There is no doubt (at least in my mind, and I think in the minds of anybody who is not delusional) that the Serb forces, particularly since the start of the bombing and to some degree before that, have been brutal and inhumane in a way which exceeds anything which society can accept even in the middle of a war (which is where they were both before and after the bombing.)
There is no doubt in my mind that Milosovic is willing to use terror, cruelty, murder, and other crimes against innocent people on a massive scale. (In this, he is following a pattern long established in the annals of human history, though his activities pale in comparision to such atrocities as occurred, under government auspices, in Russia under Stalin, Germany under Hitler, in Rwanda, in Cambodia under Pol Pot, in South Africa under Apartheid leadership, elsewhere in Africa during the rush to colonize, against the Mayans, Incas, and other South African tribes mostly by the Spanish and Portugese, in the U.S. during both slavery and Manifest Destiny, to mention only a few of almost countless historic episodes of government sanctioned human brutality and atrocities.)
He is only the current manifestation of a long and infamous list of human atrocities.
I think you and I agree on all that.
But we disagree on whether a defensive alliance of which the U.S. is a member, acting under a legal document which the U.S. signed and committed itself to follow, should violate that charter and violate international law to punish the Serbian people for the crimes committed by their nation and by some, but by no means all, of the people of Serbia, a nation which for most of this century has been an ally of the United States, fought Hitler when few were there to help them, and have as a people endured more suffering over the centuries than Americans can even conceive could exist in this world.
You say yes.
I say no.
Short of somebody providing to me proof that we are not in violation of international law, nobody will change my mind. My conviction that the security of the world, as of the people of every nation in the world, lies in the security of the law, is unshakeable.
We are letting loose forces of lawlessness which will come back to haunt us, and will still our voices of protest when other nations, following our example, decide that for them, too, might, not law, will make right.
If I lived in Taiwan, I would be seriously unhappy over this U.S. led declaration that international law governs only the weak, not the strong. |
