Many observers believe that the bombing was deliberate, and that renewing antagonisms between the United States and China serves foreign policy goals: short-circuiting the Balkans peace process (short-term); and the US gets an enemy, possibly a new Cold War and the expansion of the Pacific Rim's Theater Missile Defense (long-term). The scenario may sound far-fetched, but if you believe that the bombing was an accident, you already believe in the far-fetched. Since the bombing, the US has claimed:

1. Only one bomb had been dropped, meant for the building across the street where the Yugoslav Federal Directorate for Supply and Procurement (FDSP) was. That military target was just too close to the embassy. However, the embassy is hundreds of yards away from any other buildings.

2. The bomb landed exactly where it were supposed to, but used the wrong coordinates. One thing was certain, the mistake wasn't using an old map. The building was a warehouse for or the headquarters of the FDSP. The bomb just unfortunately happened to hit the homes of three non-NATO journalists, during a phase of operations where non-NATO journalists happened to be targeted. And make that three bombs, not one.

3. The map NATO used was dated 1992 and that the old map showed the FDSP building. This story ran in spite of the fact that the Defense Mapping Agency had 1996 maps, and that the National Imagery and Mapping Agency had even more recent maps. Additionally, tourist maps showing the embassy in its proper position are available in stores all over Belgrade. Finally, the 1992 map doesn't show any building at all on the bombing coordinates. The US must have been going after Serbian squirrels.

4. The CIA fed NATO the wrong information, in spite of the fact that the CIA has no business offering any targeting information to NATO.

5. Serb double agents purposefully fed the US bad information, hoping to expand the war and gain China as an anti-American all. And it wasn't a 1992 map after all. It was a 1997 map, one with the embassy on it.

6. A US Intelligence Officer, attempting to locate that pesky FDSP building, tried to guess its location by drawing lines on a map from parallel streets, assuming that the street with the FDSP building on it would have the same address numbers as the street he knew, even though most European cities do not have numbered grid systems like American cities. It would be impossible for an intelligence agent inside Belgrade not to realize this. And make that five bombs.

7. Those Chinese journalists were spies and deserved it. And the CIA didn't feed the bombers bad information in this version of story, but instead tried to stop the bombing.

Unfortunately, the people in charge of targeting didn't answer the phone.

The bombing of the embassy took place in the seventh week of the bombing, over a month after most of the important military targets like the FDSP had already been targeted and hit, but only days after the G8 developed a peace plan to bring to the United Nations. China has a veto on the UN Security Council. If China vetoed peace, the US could continue to claim to be for peace while dropping thousands of bombs, and could sell billions of military hardware to the Pacific Rim. And the plan seems to be working very well indeed.

The views expressed above represent the writer and not necessarily those of The Disinformation Company Ltd.