The International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia was a creature of NATO. This is something NATO boasted about. As such, its job was to exonerate and justify NATO, as well as NATO's allies in the Balkans, while reserving its full penal wrath against NATO's official enemy--the Serbs of Bosnia-Herzegovina, the Serbs of Croatia and of course the Serbs of Serbia.

The ICTY's chief target was Slobodan Milošević--the "head Serb," to use Richard Holbrooke's derogatory characterization. It excitedly put him on trial, charging him with genocide, crimes against humanity and for responsibility for every calamity that befell Yugoslavia from the 1980s on. With typical NATO, and U.S. and British arrogance, the ICTY failed to appreciate how clever and skillful Milošević would prove to be. Everything ICTY prosecutors threw at him, he disdainfully threw back at them. He showed up their ignorance as well as the absurdity of their convoluted legal theories. And then suddenly--he died, in ICTY custody.

Here is Milošević attempting to cross-examine General Wesley Clark, Supreme Allied Commander in Europe during NATO's 1999 bombing campaign. He it was who was responsible for the bombing of the refugee convoys, the marketplaces, the hospitals, the old age pensioners' homes, the passenger trains, the television stations and of course the Chinese embassy. The ICTY went out of its way to protect Clark from any probing cross-examination. Count the number of times "Judge" May interrupts Milošević.

One more thing: Many very stupid people on the antiwar Right and Left seized on a remark Wesley Clark made in 2003 that he had been told in November 2001 that the Bush administration was planning to attack seven Muslim states.

Game, Set and Match! High-fives, everybody! That's it--proof positive of what he had known all along about the evils of George W. Bush.

There is a particular kind of stupid that makes a home among the antiwar crowd. Its members are ready to forget everything they were supposed to have learned from experience just in order to score some silly debaters' points. Let me disabuse these silly children. Wesley Clark lied over and over again during the 1999 campaign. Thus, nothing he says should be believed unless it comes with convincing documentation. This of course Clark has failed to provide,

Clark made no mention of this 2001 Bush "plan" until 2003 when he began to plan his deceitful campaign for president in 2003. (It was deceitful because his goal all along was to pretend to be "anti-war" in order to defeat any genuine "anti-war" candidate seeking the Democratic Party nomination.) Clark never named the general who supposedly informed him about this Bush "plan." And Clark never presented any record of this "memo" he claimed to have seen.

What Clark was doing was obvious: The 2004 presidential election was on the horizon. The Iraq war was becoming very unpopular, and there was a serious danger that the Democrats would nominate an "anti-Iraq war" candidate. George McGovern's quixotic and hopeless 1972 campaign loomed large in the imagination of media and political establishment. What better way to head off this nightmare than to rally behind a pseudo-"antiwar" candidate such as Wesley Clark? You would have to be really stupid to believe that Clark would bring the U.S. intervention in Iraq to an end. But stupid is as stupid does, and many people were taken in by Clark's campaign--and particularly by his uncorroborated claims about secret Bush "plans."

Clark accomplished his mission. He knocked out of consideration Howard Dean who, incidentally, was also fraudulently posing as the "antiwar" candidate.

Anyway, enjoy Milošević. His cleverness, his humor and his bravery should never be forgotten.