Balkan Action Committee

The Balkan Action Committee reportedly placed an ad in the May 13, 1999, edition of The New York Times "calling for NATO ground forces in Yugoslavia."

Louis Proyect, commenting online about the ad from csf.coloradu.edu, wrote:

The ad was "signed by an odd mixture of neo-conservatives 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 [Jagger and Lerner] 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 Charles Carlucci III
• Dennis DeConcini
• Paula Dobriansky
• Geraldine A. Ferraro
• Robert Hunter
• Philip Kaiser
• Max M. Kampelman
• Lane Kirkland
• Jeane J. Kirkpatrick
• Peter Kovler
• Ron Lehman
• John O'Sullivan
• Richard N. Perle
• Eugene V. Rostow
• Donald H. Rumsfeld
• Stephen Solarz
• Helmut Sonnenfeldt
• William Howard Taft
• Elie Wiesel
• Paul Dundes 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 Ronald 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." [1]

Contact Information

Attempts to access the Balkan Action Committee web site -- http://www.balkanaction.org -- end at an advertisement entitled Balkanaction.

Related SourceWatch Resources

• Citizens for a Free Kuwait
• Coalition for a Democratic Majority
• Committee for the Free World
• Committee for the Liberation of Iraq
• Committee for Peace and Security in the Gulf
• Committee on the Present Danger
• Institute on Religion and Democracy
• Prodemca (Friends of the Democratic Center in Central America)
• Project for the New American Century
• Project for the Republican Future

External links

• Frank T. Csongas, Yugoslavia: US Says Milosevic Must Stand Trial, Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, May 28, 1999: "Also in Washington, several prominent former U.S. officials participated Thursday in a privately organized conference (by the Balkan Action Committee) to discuss the Kosovo crisis. Among those taking part were former U.S. Secretary of Defense Frank Carlucci, former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations Jeane Kirkpatrick and former White House national security adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski."
• Jim Lobe, "Committee for the Liberation of Iraq" Sets Up Shop, PresentDanger.org, November 2002: "The new committee appears to be the latest organization used by neoconservatives and other right-wingers in a long line of similar front groups stretching back over a quarter of a century, first to the Coalition for a Democratic Majority and then to the more bipartisan Committee on the Present Danger (CPD), which campaigned against détente and arms control treaties during the Carter administration.... During the 1980s, they spawned new groups--consisting mostly of the same people--such as the Committee for the Free World; Prodemca (Friends of the Democratic Center in Central America), which supported Reagan administration policies in Central America; and the Institute for Religion and Democracy (IRD), which campaigned against the overseas work of mainstream Protestant churches and liberation theology of the Roman Catholic Church; among others.... Many of the activists in these groups were associated with [the American Enterprise Institute] AEI, the leading neo-conservative think tank in Washington and one whose foreign-policy positions have never enjoyed as much influence as now."
• Jim Lobe, War party gears up for showdown: Post-election agenda in US, DAWN the Internet Edition, November 6, 2002: Regarding the Committee for Peace and Security in the Gulf (CPSG) and the Project for the New American Century (PNAC), Lobe wrote: "In 1999, many of the same figures also created the Balkan Action Committee (BAC) in support of NATO's Kosovo campaign against Serbia. Wolfowitz, Rumsfeld and Perle all served on BAC's executive committee which, like CPSG, published open letters to the president and took out ads in newspapers."