
...Whether or not this is correct, it's a provocative and subtle reading of an otherwise-inexplicable shakeup...
...The White House could not say, "Throughout the war, Clark critically damaged U.S...
...Particularly in its occasional op-ed style commentaries, Stratfor left little doubt that it failed to see NATO's strategic rationale in bombing Serbia...
...We do not yet have evidence that the United States intentionally targeted the Chinese embassy...
...In such a world, America should neither encourage such coalitions by acting high-handedly nor involve itself in high-tension tests of machismo over pitifully small stakes...
...Besides, it probably is correct...
...The prime minister, then just arrived in Pristina, was mewing over the killings of fourteen Serb farmers by elements linked to the Kosovo Liberation Army...
...Stratfor was the single most accurate source of news throughout the conflict...
...Searches of Osama bin Laden's headquarters in Yemen last December turned up video records of bin Laden training our KLA allies...
...It worries that "a growing Russian consensus that Russia has been victimized both by Western investors and by the United States" has left Russia determined to regain great power status...
...But only one news outlet still does...
...And the White House cannot mention the fact that Clark and Secretary of Defense William Cohen—a man Clinton does trust—are so estranged that Cohen must relay his commands to the general, including the order to step down, through [Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff] Hugh Shelton...
...boils them down into a kind of factual inventory...
...William Cohen recently visited Greece to arrange an undisclosed—though surely hefty— compensation for Greece's forbearance in not bolting...
...It will be something that looks a great deal like Stratfor...
...When NATO began bombing Serbia in March, Stratfor launched a "Kosovo Crisis Center" that brought the site io million hits...
...With two dozen employees, several of them with military-intelligence backgrounds, Stratfor is a low-budget hybrid of the USIA's Foreign Broadcast Information Service and the non-covert side of the CIA...
...Let us hope the repo man doesn't come in the form of a Chinese-Russian military alliance...
...In so doing, it shows one key way the Internet might change news for the better...
...Ethnic tensions are boiling in Southern Italy, thanks to an influx of thousands of gypsies fleeing the KLA's ethnic cleansing...
...For one, Kosovo may very well prove unpoliceable...
...The American Spectator • September 1999 43...
...The White House cannot say, "Clark's binary view of Belgrade and the Kosovar Albanians makes control of the situation in Kosovo and a quick and safe exit from the Serbian province nearly impossible...
...relations with its European NATO allies, and his continued criticism of those allies makes reconciliation extremely difficult...
...Wesley Clark was relegated to the inside pages of most dailies...
...It has broadened out from its still-reliable Kosovo coverage into a "Hotspots" home page that embraces not only the Balkans but also Taiwan, the Koreas, Iran, and Russian-Chinese relations...
...The New York Post (July 29) was more suspicious, but turned his firing into a conflict between "the general and the draft dodger...
...Holbrooke suffered a humiliating confirmation on his way to the U.N., and Gel-bard is headed for Indonesia...
...There was a simple reason for its popularity: The "fog of war" in Kosovo was unusually dense...
...I hardly knew what to say...
...The website Stratfor.com continues to make a convincing case that Kosovo's fallout for the West is far from over...
...The United States bought its victory in Kosovo—a victory it didn't need—on credit...
...Throughout, Stratfor left the (accurate) impression that the r9-nation NATO alliance was held together at prohibitively high cost to its member countries' stability...
...But now the site is running more ads, and these GIUs look like they may be moneymakers themselves...
...It will be a matter of outlets using the Internet as an information-collectingnot just information-disseminating — medium...
...They were consistently less reliable than Russia's ITAR-Tass, and on certain matters—bomb damage, for instance—less trustworthy even than Yugoslavia's official Tanjug news agency (home to the dozens of journalists NATO targeted in a bombing raid for disseminating "propaganda...
...of providing the firepower for an episode of ethnic cleansing that was approaching 200,000 Serbs and gypsies by early August, someone should be paying attention...
...The Washington Post (July 28) mocked those who called Clark a "political general" and referred readers to his successful conduct of the Kosovo operation, doing little to challenge the administration's line that Clark's early retirement was a routine bureaucratic move...
...42 September 1999 • The American Spectator of an Italian exile over a role in his country's reconstruction is not, as American wire reports would have it, "mysterious" and "enigmatic...
...and then tries to make sense of them...
...But, in light of bomb-damage assessments and Stratfor's careful reading of the "old maps" the CIA claims led it astray, American claims to have hit the embassy by accident do not stand up at all...
...Two months after the bombing ended, Kosovo is not news anymore...
...It plans a daily web update on the 2000 presidential elections...
...But given that hostilities were ended only through the credibility-eroding diplomatic legerdemain (agreeing to G-8 principles and enforcing them as NATO ones), given that the NATO alliance was held together at a heavy price in diplomatic concessions to Albania and other "allies," given that our "humanitarian" role in Kosovo consists CHRISTOPHER CALDWELL is senior writer for the Weekly Standard and a columnist for the New York Press...
...I f Stratfor has a bias, it's not political but strategic...
...Wasn't Blair being disingenuous, my friend suggested, in feigning surprise that the terrorists he'd helped bomb into power were now acting like terrorists...
...So Stratfor is neither isolationist nor anti-American...
...It collects broadcast and print journalism, government press releases, private military and political analyses, and whatever comes to hand...
...You wouldn't even call it history— it's more like paleontology, a fossil deposit buried under news-strata of Mark 0. Barton's Atlanta rampage, JFK Jr.'s plane crash, and Brandi Chastain's bra...
...ounded at Louisiana State University in 1995, now based in Austin, Texas, Stratfor is an "open-source information" company...
...To a foreign leader...
...Anyway," the editor finished, "maybe you could give us the American reaction...
...Because if we're on the verge of a technology-driven revolution in news, it's not going to be a matter of newspapers simply dumping their articles onto websites, convenient though that may be...
...The Kosovo intervention was foolhardy on both counts...
...Clark's sin, in this reading, was that he had actually tried to win the war...
...In Stratfor's view, Clark failed not on the battlefield but in talking the president into war in the first place: The White House could not say, "Clark helped push the president into an ill advised military quagmire, from which escape was achieved only through some particularly duplicitous diplomacy and buying off the Russians...
...And, spectacularly, Wesley Clark has been dismissed as NATO chief...
...And so, officially, Clark is simply at the mercy of an unfortunate scheduling problem...
...American and NATO briefers — Kenneth Bacon and Jamie Rubin in Washington, Jamie Shea in Brussels—were lying more often than not...
...On Kosovo...
...Minutes after Blair left, the Kosovars he'd been addressing dynamited a Serbian church...
...That is, it focuses on information retrieval and analysis, not reporting...
...Moreover, such anti-American coalitions can make credible overtures to European countries — particularly France and Germany—that see their interests threatened by American dominance...
...It has simply argued thatthe hard part of the Kosovo campaign is only beginning...
...It has long posted "global intelligence updates" (GIUs) on its website to publicize its services for potential business clients...
...This from Jane's Intelligence Weekly —which at hundreds of dollars per annual subscription is out of the reach of almost all individuals and even newsrooms...
...In one dramatic piece of photographic analysis, Stratfor attacked the website "Truth in Media" for claiming NATO had fabricated photos of mass graves...
...Even the firing of NATO Supreme Allied Commander—Europe Gen...
...But Stratfor wasn't knee-jerk anti-NATO either...
...American reaction...
...For example: • As the Italian government threatened to split apart and as hundreds of thousands massed in Rome for anti-war demonstrations, NATO made plans to move its air operations to Turkey—an indication that our air bases at Aviano were in jeopardy...
...The domestic focus is a big departure but only a small surprise...
...The American press voiced near-unanimous regret at Clark's departure...
...The war going on at its web address looked very different from the war as presented by press-conference-dependent Western newspapers...
...Stratfor takes seriously recent reports in the Albanian media of Serbian border raids...
...Stratfor is now engaged in figuring out just what it did so right during the Kosovo war...
...In this light, Rugova's preference Stratfor.com is changing the way we think about news...
...Stratfor was more subtle...
...coalitions with non-European great powers, particularly China and India...
...Its July 30 posting ("Washington Begins the Post-Kosovo Purge") noted that, of the four advisers who convinced Bill Clinton a Kosovo bombing campaign would bring Milosevic to heel within days—special negotiators Richard Holbrooke and Robert Gelbard, Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, and Clark—only Albright remains in a significant policy position...
...NATO "has just handed control of Kosovo to a group no more nor less ethical and humane than Arkan's Tigers," it wrote in early June, comparing the KLA to a notoriously brutal group of Serb paramilitaries...
Vol. 32 • September 1999 • No. 9
