There you go again, misrepresenting what I said.
I have said often enough that you would have heard it perfectly well by now if you were interested in hearing the opinions of others, that I abhor what Milosovic has done and in now way seek to excuse, justify, support, endorse, or encourage it. On the contrary, he needs to be stopped.
Where we DIFFER is:
a) is this the U.S.'s fight? I say no, we have no role there, we have no right to be there, our intervention is illegal under EVERY international law you can cite, and nobody elected us the world's policemen. I think the people of Yugoslavia need to deal with their own problems.
b) we in the U.S. tend to see things in terms of black and white. This is good, this is bad. We are used to 30 or 60 minute TV shows, or maybe 2 hours movies, in which in that brief period we learn who is good and who is bad and the good guys solve the problem and win. That sort of thinking is part of our national psyche (exacerbated recently by the stock market where everybody can become wealthy overninght.) We abhor complexity, and don't generally have the national willingness to study issues in depth and understand the problems and issues before we jump in. Thus, we totally ignore what Kosovans did to Serbs, we ignore what Croatia is even now doing to displaced Serbs (see recent WSJ article posted here), we ignore historical role of Kosovo in Yugoslavia, we ignore everything which would force us to realize that this is not a situation where one side is all black and one side is all white.
(This is NOT (I say this for others on the thread, because based on your history I am well aware that you will ignore this and accuse me of precisely this) to justify what SM is doing. It IS to say that there is some truth and some evil on BOTH sides, which we refuse to acknowledge.)
c) even assuming we had a valid reason and right to be involved in trying to solve the Kosovo situation, is this bombing going to solve the problems? Not a chance. So far, they have strengthened, not weakened, Milosovic. They have turned the people of Yugoslavia from Western allies who were interested in joining embracing Western values into (and quite justifiably) haters of the West. We had a chance to bring them into the Western fold; we merely drove them further into Russia's arms.
d. While we claim that Milosovic is our target, in fact our target is the Yugoslav people. Can farmers plant crops without gas to run their tractors? Can people get food if it can't cross the Danube to get fro the farmlands to Belgrade, where the people are? Can lives be saved if hospitals don't have power or the equipment or drugs they need? Do you really think Milosovic personally is suffering? You who write of all his mansions and yachts and millons in overseas accounts (none of which you have ever justified through a single cite)?
The problem is that Nato, with the Soviet Union destroyed, really had no role and no purpose. So now it has created one to preserve its bureaucracy and justify its existence. I used to think it was bad enough to have a civil government bureauracy which had lost its role and had to find something to do to justify keeping paying itself its salaries. I see now that this is FAR more dangerous when it's a bureaucracy which has nuclear weapons at its disposal.
In summary, our intevention is:
a. Illegal
b. Simplistic
c. Ineffective
d. Incredibly destructive of many innocent people and their lives
e. Politically stupid and very dangerous |
