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OTTAWA - Numbers don't matter.
That was the response of Art Eggleton, the Canadian defence minister who seemingly doubles as a Pentagon spokesman, to the news this week that the NATO numbers on casualties caused by the Serbs in the Kosovo war were more inflated than a Hindenburg airship.
United Nations search teams found 2,100 bodies, not all Albanians. There are more searches to come but the numbers fall far short of the NATO estimates that ranged from 10,000 to 100,000 and were swallowed whole by most of the western media.
Some months ago, when the war was beginning, the numbers, in the words of Mr. Eggleton and others, did of course matter. Now, since they are not helpful to NATO credibility, they border on the irrelevant.
Mr. Eggleton was remarkably smooth before the cameras. It was as if he were on automatic B.S.pilot. In his business you have to be smooth. The stories tend to change.
Before the war began, the Kosovo Liberation Army was classified by the Central Intelligence Agency as a terrorist organization, replete with Marxists. During the war, the KLA was given a new shining identity by NATO. Its members were "freedom fighters." After the war, NATO tells yet another story: They're the enemy again.
Whatever the real reason for the massive NATO bombing campaign in Kosovo, there is one aspect that cannot be overlooked. It is the idea that in war the politicians can think their publics are so gullible, ignorant and stupid that they can trot out any line and get away with it.
In this war, it appears more and more like NATO won over public opinion by putting out one extraordinary falsehood after another while relying on a media, particularly the U.S. one, so compliant it began to look like the state-run enterprise I saw in the Soviet Union before Mikhail Gorbachev went to work.
Two of the Canadians closest to the Yugoslav story were Maj.-Gen. Lewis Mackenzie, who commanded United Nations forces in the Bosnian war of 1992, and James Bissett, the last Canadian ambassador to serve in Belgrade. While holding no truck for Slobodan Milosevic, both men were courageous enough to challenge Ottawa's and NATO's assertions on this war most every step of the way. They might well feel a bit of vindication now, not just at this week's numbers, but at how the whole picture is emerging.
The war was triggered by Mr. Milosevic's failure to accept the Rambouillet accord which was likened by NATO leaders to a reasonable deal. The consensus now among Henry Kissinger and many of his ilk is that it was so unreasonable that no Serb leader with a grain of a brain could have accepted it. It stipulated, for one, an independence referendum in Kosovo in three years. Since Kosovo is 90-per-cent Albanian, Rambouillet was tantamount to the Serbs handing over their historic heartland to the enemy. Yet NATO said sign it or it's war.
To justify the actual bombing attacks, which made mockery of international law, NATO leaders like Prime Minister Jean Chretien alleged the Serbs were on a murderous and ethnic-cleansing rampage. In fact, the most reliable estimates put the deportations before the bombing attacks began at more like a trickle.
As for killings, the International Crisis Group this week put the average number before the NATO intervention at 30 a week, for both sides. More accurate were the NATO claims about large displacements of people within Kosovo itself before the bombings. But how surprising or catastrophic was this given that an ethnic civil war had been going on for years and that in many cases the Albanians were giving as good as they got.
It would be nice to say the pattern of apparent disinformation was limited to the Yugoslav war, a campaign that served a vital purpose for President Bill Clinton in that it vanquished Monica Lewinsky from the front pages forever. But it was only a year ago when, on the very eve of his impeachment hearings, Mr. Clinton started bombing the hell out of Iraq, pretending that Saddam Hussein was such a grave threat to humanity that if he didn't get him that week, the world would be covered in poison gas by the following Tuesday. Before that, again with the Lewinsky crisis in full throttle, Mr. Clinton bombed a pharmaceuticals factory in Khartoum claiming, laughably as it turned out, that it was a toolshed for terrorists.
There might be a bit of a pattern here. Believing in a lot of this stuff is like believing in the tooth fairy. Art Eggleton likes tooth fairies.