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Pastimes : Kosovo -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: James R. Barrett who wrote (6415)	5/2/1999 8:48:00 PM
From: George Papadopoulos	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 17770

> it is absolutely disgusting what Clinton and NATO are doing to the Serb civilians I feel likewise...this is sickening.

To: James R. Barrett who wrote (6415)	5/2/1999 8:55:00 PM
From: George Papadopoulos	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 17770

This sums it all up perfecty IMHO: In an age of lies, actions in Balkans speak louder than words by Charlie Reese In the fog of war propaganda, let us remember the facts. The North Atlantic Treaty Organization is in the wrong. NATO is in violation of the United Nations Charter, which forbids military aggression against a sovereign state at peace with its neighbors. Yugoslavia was at peace with its neighbors. NATO is in violation of its own charter because it was supposed to be a defensive alliance only. No attack was launched against any NATO country. The United States, which has orchestrated this war against Yugoslavia, has no legitimate vital, strategic or even marginal interests in the Balkans. At the time the NATO attacks were launched, a total of about 2,000 people -- both Serbs and Albanians -- had been killed during a two-year civil war between the government and the Kosovo Liberation Army. To put that number into perspective, about 18,000 Americans lose their lives to criminals in one year. One of the most stupid statements being made in Washington by both Republicans and Democrats is that attacking Yugoslavia was a mistake but that, because it has already been done, the United States has to win. This is stupid for a number of reasons. War is not a sport. What the people making those statements are really saying is that it was wrong to begin killing people and destroying their property but that, because we are doing it, we have to keep on killing people and destroying more property. Second, there is no way the United States can win. If it takes Kosovo away from Serbia and gives it to the Albanians, then the Serbs will fight a guerrilla war to get it back. Moreover, the Albanians very likely will fight to get NATO forces out so they can pursue the goal of a greater Albania. Unless the United States halts its aggression, it will create a fire that will burn well into the new millennium. Finally, to say that Americans and Serbs must die in order to salvage the reputation of President Clinton's incompetent foreign-policy team is obscene. The reputations of Sandy Berger and Madeleine Albright aren't worth the life of a rat, much less the life of an American or a Serbian man or woman. In an age of lies, it is always best to look at actions rather than words, and the meaning of NATO's actions includes the following: By expanding the alliance and immediately launching an offensive war against a sovereign nation, NATO has shown that its purpose is to be a weapon to enforce U.S. domination of Eastern Europe. There were, in fact, no negotiations with Yugoslavia. Yugoslavia was told: You will turn Kosovo over to the Albanians; you will accept occupation of your territory by foreign military forces; or you will get bombed. The Yugoslav leader had no choice but to reject the NATO demands. This cannot be blamed on the current leader, Slobodan Milosevic. Any Yugoslav president would have been forced to reject the dictate. The consequences will be serious. This war has already precluded the chance of any pro-Western person being elected in Russia. Russia, in this case, is on the high moral ground and rightly sees the NATO aggression as a potential threat to it. Ukraine and Belarus, which had given up nuclear weapons, are both now reconsidering the issue. Russia and China have even more reason to establish close military ties. The United Nations, like its predecessor, is a dead issue. The old League of Nations died when it did nothing to help Ethiopia, which had been invaded by fascist Italy. Now the United Nations has done nothing to help the Serbs, who have been attacked by NATO. Clinton has poisoned the future. People who said character doesn't matter were wrong.

To: James R. Barrett who wrote (6415)	5/2/1999 8:57:00 PM
From: George Papadopoulos	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 17770

Orlando Sentinel, April 22, 1999 If we're so great, why don't we pick on somebody our own size? by Charlie Reese I am, as the baby boomers are fond of saying, conflicted about this war in the Balkans. My natural predisposition is to cheer any time American forces go into combat. On the other hand, I hate a damned bully, even if it's the United States. I hate it that the politicians in Washington keep using our forces to bomb little countries because those politicians are annoyed with the little country's leader. How about a fair fight once in a while? How about bombing a country more our size? I kid you not, but if I were the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, I would be embarrassed to announce, as it did last week, that the alliance's bombing campaign was "beginning to have an effect." Wow. That's like a professional wrestler saying, after going three rounds with a 12-year-old, "I'm beginning to wear him down." Combined population of NATO's 19 countries: about 600 million, give or take 50 million or so. Population of Yugoslavia, 10 million. Combined armed forces of the NATO countries: easily 2 million or more. Yugoslavia's total armed forces: 114,000. And after three weeks of high-tech bombing and missile-lobbing, NATO's air attacks are "beginning to have an effect." As I said, wow. Good thing Yugoslavia doesn't have 20 million people; it might take months before NATO's bombs could "begin" to have an effect. If President Clinton wants to be macho, why doesn't he bomb North Korea? Now, North Korea is still a little country compared with us, but it is virtually all military. It has a million-man army and 4.7 million-man reserve force, not to mention more than 10,000 surface-to-air missiles. Now that would be, if we kept the nukes out of it, a bit more of a fair fight, and all of these armchair generals and all of these pompous spokesmen for NATO, the Pentagon and the State Department, all of these bloodthirsty little academics who chatter on television would have something interesting to talk about. As it is, they mainly have to make excuses for blowing up passenger trains, bombing refugees and killing some farmer's dog. And, of course, boast about the bombing beginning to have an effect. Yes, I'm conflicted. I really don't want a war with North Korea. It would be terrible. The official American estimate is that casualties would run 70,000 or more per day during the first 72 hours. Besides, if it takes a month to move 24 Apache helicopters from Germany to Albania, I don't even want to know how long it would take to move them to Korea. As a matter of deadly serious fact, one of the dangers of these Yugoslav follies is that they may encourage somebody such as the dictator of North Korea to think that now is the best time to make a move on South Korea. NATO, frankly, has not been too impressive in its first war, even against a small country with few resources. What I wish is that Americans would wake up from their television trance and realize that our government -- the people we elect -- have been acting like crypto-fascists in recent years, bombing and starving people in small countries simply because the politicians are frustrated or need a headline to distract attention from their personal failures. We ought to be the good guys, and we aren't. We are meddling in other people's countries, bullying them, killing them, breaking international laws right and left, acting the hypocrite and being an all-around jerk of a nation. The fault lies with the civilian leadership, not with the military, and ultimately with us because we elect the civilian leadership. For a self -governing people, we haven't done such a hot job in recent years.

To: James R. Barrett who wrote (6415)	5/2/1999 9:00:00 PM
From: George Papadopoulos	Respond to of 17770

'The war is being fought to destroy the very principles which constitute the West. This is not moral: it is megalomaniac' The Times, April 22 1999 OPINION John Laughland 'The war is being fought to destroy the very principles which constitute the West. This is not moral: it is megalomaniac' Among the charred corpses and smoking ruins of Kosovo there lies an unreported casualty. It is not one of the hundreds of physical victims of Nato's bombs but instead a metaphysical one. In 1999 as in 1389, the Blackbird Field has witnessed the defeat of that spiritual body of values which in the postwar period used to be known as the West. This is because the war is being fought to destroy the very principles which constitute the West, namely the rule of law. Unlike in 1389 however, the enemy is not the Sultan but rather the leaders of the Western nations themselves. It is false to claim, as Tony Blair now does, that Serb mistreatment of the Kosovo Albanians, is the casus belli. Instead, the bombing started because President Milosevic refused to allow hostile foreign troops on to Yugoslav soil. Overturning this refusal remains Nato's overriding purpose. Yet this demand is completely incompatible with the logic of a system of sovereign states, which for the past 350 years has formed the basis of Western politics, liberalism and the rule of 1aw. To be sure, state sovereignty is not an absolute principle. It can be overriden in certain extreme cases. But the present war is being fought in order to override it in all cases, and to remove it completely as a relevant factor in the new world order. Mr Blair has said the war is being fought for "a new internationalism". Javier Solana, the Nato Secretary-General, has said that its purpose is to establish a precedent for the "new strategic concept" of Nato, namely that it should be able to intervene in the internal affairs of a sovereign state for humanitarian reasons. Nato, by definition, never had this role when it was set up, as a defensive alliance, protecting the sovereign territory of its members. If the war is post-national in its aims, it is also post-national in its implementation. Nato, an anonymous international apparatus based in Brussels and acting outside the terms of its own charter, is colluding with a group, the Kosovo Liberation Army, whose structures and goals owe very little to any political programme of national liberation for Kosovo and instead a great deal to the needs of its mafia activities and extensive drug-running network. The only nation involved is Serbia, whose wholesale destruction is certainly going to be the outcome of the war, though not its stated aim. This is why all the war's main protagonists are old enemies of nationhood, Nato and the West. Bill Clinton, Mr Blair, Joschka Fischer and Señor Solana form "the new generation of politicians who hail from the progressive side of politics" of which Mr Blair boasts. Commentators have been wrong to chuckle at the apparent conversion of these one-time opponents of US power, for the truth is much worse. This war represents the most complete fulfilment of their deepest internationalist convictions. Like the conversion of the New Left to the market, its new warmongering should give no comfort to conservative supporters of economic liberalism or the Atlantic alliance. Instead of being systems for the protection of national liberties, both these have now been subverted into vehicles for their destruction. Mr Blair has even compared the four weeks of bomb attacks on Yugoslavia to the process by which "globalisation is opening up the world's financial architecture for discussion, re-evaluation and improvement". War, it seems, is now the continuation of economic integration by other means. In place of the old system of national legal systems creating free markets and national liberties, a new world order of universal human rights is being set up. The problem is that the bogus notion of human rights can never provide a basis for either the rule of law or morality. Whereas a national system of justice is a self-contained entity which grows with and defines the society in which it inheres, universal human rights are detached from any rootedness in time or place. Their application therefore inevitably flails around capriciously, according to the latest whim of outrage or the latest fad for victimhood. It is therefore inevitable that the brave new world of universal human rights is, in fact, a topsy-turvy world of gruesome moral relativism. Why support the KLA, while sidelining the moderate Albanian resistance under Ibrahim Rugova? Human rights are, by definition, antithetical to the concept of national sovereignty. The idea that there can be such a thing as universal human rights implies that there can be a single global system of civil law with Nato playing the role of world government. But for its sins, mankind has been divided up into different peoples. Any attempt to behave as if this were not so is not moral: it is megalomaniac.