The Balkan Action Committee of US Right-wing Hardliners

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The Balkan Action Committee

Today's NY Times has an ad sponsored by a group calling itself the Balkans
Action Committee calling for Nato ground forces in Yugoslavia. It is signed
by an odd mixture of neoconservatives and "leftists" including Bianca
Jagger and "Rabbi" Michael Lerner, the portly editor of Tikkun and
erstwhile 1960s radical. Lerner was "spiritual adviser" to the Clintons for
a brief time about 5 years ago, urging "communitarian" values upon the
thuggish Arkansas president and his wife.

They are window-dressing, however. The real forces behind Balkans Action
are the hardline anticommunists who emerged during the Reagan era. This is
the executive committee, as announced on their website (www.balkanaction.org).

Morton Abramowitz
Saul Bellow
Zbigniew Brzezinski
Richard Burt
Frank Carlucci
Dennis DeConcini
Paula Dobriansky
Geraldine Ferraro
Robert Hunter
Philip Kaiser
Max M. Kampelman
Lane Kirkland
Jeane Kirkpatrick
Peter Kovler
Ron Lehman
John O'Sullivan
Richard Perle
Eugene Rostow
Donald Rumsfeld
Stephen Solarz
Helmut Sonnenfeldt
William Howard Taft
Elie Wiesel
Paul Wolfowitz
Elmo Zumwalt

Except for Geraldine Ferraro, this is basically the same group that made up
the Committee on the Present Danger, which was chaired by the atrocious
Jeane Kirkpatrick and flourished under Reagan. It promoted Star Wars,
intervention in Central America, Afghanistan and Angola and all sorts of
other militantly counterrevolutionary adventures. The point is that the war
in the Balkans is not a "progressive's" war. The most important sector of
reactionary opinion in the United States is represented by this executive
committee and should remind us that the war is a continuation of the
anticommunist crusade launched by Reagan 20 years ago.


Louis Proyect