You are making things tough--- ( i'm drinking,, war was easier)
# 1 -- I don't think you will change your mind,,,
NATO.... Is run by the US.... anything they want ,, goes (or else) ,, we know what bucking them will get you...
You read this----
<<<
Chomsky was asked first about support among progressives
for the position that "military intervention is needed to stop
Milosevic from committing genocide, regardless of whether
NATO's motivations are pure," with comparisons about
"WWII being necessary to stop Hitler, even if the U.S. did
not have truly humanitarian objectives." As well as, "Is the
Yugoslavian government genocidal" and "Will the NATO
intervention have the effect of stopping Milosevic and/or
saving the people of Kosovo from extermination?"
I don't want to say anything about the people you are referring to, because I don't
know, but it seems to me reasonably clear that if we think the matter through, the
arguments you report are untenable, so untenable as to raise some rather serious
questions.
First, let's consider Milosovec's "genocide" in the period preceding the NATO
bombings. According to NATO, 2000 people had been killed, mostly by Serb military,
which by summer 1998 began to react (with retaliation against civilians) to guerrilla
(KLA) attacks on police stations and civilians, based from and funded from abroad.
And several hundred thousands of refugees were generated. (We might ask,
incidentally, how the US would respond to attacks on police stations and civilians in
New York by armed guerrillas supported from and based in Libya). That's a
humanitarian crisis, but one of a scale that is matched or exceeded substantially all over
the world right now, quite commonly with decisive support from Clinton. The numbers
happen to be almost exactly what the State Department has just reported for Colombia
in the same year, with roughly the same distribution of atrocities (and a far greater
refugee population, since the 300,000 resulting from last year's atrocities are added to
over a million from before). And it's a fraction of the atrocities that Clinton dedicated
substantial efforts to escalating in Turkey in the same years, in the ethnic cleansing of
Kurds. And on, and on. So if Milosovic is "genocidal," so are a lot of others -- pretty
close to home. That doesn't say he's a nice guy: he's a monstrous thug. But the term
"genocidal" is being waved as a propaganda device to mobilize the public for Clinton's
wars.
Second, the US ("NATO") intervention, as predicted, radically escalated the atrocities,
maybe even approaching the level of Turkey, or of Palestine in 1948, to take another
example. I wouldn't use the term "genocide" for such operations -- that's a kind of
ultra-right "revisionism," an insult to the memory of the victims of the Holocaust, in my
opinion. But it's very bad, and it suffices to undermine the claim that "military
intervention is needed to stop Milosevic from committing genocide," on elementary
logical grounds.
About "WWII being necessary to stop Hitler," that's not what happened at all. The
US/UK were rather sympathetic to Hitler (and absolutely adored Mussolini). That went
on to the late '30s, with varying defections in the latter stages (much the same was true
of Japanese fascism). When Hitler invaded Poland, Britain and France went to war --
called "a phony war," because they didn't do much. When Hitler attacked them, it
became a real war. When Germany declared war on the US, after Japan had attacked
mainly US military facilities in US colonies that had been conquered (in one case, with
extraordinary violence) half a century before, the US went to war. No one went to war
"to stop Hitler."
There's always more to say: history is too complex to summarize in a few lines. But the
basic assumptions you describe are so far off the mark that discussion is hardly even
possible.>>>>>
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