What will we do now?

Daniel's latest comment on political lobbying as purely a marketing tool was shocking. Comparing the promotion of political decisions that affect millions of lives to the marketing of soda drinks was outrageous.

"Marketing? How can you put wars and soft drinks together?"

"Well, I wouldn't be surprised if soft drinks killed more people in the past decade." Daniel smiled and started speaking in a patronizing tone. "There is not much difference. Everything is just a matter of marketing: Christianity, Islam, Communism, wars. Slightly different products with the same marketing strategy."

"I'm not following you." I didn't understand why Daniel was telling me all these things. I tried to drive the conversation to something more specific so I could get some answers.

"I thought you are PR kind of spin doctor, but now you are saying marketing. Daniel, what do you do exactly?"

"At the moment I work as a freelance adviser. I make a living by knowing many people."

"But you must have worked for some company."

"Well, I worked for too many companies. As a soldier, journalist, aid worker, broker... Then, my occupation lost its name."

I was more and more annoyed with Daniel's dodging of my questions, so I asked him straight out. "All I am asking you is who is paying you to do this stuff?"

"My last official employer was General Dynamics."

"General Dynamics? Sounds familiar."

"The defense industry. The maker of F16 & F22, the Seawolf class submarines, Tomahawk, Stinger and Sparrow missiles and M1 Abrams tank."

"I heard about General Dynamics now and then. Nice collection of boys' toys."

"I know," Daniel smiled.

"So you are doing sort of marketing for defense industry."

"They also make Cessna aircrafts and other stuff. So it isn't strictly military equipment, although I was involved predominantly in that area."

"So, what did you do for them?"

"Developing markets. Well, it's not easy, I can tell you that. And it takes time."

"But how that works in defense industry?" Now I was just curious.

"In 1990, when the cold war was over, Bill Anders got a post as General Dynamics' CEO. He called me to help him revive demand for weaponry. He was really worried that the golden age for the defense industry had come to an end. But together, with lots of planning, market research and analysis, we realized that things could actually improve. It was so easy to get rid of the competition, like your Yugoslavia, who used to be a major player in the industry. In a single decade, the East European market share of the arms export dived from forty percent to less than ten percent, while the Americans went from a quarter of the market to over sixty percent. That's a huge jump in a market worth almost a trillion dollars."

"You only had to destroy Yugoslavia to achieve it," I added bluntly.

"It wasn't that simple. Bill is a real genius when it comes to those things, but I'm not bad either. He was an astronaut on the Apollo 8 mission, you know? A genuine man on the Moon."

"Come on, Daniel, you can do better than that." I got tired of Daniel's deflection off the topic.

Daniel smiled and continued. "OK, I'll give you just one example of how we would create a demand for a certain product, but don't ask me anything further."

"Go on."

"We had a huge problem with the Year 2000 Bug, you know..."

"Year 2000 bug," I repeated sarcastically. "Not again. You could find something better."

"No, wait. It's a real story that not many people know about." Daniel was trying to keep my attention. "The Navy and other buggers had several hundred Tomahawk missiles that wouldn't work after the year 2000. Actually we didn't know what would happen to them, but you don't play with weapons just like that, you know. So, the US Navy wasn't really happy about the whole thing. It was likely that the Navy, and also General Dynamics, would be forced to spend millions to fix the error."

"What did you do?"

"Actually, I tried to find a conflict where we could use those old missiles before the expiry date. Unfortunately, at that time the Dayton agreement was already signed and the wars in Bosnia and Croatia were over, as you are probably well aware of."

I nodded and Daniel continued. "So, I had to find another crisis."

"You mean to create one," I sarcastically added.

"Well, actually to put it on the radar of the State Department; and maybe to boost it just a little bit."

"I know what you are talking about..."

"Anyway, we decided that Kosovo would be a good opportunity. It was during the time when Bill Clinton was busy discussing a stained blue dress with Ken Starr, and Milosevic was in full swing fighting the Albanian rebels, probably taking advantage of the lack of international spotlight surrounding him at the time."

"Terrorists!" I corrected him.

"Well, depends how you look at it. Some would say freedom fighters."

"Drug smugglers." I didn't want to give up.

"Whatever." Daniel didn't want to argue. "I planned and organized everything backstage. You don't want to know what that involved."

"I can guess," I said through my teeth while boiling up inside. Kosovo was a holy land for Serbs, and now it was occupied by NATO forces.

"No, you can't. Anyway," Daniel continued. "That bugger Milosevic almost screwed us. We planned the action for October '98, being sure that he wouldn't accept our ridiculous conditions, but he read our game and in the end accepted everything. So we had to orchestrate other stuff, like to engineer a battlefield to look like an ethnical cleansing of civilians. Luckily, we had William Walker with his Verification Mission on the ground to orchestrate that incident in Rachak. And James Rubin's wife, Cristine Amanpour, was covering everything on CNN the way we wanted."

"Similar scenario to Markale market in Sarajevo?" I asked while memories from the war came flooding back.

"Sort of, although Markale was much easier to orchestrate. Sarajevo was controlled by Muslims and we just needed them to shoot their own people with canons in order to blame the Serbs and to add a couple of dummy dolls to make it an even bigger tragedy. Kosovo was under Milosevic's control..."

"You mean Serbian control," I corrected him.

"Well, yes. One of the first steps is to personalize the blame. We didn't fight the Serbs, we fought Milosevic. And Milosevic controlled the ground. So, it was much harder to prepare the scene. But we made it. We finally had a cause to act and NATO started the action on 24th of March of 1999, just nine months before the old Tomahawks would become useless. And in two months, the Navy spent not just the old stock, but also the new missiles that would work fine after year 2000, so they had to order more. In the end, the Navy and Air Force got more money from Congress, my client didn't have to mess with fixing old missiles, and General Dynamics got an order for a new batch. Classic win-win situation."

"Except for poor people in Kosovo and hundred of thousands Serbian refugees."

"Actually, they got some sort of independence. They were happy."

"I am just wondering how grateful they will be when they start giving birth to children with two heads and when their cancer rates skyrocket after all deployed uranium Americans dropped there."

"It's not that bad."

"Don't tell me what is bad and what is not bad!" I lost my temper and began shouting. "I have cousin in Bratunac in Bosnia who has cancer. They have ten times higher cancer rate since NATO bombarded them. Ask SFOR soldiers as well. They all have cancer. Just wait and see in ten years what will happen to Albanians in Kosovo."

"Well, freedom has its price. At least they got what they wanted, while we destroyed quite a bit of Serbia, bridges, power plants, TV stations and stuff like that." Daniel then stopped, like he was thinking about something. "Sorry."

"Don't apologize to me."

"Well, Serbia will also be fine. They will probably have to build that stuff again. Congress will give them some funds now that Milosevic is gone, and they will buy equipment from Americans. Not so bad after all. At the end of the day, General Dynamics' stock soared. Even more, after Lockheed shares plummeted after their F117 got shot down. Even when the Serbs shot down America's best plane, that was still good for my business. That was probably the crown of my career so far."

"Not very nice profession you have, Daniel. I can't believe you are telling me how you bombed whole country just to get rid of old rockets!" I was really mad.

"First of all, it wasn't me who bombarded them. And secondly, they were doing some nasty things in Kosovo anyway. I just blew the whistle."

"Just blew the whistle. You blew whole country."

"Depends on how you look at things, you know. Every time a parent buys a Playstation, BMW, the fourth TV set in the house, a pair of two-hundred-dollar sneakers, that was all thanks to Congo, Angola, Lebanon, Bosnia, Panama, Iraq or Kosovo. The only real American export is the US dollar that is soaked in blood. Remember this!"

"Still, you have much more blood on your hands than me."

"I can see your point, but I'm not ashamed of what I did. You know, at least I moved the misery of war and fear closer to Westerners. While it was in Africa they didn't care. Then I moved it to Europe. I'm just afraid that even Yugoslavia wasn't close enough for them. They needed some destruction in New York or London or Paris to notice what kind of a mess they were making all around the world."

"I am afraid that this would just make things worse."

"Yes, I agree. We'll see what tomorrow brings."

"I'd rather keep my kids without Playstation than living with all these lies on my conscience."

"Still, you came to America. You can go back to Bosnia and live with a clear conscience."

"Bosnia today is just another American colony," I said.

"And you cannot do anything about that, can you?"

I accepted Daniel's argument. However, I deeply felt that there was something wrong in his views. Daniel definitely didn't care about the wealth of Americans, French or Jews. He was just thinking about his own pocket.

"Still, Daniel, I'm not really convinced with your excuse."

"Well, I have a better one."

"Don't get me wrong, this was quite a good one. You almost made yourself sound like angel," I said sarcastically. "Yet, I don't think you could really find a good excuse for things you are doing."

"No, really. It was my destiny. I couldn't help it! I told you it's all written in the stars. We can only do our best in following our predetermined path."

"Somehow I would say that this world would be better place if you got lost along your journey, Daniel."

***