Serbia

Serbia is discussed as a revealing case in Noam Chomsky’s critique of wartime politics: public accounts of intervention, he argues, can present a contested campaign as the work of an “international community,” while political alignments determine who is called a terrorist and who a freedom fighter. The bombing of Serbia also serves as a comparison for his claim that military action may be intended not only to address a stated crisis, but to establish the credibility and reach of the United States and NATO.

Serbia and wartime public opinion

Chomsky places the bombing of Serbia within a recurring pattern in which major media and intellectual circles rally to power during a crisis and encourage the public to rally with them. He describes this alignment as especially intense during the bombing campaign against Serbia, and sets it beside the Gulf War as another instance of the same tendency. The point is not that public responses are uniform: he notes elsewhere that many New Yorkers opposed an indiscriminate attack after September 11. Rather, he contrasts popular reluctance to see further innocent people harmed with the institutional habit of gathering behind a government’s chosen response.

This account of media and public life gives Serbia a role beyond the history of a particular military campaign. It is an example in Chomsky’s argument that wartime narratives may narrow the space for dissent, even when opposition exists. The contrast between public unease and elite mobilization matters because it raises the question of whose views count as the public’s views, and whose actions are presented as legitimate expressions of the international community.

The Kosovo Liberation Army and political labels

The Kosovo Liberation Army is central to Chomsky’s account of changing labels. He says that the United States officially condemned the group as a terrorist army in 1998, citing its attacks on Serbian police officers and civilians. He describes the group’s stated strategy as provoking a harsh and disproportionate Serbian response. British officials, whom he characterizes as NATO hawks, reportedly considered the Kosovo Liberation Army responsible for more deaths than Serbia through January 1999. Chomsky presents that assessment as difficult to believe, but significant as evidence of how the situation was being viewed at a high level within NATO.

He further argues that the available Western documentation—from the U.S. Department of State, NATO, the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe, and other sources—showed no tangible change on the ground before the Kosovo verification mission was withdrawn and the bombing began in late March 1999. In his account, what changed was policy: the United States and the United Kingdom decided to attack Serbia, and the Kosovo Liberation Army was recast as a force of freedom fighters. After the war, Chomsky says, the group and its close allies were again described as terrorists, “thugs,” and criminals when they carried out similar kinds of actions, for comparable reasons, in Macedonia, then an American ally.

The sequence makes Serbia part of a larger argument about the instability of political classifications. Chomsky does not treat the labels as neutral descriptions that necessarily follow a fixed definition of conduct. Instead, he draws attention to the way the same actors and actions can be categorized differently as alliances and policy change. He says he uses the term terrorism in its literal sense and condemns all terrorist acts, rather than only those given that label for propagandistic reasons.

The “international community” and the politics of inclusion

Chomsky also uses the bombing of Serbia to question who is included when Western governments and intellectuals invoke the “international community.” In his account, NATO’s bombing was commonly presented in the West as an action of that community, even though, he says, most of the world opposed the bombing, often openly. The phrase therefore does more than describe a broad consensus: it can identify the powerful states acting together while excluding those who do not support their actions.

He connects this selective use of the phrase to the selective use of “terrorism.” The term, he argues, conventionally means terrorism directed against the speaker’s side and its friends. Set beside the shifting treatment of the Kosovo Liberation Army, this observation makes Serbia a case study in how language can confer legitimacy on force, define the boundaries of political belonging, and turn disagreement with powerful states into apparent exclusion from the international community.

Strategic credibility and military power

Chomsky presents NATO’s bombing of Serbia as part of a wider pattern in which military operations are justified, in part, by appeals to credibility. He says that the bombing was conducted for reasons similar to those he attributes to the U.S.-led bombing of Afghanistan: the stated strategic purpose was to establish NATO’s credibility. He points to explanations by Tony Blair and Bill Clinton, while emphasizing that the credibility at issue was not that of Norway or Italy, but that of the United States and its principal arms client.

The comparison situates Serbia within Chomsky’s account of military power as a demonstration aimed at a wider audience. He argues that the reasoning is a recurring feature of diplomacy and international relations, and that the experience of history makes the strategic logic consequential. His point is not presented as a claim about every motive behind the campaign, but as an interpretation of why the language of credibility can accompany force and why that language may obscure whose power is being affirmed.

Consequences and significance

Across these discussions, Serbia is not treated only as the setting of NATO’s bombing. It connects Chomsky’s claims about wartime media alignment, contested public legitimacy, shifting political labels, and the strategic uses of military action. The campaign also forms a contrast with the restraint he advocates elsewhere: rather than treating force as a self-evident response, he emphasizes the need to consider what a military reaction may encourage and what consequences it may bring.

His discussion keeps the distinction between description and interpretation in view. The reported 1998 condemnation of the Kosovo Liberation Army, the assessments attributed to British officials, and the late-March 1999 shift from verification to bombing supply the chronology of his example. His broader conclusions—that the public language of international community can be exclusionary and that the bombing served to demonstrate U.S. and NATO credibility—are arguments built from that chronology. Serbia thus becomes a central example in his examination of how force, labels, and public narratives interact in international politics.