That the Serbs are guilty of atrocities and ethnic cleansing, there can be no doubt about. But the fact that Serbs are guilty of those atrocities does not give NATO's commanders the right to disregard and break those rules.
So what will be their punishment and how will it be carried out??
Sue them??
Likewise, the policy of hurting civilians to pressure Milosevic, as admitted by Short, is not acceptable either.
It was in WWII if you remember the mass bombing campaigns that were carried out against Germany. You also might recall the fire bombing campaigns that we implemented against Japan since high winds prevented "precision" bombing, and the fact that Japan's military industry was heavily decentralized into their "cottage factories".
And of course, there was Nagasaki and Hiroshima.
The rules of war are a sham and unenforceable except by the victors.
"Civilized War" is the most ironic of oxymoronic terms. It doesn't exist and never will. War comes down to a matter of national and personal will. Any rules of warfare are self-imposed restraints enacted by cognitively dissonant politicos wishing to retain some semblance of morality in an immoral environment. But they are quickly compromised and violated when they impede the execution of the military plan.
So let's not fool ourselves here. Milosevic doesn't give a squat about the "rules of war". He has shown this time and time again while he has held out the carrot of peace in front of the sheepish European democracies, then suddenly withdrawing it and doing his own thing. The Serbian people also are not innocent in that they empowered Milo and then chose to ignore or tacitly support his aggressive action against other ethnicities. No political leader can pursue such a course of criminal action without at least some awareness of what is actually occurring and who is perpetrating it.
Milo has been a master chess player and pratictioner of Machiavellian politics during the '90s. He has maintained Serbia's place upon the international stage, forcing the world to pay attention to a region of the world no one much cared about before. But to mix gameplaying metaphors, his bluff has finally be called, and he is in check, soon to be checkmate.
JBL, don't fool yourself. War is an immorality perpetrated by "moral" people. Once committed, the result must be to WIN, not to permit the person who forced your military hand to retain the ability to do so once again 1 or 2 years from now.
Milo and the Serbian people are fortunate that people of my ilk are not running this campaign. I would have shut the power down in Belgrade on day one. I would have commenced shipping combat units to Albania and Macedonia almost immediately so that Milo would realize that their was no doubt about what was coming and where he stood in the negotiating process.
You can't negotiate if your opponent thinks you are irresolute in your position and that time is on his side. One must negotiate from a position of strength and will the means and the will to carry out the necessary actions should the other side not negotiate in good faith.
And personally, IMO, one of the greatest strengths and curses of the US is that we react emotionally to certain events.
The question now is whether it is too late and too much leverage has been lost to prevent this crisis from becoming an even greater debacle.
Regards,
Ron |
