“Britain, of course, had only a dubious right to the high moral view of slavery. British ships had long dominated the slave trade, and only in 1838 had slavery’s vestiges been abolished in the British Empire. But England quickly forgot all this, just as they forgot that there had been slave revolts in the West Indies and that economic factors had hastened slavery’s end by making it less profitable. In their opinion, slavery had come to an end throughout most of the world for one reason only: British virtue. When London’s Albert Memorial was built in 1872, one of its statues showed a young black African, naked except for some leaves over his loins. The memorial’s inaugural handbook explained that he was a ‘representative of the uncivilised races’ listening to a European woman’s teaching, and that the ‘broken chains at his feet refer to the part taken by Great Britain in the emancipation of slaves.’”

  —Adam Hochschild, King Leopold’s Ghost

When America led NATO into bombing Serbia two years ago, it was called by its supporters the world’s first “Humanitarian War”. The NATO/State Department propaganda machine first spoke of tens of thousands of Kosovars being raped and murdered; then 100,000; and finally, as people began to question the war’s moral basis, the State Department claimed that “over 500,000 Albanians” had been slaughtered in a mass genocide. Everyone from Michael Wines to Madeline Albright hailed the West’s mass bombing of a nearly defenseless, destitute Balkan nation, on behalf of an even more defenseless, destitute Balkan people in Kosovo, as a turning point in civilization and the moral thread in human history. It was a triumph, in other words, of Our Good Values over Their Bad Old Ways.

As things turned out, even by the rigged figures cooked up by the American-dominated International War Crimes Tribunal for Yugoslavia, some 3,300 possible victims of Kosovo war crimes have been discovered since NATO troops moved in. Some highly-placed pathologists hired by the ICTY resigned due to allegations that they were being pressured to find even more bodies. Moreover, that figure includes not only those Albanian civilians murdered by Serbs during NATO’s bombing, but all victims (KLA fighters, Serb civilians, missing Serb policemen) murdered for almost two years prior to NATO bombing.

Compare this to the nearly three million Vietnamese slaughtered during America’s war there, the 70,000 Vietnamese murdered as part of Operation Phoenix in which Bob Kerrey took part, or even the hundreds of Serb civilians killed in NATO’s bombing campaign, and you might start to ask yourself, “What fucking right do these people have to condemn other people for war crimes?!”

Bob Kerrey personally led a commando raid on a defenseless village, slaughtered some twenty unarmed women and children after rounding them up, hopped back in his PT-109 boat dripping gook blood, and was subsequently awarded a Bronze Medal for heroism in battle. When news of this came out, the very same elite that pushed for a war crimes tribunal against the Serbs in order to “let the world know that we will never tolerate these crimes again” came one and all to Kerrey’s defense, crying that we should “blame the war, and not the individuals who took part in it.”

The United Nations set up the first post-World War Two war crimes tribunal, the International War Crimes Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia, to prosecute crimes against humanity (war crimes, genocide) committed in the disintegrating Balkan nation. The first Serb convicted of committing war crimes in Kosovo, Milos Jokic, 21, was sentenced last September to 20 years in prison for killing one Albanian, ordering the murder of another and raping an Albanian woman (prosecutors had initially wanted to charge him with genocide (!), but he was only convicted of a lesser crime of “war crimes against civilians”.)

Everyone’s bogeyman, Slobodan Milosevic, was never formally charged with genocide or crimes against humanity for his role in the Bosnian war - mainly because he was one of the guarantors of the Richard Holbrooke-orchestrated Dayton Accord. However, even as NATO bombs were falling on Serbia, ICTY indicted Milosevic for genocide and crimes against humanity for the suspected deaths of some 300-plus Albanians sighted by NATO spy planes and verified by fleeing Albanians as victims of a massacre.

Kerrey, meanwhile, is the recipient of an unbelievable outpouring of sympathy from not only the American press and elite, but from average Americans spanning the talk radio spectrum.

While NATO troops continue to comb the Bosnian hills for war crimes suspects (two months ago, a tribunal sentenced a Bosnian Croat to 25 years for “planning” an attack on a Bosnian Muslim village on April 16, 1993, that “resulted in a massacre in which more than 100 people were murdered, including 32 women and 11 children”) and Colin Powell and the U.S. Congress demand that Serbia hand Milosevic over to the Hague even before the Serbs can try him for the innumerable crimes he committed against his own people, Bob Kerrey has become a hero in America a second time over. A hero for what? For having to relive the pain of slaughtering 20 unarmed women and children, in a war that was, after all, not his fault.