Patrick Martin
WSWS
[KLA's Godfather - Richard Holbrooke -Holbrooke, Clinton's "troubleshooter", was the KLA's godfather. It was not his only "pact with the devil" (as he called bringing the mujahedins into Bosnia in his memoirs). How this saxophone-policy by Western pragmatists can come back to haunt the West was demonstrated on Sep. 11 in a very graphic way (Photo of Holbrooke with KLA gunman in Kosovo, summer 1998) (Kosovo.net)]
There is no reason to pull any punches in regard to Richard C. Holbrooke, the long-time US diplomat who died Monday night in Washington. He was a bully and a liar for the most rapacious and militaristic power in the world, a man steeped in the commission and cover-up of bloody crimes. He devoted his life to defending the worldwide interests of American corporations and banks, and became personally wealthy as a consequence.
The obligatory tributes pouring in from the US political establishment—from President Obama, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, former President Bill Clinton, the editorial page of the Washington Post, and politicians and pundits galore—amount to a self-indictment of the character and “morality” of these gentlemen and ladies. As for the bouquets from foreign leaders, from British Prime Minister David Cameron to Afghan President Hamid Karzai, it is a mafia tradition to send flowers to the funeral.
As far as the Washington press corps was concerned, Holbrooke’s was a death in the family. Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen blogged about a recent encounter with this “extraordinary man,” when Holbrooke visited Cohen’s beachfront home last summer. Judy Woodruff of PBS and Al Hunt of Bloomberg News visited the dying envoy in the hospital.
The gushing by the press reveals an important feature of American political life—the incestuous relations between Wall Street, the Washington power structure and leading circles in the media, cemented by vast sums of money. Holbrooke personified this relationship, shuttling back and forth between investment banking and the State Department, squiring Diane Sawyer about Manhattan and then marrying Kati Marton, the ex-wife of ABC anchorman Peter Jennings.
While the obituaries and tributes gave first place to Holbrooke’s role in the Balkan crisis of the 1990s, where he brokered the Dayton Accord that ended open warfare in Bosnia, this was only one of the many episodes in a career that spanned nearly 50 years, from Vietnam to Afghanistan.