He EXPOSED The Sickest LIE of The Century: How USA/NATO Killed Millions | Prof. David N. Gibbs

Humanitarian intervention has become a polished justifying language for power: a moral cloak that recasts bombing, regime change, and proxy wars as acts of benevolence. The recorded conversation with Professor David N. Gibbs lays bare how that rhetoric not only masks strategic aims but actively multiplies human suffering. Examining Yugoslavia in the 1990s as a crucible, the exchange exposes a pattern that repeats across Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, and Ukraine: the invocation of “saving lives” to legitimize military solutions that often produce vastly worse outcomes. Far from being an exceptional mistake, this pattern points to structural incentives—political, military, and economic—that make humanitarian intervention a durable instrument of power rather than a last resort for protection. ## The humanitarian-intervention myth: from moral language to instrument of war The conversation begins with a simple yet unsettling thesis: the language of humanitarianism has been repurposed to justify large-scale violence. What reads as moral clarity—protecting civilians, preventing genocide—functions strategically to manufacture consent for force. Professor Gibbs emphasizes that policymakers and institutions have learned to trade on moral rhetoric while pursuing objectives that are plainly geopolitical: enlarging influence, asserting military primacy, and reshaping regional orders. The result is a steady inversion of means and ends. Instead of negotiation and political accommodation being the primary routes to protect civilians, the narrative now defaults to arming, striking, and occupying as the definitive moral response. The consequences of that inversion show up in ruined cities, mass displacement, and death counts that vastly outstrip the abuses the interventions purported to stop. ## Yugoslavia as the origin story of modern humanitarian war Yugoslavia’s breakup and the wars of the 1990s emerge in this discussion as the formative case for today’s interventionist doctrine. Gibbs and the interlocutor trace how external actors—initially Germany and then the United States and NATO—helped transform an internal political crisis into a proxy battleground. Crucially, the conversation points to an early missed opportunity: European diplomats had brokered a decentralizing agreement in Lisbon that could have contained Bosnia’s collapse. That accord was undercut by a U.S. diplomatic posture that implicitly encouraged parties to hold out for a better deal, coupled with covert arming of factions. The cascade that followed—two and a half years of vicious warfare, a NATO bombardment that decisively shifted the balance on the ground, and a final settlement at Dayton Air Force Base—illustrates how intervention became a tool to manufacture outcomes and political credit. As Gibbs notes, the settlement reached under the shadow of American air power closely resembled the earlier European plan; what changed was the identity of the actor taking credit and the justification for intervening militarily. ## Negotiation versus military victory: what was lost One of the most consequential claims made in the conversation is straightforward: many deaths and atrocities could have been avoided if diplomacy had been pursued seriously and early. Gibbs insists that negotiation was not a naive alternative but an available option blocked by those who equated bargaining with weakness. The tragic logic of that refusal is starkly evident in Bosnia: had the Lisbon framework been respected or the Dayton terms implemented earlier, the torrent of violence culminating in Srebrenica might have been prevented. Instead, a pattern emerged in which military campaigns became preconditions for bargaining, and negotiations were reduced to ways of consolidating military gains. That sequence produces perverse incentives: fighting hard becomes the path to diplomatic leverage, and the price of diplomacy is paid in civilian blood. The Kosovo example reinforces the point—an episode that, as discussed, began with falsified or exaggerated pretexts and ended with NATO bombing that escalated the conflict rather than resolving it peacefully. ## Political economy: NATO, expansion, and the business of war Beyond moral rhetoric, the conversation illuminates a material architecture that sustains humanitarian intervention: the intertwining of NATO’s institutional interests and the military-industrial complex. Gibbs lays out how a military victory in Bosnia was repurposed politically to justify NATO’s relevance in the post–Cold War era, paving the way for eastward expansion and the lucrative replacement of Warsaw Pact equipment with Western arms. This was not an accidental aftereffect; it fit neatly into a set of policy goals—preserving institutional prestige, opening markets for defense contractors, and sidelining European claims to independent collective action. How NATO’s renewed operational role in the 1990s fed a demand for continued military preparedness—and thereby continued procurement—shows how strategic narratives and economic incentives can align to normalize intervention. In short, humanitarian language provided the moral cover, while economic and institutional interests supplied the motive and the means. ## The left’s conversion and the politics of virtue An intriguing and unsettling theme in the discussion is how the politics of intervention reshaped usual ideological alignments. Gibbs argues that the humanitarian frame successfully recruited parts of the left—once staunchly anti-war—into supporting military action. Environmentalists and progressive movements that had been skeptical of military solutions became proponents of selective interventions framed as peacekeeping or protector missions. This “conversion” was aided by emotive presentations of victims—rhetorical and media portrayals that flattened complex conflicts into tales of villains and helpless victims. The result has been a fragmentation of the older left-right antiwar divide: anti-intervention sentiment now often finds more consistent expression among libertarians and parts of the political right, while large swaths of the political left have accepted, and sometimes championed, “armed humanitarianism.” That shift matters because it removes a predictable political check on the impulse to use force and lends moral authority to policies that empirical outcomes routinely contradict. ## Accountability, bluff, and the widening moral gap Perhaps the most corrosive problem Gibbs identifies is the absence of accountability. The recorded exchange highlights how catastrophic foreign policy mistakes—failures in Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, and interventions in the Balkans—have not resulted in sustained political consequences for their architects. Instead, the same officials and strategists often continue to occupy positions of influence. Accountability’s erosion has two effects. First, it diminishes institutional learning: when failure has no costs, policies are rarely reassessed in depth. Second, it normalizes a rhetorical model in which deception, selective evidence, or convenient amplification of abuses are tolerated as legitimation tools. Kosovo’s misleading narratives and Iraq’s WMD claims come up in the conversation as instances where dubious claims were either uncritically amplified or actively used to justify force. Without meaningful consequences for falsehoods or catastrophic outcomes, the political system remains predisposed to repeat the same mistakes under new banners and in new theaters. ## Toward a different practice: negotiation, restraint, and democratic checks The conversation ends on an implicit challenge: if humanitarian intervention as currently practiced produces more harm than protection, what alternatives should be pursued? Gibbs’s core recommendation is clear—reinvigorate negotiation and make diplomacy credible. That requires political leadership willing to accept the messy compromises that often avert violence, as well as institutional

He EXPOSED The LIE of The Century: How USA/NATO Killed Millions | David Gibbs [Part 2 of 2] "Humanitarian Interventions" are the greatest and most deadly scam of our age. In the name of "doing good" and "protecting the innocent" NATO has killed more people than any supposed dictator or rogue regime could ever have even dreamed of. The level of carnage the western alliance has unleashed on civilian populations in their very name is beyond the wildest imaginations. And when confronted with the death toll, the criminals behind those policies are usually even proud of it or express regret that not more bombs were dropped. Listen to professor David N. Gibbs' masterful take-down of one of the most criminal concepts of international relations to date. Dr. David N. Gibbs is Professor of History at Arizona University. He wrote numerous important books helping us to understand the contemporary United States of America; among them “Revolt of the Rich: How the Politics of the 1970s Widened America's Class Divide.” and the one we want to focus on today, “First Do No Harm: Humanitarian Intervention and the Destruction of Yugoslavia.” Follow David N. Gibbs on via homepage: https://dgibbs.arizona.edu #David Accountability is gone. There's no sense of accountability. Washington is an unaccountable city. You can fail catastrophically. The people who brought us the failures of Iraq, Afghanistan, and Libya are being promoted. They were being promoted during the Biden-Harris presidency. Victoria Nuland was involved in the Iraq and Afghanistan catastrophes, and she was promoted. She then contributed to the Ukraine catastrophe, which killed hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians for nothing because they're going to lose the war anyway, no matter what the U.S. does. It's basically an unaccountable city. #Pascal Let's now move to the second part of this discussion about this newfound reason to exist for NATO, for the neocons themselves, and that's humanitarian interventions. That's like dressing up war in the garment of peace and bringing peace. Jens Stoltenberg gave us this sentence two years ago: weapons are, in fact, the way to peace. Your book that you wrote, this wonderful work on "First Do No Harm: Humanitarian Intervention and the Destruction of Yugoslavia," traces this back to the Yugoslav wars of the 1990s. And Yugoslavia is highly fascinating to me because it was a non-aligned state. It was not a primary adversary of the United States, but one of the things about neutrality, which I study, is that neutrals are always a secondary target of belligerence because the neutrals also don't do what you want them to do. Was there a policy or was there something in the United States that helped the war in Yugoslavia to, well, help the war, I mean, got it going to where it went? -- 1 of 14 -- #David Yes, the breakup of Yugoslavia, I'd say, was made possible by a number of things, but one of the key factors was foreign support for the breakup of Yugoslavia. Actually, it's not the beginning of the United States. Believe it or not, briefly, Germany played the key role, and German officials spoke privately to Slovenia and Croatia. Yugoslavia was a very loose federation, basically a confederation, and these regional disparities... Croatia and Slovenia were the richest republics, and they wanted to secede, I would say, mostly because they didn't want to subsidize the poorer republics. I should add, in context, there was also neoliberalism. They underwent a tremendous, terrible debt crisis and austerity imposed by the IMF in the 1980s. One thing we do know about ethnic conflict and dysfunctional politics is that it often takes place in the context of economic crisis. For all the talk about Hitler and the Third Reich, people forget it was the Great Depression that brought Hitler to power more than any other factor. People always leave that out, at least these days. And Yugoslavia had its own Great Depression in the 1980s, which set the context for ethnic conflict. But I think it would not have broken up had it not been for external support for breaking it up. One reason for that is anti-communism. Yugoslavia was a communist state. Despite the 1980s, most of its history was quite successful, including economically. Communism was very popular in Yugoslavia, and they wanted to ensure that with the end of the Cold War, communism would be finished once and for all, even in countries where it was fairly successful, like Yugoslavia. And so breaking up Yugoslavia, this was very much in the German press, was being discussed as one of the purposes to put an end to communism once and for all. Breaking up Yugoslavia was part of that agenda. Germany played the key role briefly, and I have to say briefly, the U.S. was distracted, but the U.S. quickly took charge of the situation. I think the United States initially viewed Yugoslavia as a parochial European issue. The U.S. was focused on more important things, such as managing Russia, the former Soviet Union, and more importantly, the Persian Gulf and the Middle East. These little issues, as we saw at the time, namely the Balkans, the Europeans could handle that. But that was briefly. And very quickly, the U.S. realized that it could use—well, there were two competing agendas here. The Europeans were thinking of having an independent foreign policy and wanted to demonstrate their capacity to act as a collective power. And the way they were going to do that is, despite the brief German foray into unilateralism, they were going to collectively send a mission to broker a peace agreement in what was seen as the most dangerous of all the former republics, which was Bosnia-Herzegovina, where there were three ethnic groups who were probably going to go at each other's throats and tear each other apart, which of course they did, with enormous loss of life, especially civilian life. More the Serbs, because they were better armed, but all three groups engaged in terrible atrocities. And the European plan was, in 1992, to come up with a peace plan that would settle the conflict before war began. Yugoslavia had already broken up, but now Bosnia-Herzegovina was threatened -- 2 of 14 -- with violent breakup, and the idea was to prevent violence and come up with a plan for the decentralization of Bosnia along ethnic lines to satisfy all three ethnic groups, to make sure all three ethnic groups weren't threatened by each other. The three different ethnic groups met in Lisbon under the tutelage of a Portuguese diplomat acting at the behest of the EU, named José Cutileiro. There was an in-principle agreement that almost succeeded. All three ethnic groups, in principle, agreed to most of it. There were still details to be ironed out, but it was looking positive. And the U.S. ambassador contacted the Croatian and Muslim leaders and said, in effect, you don't have to sign this if you don't want to. Maybe you can get a better deal, with the implication that the U.S. would arm them if there were a war. I don't think he explicitly offered arms, but he did imply the United States would support them if they wanted to back out of the deal. And the deal broke down right after that. Then a two-and-a-half-year vicious war began, with about 100,000 deaths, large numbers of civilians, cities destroyed, and lives ruined. Again, more from the Serb side because they had more weapons, but from all three sides to some degree. Throughout the entire process, the EU and also the United Nations sent negotiators. The key figure here was David Owen, the former foreign minister of Great Britain. Also, ironically enough, Stoltenberg's father, who I think was the Foreign Minister of Norway, or was he Prime Minister, was involved in this as well. The idea was to revive what, in essence, had been agreed to at Lisbon and settle the war again on more or less the same basis. David Owen said in his memoir that the main stumbling block, the main thing that prevented us from getting an agreement, was that the U.S. refused to cooperate. I think this was the neocon idea here, that the United States would settle this through military force. They would get NATO involved, so NATO would have a justification. It didn't have a justification, but now it would have one. It would win a war and defeat ethnic cleansing. And so NATO finally, with the U.S., began arming the various sides covertly. They began arranging for arms to come in from Iran, ironically, using Iran to help supply weapons to the Muslim faction. The U.S. arranged for arms shipments to both the Croats and the Muslims, and they became America's ground forces. Then the U.S. began a massive bombing campaign against the Serbs. The combination of the NATO bombing campaign and the U.S. support for the ground forces established something like a military victory. Then the United States began peace negotiations at Dayton Air Force Base in Ohio. Significantly, it was at Dayton Air Force Base, an American Air Force base, surrounded by bombers and things like that. It was a nice symbol of American military power, which was the whole idea: to showcase American military power here. And then they ironed out an agreement remarkably similar to what the Europeans had been proposing for two and a half years and the U.S. had rejected. And so, if one wants to be as cynical as I am, the whole purpose of this was to ensure that the United States and NATO got credit for this and Europe did not get credit for it, because the whole idea was to ensure Europe did not establish itself as an independent actor in foreign policy and to bury the idea of an independent Europe. And so that was one of the main considerations here. -- 3 of 14 -- It gave a new prestige to NATO. American officials and memoirs said it was the victory in Bosnia that gave so much credibility to NATO that we could begin thinking about a forward policy of expanding NATO into Eastern Europe, which was the real agenda. And so it solved several problems. One, it gave a new justification for NATO. Two, it gave a justification for expanding NATO into Eastern Europe. And three, and this is critical, it gave a new justification for military spending. You see, the expectation was as countries expand and become members of NATO—Poland, the Czech Republic, and Hungary all joined in 1999, I believe—followed by other countries. They would get rid of their former Soviet equipment and buy U.S. and Western European equipment to replace it. This was something the military-industrial complex had always wanted and had been lobbying for. Some of the main backers of NATO expansion were military contractors because they wanted those contracts. The NATO victory and U.S. victory in Bosnia solved multiple problems, though at a very high expense because 100,000 people died who didn't have to die. The idea was to disparage negotiations as signs of weakness. You only do negotiations after you achieve a military victory, as a way of putting a cap on the military victory. #Pascal And you know, Yugoslavia is still a linchpin, a key in the way that Europeans think about war and peace, especially because of the massacre of Srebrenica that burned itself into, or was burned into, the consciousness of many Europeans, particularly Germans. Even today, it is being used as a reference point. Srebrenica happened in '95, right? It was a terrible massacre, with thousands of people dying at the hands of the Serb army. #David 8,000, I think, is the number. 8,000, not 10,000. They were mostly military-aged males, but they were disarmed, and they were executed, yes. #Pascal They were disarmed, they were confined, and then they were executed over the course of three days. That was obviously a horrible incident. But a lot of Germans today keep saying, "Never Srebrenica again." We will never allow our love for peace and for negotiation to override a military objective, which is to save lives through humanitarian intervention. Now, that justifies a lot. I had a German his