You said in a previous post that "NATO is too chicken to put ground troops in before they turn Yugoslavia into a crater...."
Not only does that sound like something you'd expect to hear on an elementary school playground, it doesn't make sense. You make it sound that if we are going to destroy Yugoslavia's ability to wage war, then somehow we are obligated to place our troops in harm's way, even if we don't have to.. That's bullshit. The best thing we can do for the Kosovars and for other non-Serbs left anywhere in the former Yugoslavia is to destroy the Serbs ability to continue their nine year old ethnic pogrom. The best way to do that, is exactly what we've been doing, the systematic destruction of Serb military targets, industrial infrastructure, and transportation capabilities. The proof that we are effectively doing that can be seen in the protests and claims by the Serbs to the contrary. There are undoubtedly civilian deaths that will result from these military actions, but there is no such thing as a weapon system with the capability to destroy military targets and leave non-military targets magically untouched.
If we were to believe the slant (the pro-Serbian/anti-NATO slant) that you promote, NATO is solely targeting hospitals, churches, and orphanages while the Serbs are only engaged in a heroic struggle to build a nation, with amity for all and in accordance with the will of God. Give me a break.
Until you admit to the basic truth of this conflict, which is that this entire nine year conflict, from Croatia, to Bosnia, to Kosovo is the result of a ruthless campaign by the Serbs, led by Milosevic to remove all non-Serbs from any land that the Serbs want by any means possible. It has entailed anything from a Serb orchestrated apartheid, to illegal confiscation of property, to deportation without anything but the clothes on their backs, to genocide. It started as far back as 1980 with the death of Josip Bruz Tito and the headlong rush by power hungry Yugoslav politicians (Power hungry politicians. Now that's one thing that is truly a universal trait, in every culture) to fill the vacuum left in Tito's wake. The one man who saw his path to power through the inciting of ethnic hatred amongst all Yugoslavs was Slobodan Milosevic. He incited that hatred amongst his fellow Serbs and amongst the Croats and Muslims alike. He was successful in inciting the Croats and Muslims to react to what they perceived was a threat (rightfully so) to their survival as autonomous cultures within Yugoslavia. He tied his fortunes to that credo of hate and soon outpaced all of his rivals for power. While I do not doubt that his ethnic hatred is very real, I don't believe that it is at the core of his values. His true values involve the quest for, and maintenance of, power at any cost. I firmly believe he would have professed a platform of gay rights for farm animals if that was what would have enabled him to gain power. Now that he has acheived power, he is prepared and willing to see his entire country bombed into oblivion rather that give that power up.
So don't preach to me about the beauty and nobility of a culture that had already self-destructed and set it's own course for ruin long before we dropped our first bomb. The only good that can come from this entire sordid episode is the total destruction of ethnic and religious nationalisms that have held the Balkans in the Middle Ages while the rest of the world in preparing to enter the next millennium. |
