WHEN the United States dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima after Japan had all but surrendered, the front page of the Daily Express of London said: "This is a warning to the world." When American missiles and bombs attacked a sovereign European state this week, it was another clear warning to the world, with the message fundamentally unchanged.
The most powerful and rapacious imperial power in history will stop at nothing to secure its domination over human affairs. This is a truth that we who have lived through the most violent period of the American imperium ought to comprehend above all others, if we are to understand how our world is threatened, over and over.
The basic details of the assault on Serbia illuminate this truth vividly. The bombing has nothing to do with a humanitarian concern for the suffering people of Kosovo. On the contrary, "the West" (as the Anglo-American imperial forces are known) has consistently used humanitarian rhetoric to justify intervening in the Balkans, mostly on the side of regional power, often the Milosevic regime. Last October the United States drafted an entirely pro-Serbian plan for the Kosovars, giving them a fake autonomy with far less freedom than they had under the old Yugoslav constitution.
Similarly, in the early 1990s, Anglo-American propaganda during Bosnia's life and death struggle masked Washington's true aims. It was an American plan, devised by former US Secretary of State Cyrus Vance in 1992, that handed the Milosevic regime and the fascist Bosnian Serbs the entire arsenal of former Yugoslavia. Thereafter the people of Bosnia hardly stood a chance. At the same time, NATO navies in the Adriatic Sea and UN (mostly British and French) troops at Bosnian airports enforced an arms embargo against the Sarajevo government.
To the Americans, what mattered, above all, was that Serbia was not fragmented and did not slip beyond Western - that is, American - control. The ensuing American-arranged "Dayton peace plan" legitimised the ethnic cleansing; the wishes of the people of Bosnia were ignored and American power was asserted.
Today NATO, which of course is Washington, is bombing Serbia because the Milosevic regime - like Saddam Hussein in 1990 - has become uppity. The man is not following orders. He is not subduing the Kosovars as the American plan dictated. He has become all too flagrant, allowing his troops to slaughter people and leave their bodies to be filmed by Western television. More seriously, he is challenging the "stability of the region": the kind of false stability essential for an imperial power to go about its God-given tasks.
US special envoy to the Balkans Richard Holbrooke has admitted, in effect, that the real reason for the bombing is "the credibility of NATO" - in other words, the credibility of American power. Since the end of the Cold War, the United States has sought new reasons for maintaining NATO, which ensures US control over European military forces and NATO's usefulness for imperial action outside Europe.
Since 1990, Washington has pushed for NATO to be used "out of area" and to act without United Nations approval: in other words, to usurp the role of the UN as the world's "peacekeeper". After all, even the UN Security Council, which Washington dominates, requires resolutions before UN forces can take military action.
This has not proved an insurmountable problem in the past. The slaughter in the Gulf "war" in 1991 was legitimised by the UN after US Secretary of State James Baker travelled the world, offering the biggest bribes in history to potential military allies. In Cairo, for example, Baker bribed the Egyptians with $14 billion, which wiped out a third of the country's foreign debt; and Turkey received $8 billion in military gifts and a low-cost IMF loan of $1.5 billion.
However, these days, having attacked Iraq on and off for eight years, the US can no longer rely on the open support of conservative Muslim states. The imperial godfather is impatient to complete its main project following the collapse of its former rival, the Soviet Union - and that is to secure an oil "protectorate" all the way from the Gulf to the Caspian Sea.
With this aim, the US has imposed crushing economic sanctions on the uppity Saddam Hussein, a former American favourite, thus preventing him from selling Iraq's oil on the open market and further undermining the economies of the current US favourites in the region, notably Saudi Arabia.
NATO is to be the policeman of the new American oil protectorate, and we can expect to see more NATO (mainly Anglo-American) violence in support of this newly charted imperial hegemony. It is a bitter irony for the Serb regime that, while the US actually regards Milosevic as useful and is opposed to an independent Kosovo, the attack on his country is too good an opportunity to pass up.
It demonstrates to the world what NATO is really for, in the same way that the 1991 Gulf "war" was as much a demonstration of American power when US economic dominance appeared under serious challenge from both the Japanese and the Europeans, as it was an act of punishment to one of America's client tyrants for stepping across a line that the West had drawn in the sand of the region.
The NATO attacks will kill civilian Serbs, who have nothing to do with Kosovo. They are "collateral damage" and "unfortunately expendable", as an American general once famously said in Vietnam. The NATO action threatens to trigger a wider war. Macedonia could break up, drawing in Bulgaria and Greece.
"We shall work through bilateral forums and bilateral relationships to spread the valise of human rights," Britain's New Labour Foreign Secretary Robin Cook said soon after coming to office. This nonsense is still reported seriously in the West, where the media have played a historic role of minimising the culpability of Western adventures.
Cook's announcement was at odds with the historical record, for which a wider understanding is vital now that Britain and the US have embarked on a new era of imperial expansion.
None of this is surprising, for the pattern is clear. Since 1945, in serving what are known as "Western interests", both US and British foreign policies have played a significant part in some of the century's worst abuses of human rights. Name virtually any regional tyrant in recent years - from Mobutu to Suharto to the gang who have terrorised Turkey - and there will be the crucial support of Washington and Whitehall.
Recently declassified Foreign Office files show that in 1965 Britain aided in the slaughter of more than half a million Indonesians, many of them opponents of Gen Suharto. "I have never concealed from you my belief," cabled the British ambassador, Sir Andrew Gilchrist, in 1965, "that a little shooting in Indonesia would be an essential preliminary to effective change." A series of covert operations, which have only now come to light, supported the "little shooting" which turned out to be the murder of hundreds of thousands.
The Americans, now the unchallenged imperial masters, are less guarded about their aims. Last year Secretary of State Madeleine Albright was asked on US television: "We have heard that half a million children have died (as a result of sanctions against Iraq). I mean, that is more children than died at Hiroshima . . . Is the price worth it?"
Albright replied: "We think the price is worth it."
BEYOND the current adventure in the Balkans, the dangers that will usher in the new millennium remain substantially unreported. Among a number of proposals seriously considered by the Americans for NATO is a nuclear expeditionary force "primarily for use against Third World targets", according to one report.
There are plans for Stealth bombers, the kind that were used in the attack on Serbia, to carry a new type of bomb, the B61-11, or "penetrator nuclear weapon". Designed to drill into the earth before exploding in a blast whose shockwaves can destroy "command bunkers" thousands of feet below, these low-yield "mini-nukes" can also be delivered by F-16 fighter aircraft.
Last week Russian protests were dismissed by the West. What we are not told is how gravely the Russian military establishment views the expansion of NATO. Since the fall of the Berlin Wall, NATO has expanded rapidly into eastern Europe.
The Russian response has hardly been reported in the West, yet the Defence Ministry in Moscow has formulated plans to deploy new tactical nuclear weapons near Russia's western border. The National Security Council in Moscow also intends to drop Moscow's long-standing doctrine of "no first use" nuclear weapons.
The Russians look aghast at the Clinton administration's decision to payroll the biggest war budget since Ronald Reagan. Indeed, it was back to the future in February when President Clinton sent to Congress a proposal to spend $6.6 billion developing a national missile defence "shield" by 2000.
This sequel to Reagan's infamous "Star Wars" will violate the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty. The US arms industry is delighted. For the Russians, the prospect of building a competitive system means it must stop cutting back its arsenal and prepare for a war no one can comprehend. The rest of us might ask: if we are about to leave what is sometimes called the American century, what are we entering, if not its most dangerous sequel?