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Clark’s dilemma on dropping devastating bombs on Serbia

16. January 2011. | 08:19

Source: Tanjug, Guardian

Strategist of the media war against Serbia, British Prime Minister Tony Blair's press secretary, published diaries which explain the background of an entire series of events which followed the bombing of Serbia in 1999, whose excerpts were published by the British “Guardian”.

Wesley Clark was “bothered” by a dilemma whether they should drop until then unknown devastating bombs on Serbia – with or without a warning, while Gerhard Schroeder was interested how the disinformation campaign is going, Tony Blair's press secretary Alastair Campbell wrote in his diaries.

Strategist of the media war against Serbia, British Prime Minister Tony Blair's press secretary, published diaries which explain the background of an entire series of events which followed the bombing of Serbia in 1999, whose excerpts were published by the British “Guardian”.

Friday 2 April - I was very tired still, and starting to get that achy feeling that exhaustion brings. We were losing the propaganda battle with the Serbs. Tony Blair called early on, and wanted a real sense of urgency injected into things.

He had spoken to Clinton about the timidity of the military strategy. He had spoken to Thatcher [Margaret Thatcher] last night who was appalled that the NAC and Nato ambassadors discussed [with each other] targeting plans.

He wanted the message out that we were intensifying attacks. I said we said that on Wednesday.

Tuesday 6 April - Family holiday France - The rightwing commentators were in full cry and we agreed to try to get Thatcher and Charles Powell [former foreign policy adviser to Thatcher] out saying the right hate the left fighting wars but they should be supporting what we are doing.

NATO might balk but we were going to have to get a grip of their communications and make sure capitals were more tightly drawn in to what they were saying and doing.

Wednesday 7 April
- We were having some effect with the strategy for the right, eg Charles Powell and David Hart [former Thatcher adviser] were both going up, but the rightwing papers and commentators so hated us that they were determined to do what they could to help anything fail.

If this was a Tory war, they would support it every inch of the way.

We are losing the media wa
r

Thursday 8 April - I was finding it impossible to switch off from it, and was starting to map out more changes I felt we should be making to the communications effort. A lot of this was about communication now.

Militarily, NATO is overwhelmingly more powerful than Belgrade. But Milosevic [Slobodan Milosevic, president of Serbia] has total control of his media and our media is vulnerable to their output.

So we can lose the public opinion battle and if we lose hands down in some of the NATO countries, we have a problem sustaining this.

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