Silicon Investor (SI) -- The First Internet Community

STOCKTALK

We've detected that you're using an ad content blocking browser plug-in or feature. Ads provide a critical source of revenue to the continued operation of Silicon Investor. We ask that you disable ad blocking while on Silicon Investor in the best interests of our community. If you are not using an ad blocker but are still receiving this message, make sure your browser's tracking protection is set to the 'standard' level.

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

To: Neocon who wrote (11212)	6/6/1999 12:17:00 AM
From: George Papadopoulos	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 17770

This is disturbing too... Chicago Tribune UNDER FIRE THE RIGHT WAY TO KILL ENEMY CIVILIANS May 27, 1999 Stephen Chapman Americans should be proud to learn that the United States and NATO are winning the war in Yugoslavia. By this, I don't mean we are defeating the Yugoslavian army and security forces. Unfortunately, they have achieved their objective of using mass terror to empty Kosovo of ethnic Albanians and are firmly entrenched in the province, with no intention of leaving. But never mind that. The other war is going superbly: We are beating the daylights out of the country's civilian population. Women and children, the elderly and the newborn, the sick and the lame--they are no match for the most powerful military alliance in history. Since the first day of the air war, we've said that our bombs are not aimed at civilians. At the same time, we are deliberately doing things guaranteed to bring about suffering and death among innocent people. Intentionally bombing civilians would be immoral, everyone agrees. But intentionally targeting them with equally lethal, though slower-acting, means of destruction is entirely permissible, according to NATO's reasoning. After years of being victimized by Slobodan Milosevic, the people of Yugoslavia now find themselves being pummeled by his enemies. Bombing this week has cut off electricity to 80 percent of the country. Most residents of Belgrade no longer have running water. Bread is scarce, and food is rotting in refrigerators. Medicines are hard to come by. There is no evidence that blasting the power grid has impeded the Serbian war on Kosovo. This guerrilla-style operation can manage just fine without it. About the only military benefit is that the loss of electricity disrupts communications and radar, neither of which is crucial to Milosevic in riding out the air assault. Early in the war, NATO tried to give the impression that any hardship to innocents or damage to the country's civilian economy was purely a byproduct of our effort to destroy the Serbs' ability to wage war. Lately, though, allied officials have admitted that one big purpose is to inflict pain and suffering on the people of Yugoslavia. "If you wake up in the morning and you have no power to your house and no gas to your stove, and the bridge you take to work is down and will be lying in the Danube for the next 20 years, I think you begin to ask, 'Hey, Slobo, what's this all about?' " says NATO air commander and U.S. Air Force Gen. Michael Short. There are only two problems with this approach: It's ineffective, and it's immoral. In previous conflicts, as Dartmouth professor Robert Pape notes in his 1996 book "Bombing to Win: Air Power and Coercion in War," U.S. bombing "knocked out nearly all power generation in North Korea (90 percent), North Vietnam (85-90 percent) and Iraq (over 90 percent), but in no case caused the population to rise up against the regime." The Serbs follow a strange but familiar pattern: When we bomb them, they don't blame their government--they blame us. As for morality, knocking out power is guaranteed to kill people who are helpless and blameless. Infants in incubators, patients requiring dialysis, and patients in intensive care are all at grave, immediate risk--and there are 13,000 of them in Yugoslavia. As water supplies vanish and sanitation deteriorates, disease will spread, posing a particularly lethal danger to anyone who is very old, very young or already ill. The longer the war goes on, the filthier conditions will be and the more people will be in mortal peril. Yet NATO continues to insist that it occupies the moral high ground. Alliance spokesman Jamie Shea says that if patients die because hospitals are deprived of electricity, that's not our fault. Milosevic, said Shea Tuesday, "can either use his backup generators to supply his hospitals, his schools, or he can use them to supply his military. His choice. If he has a big headache over this, then that is exactly what we want him to have." This is the logic of a kidnapper: If you don't do as I say, I'll kill my hostage--and the blame will be on you. Even Henry Kissinger, vilified as a war criminal by Vietnam-era anti-war protesters, says this approach goes too far. "What kind of humanism expresses its reluctance to sacrifice military casualties by devastating the civilian economy of its adversary for decades to come?" he asks in a Newsweek essay. As Kissinger suggests, the reason we are trying to win the war by punishing innocents is that we aren't willing to fight an army with an army. We're sacrificing Serbian newborns to avoid casualties among volunteer American soldiers. If we don't want to go in with combat troops and armor on the ground--and we shouldn't--then we need to either abandon the air war or conduct it in such a way as to minimize the harm to ordinary people who have no more control over Milosevic than we do. Fighting this way is a blunder. Worse, it's a crime.

To: Neocon who wrote (11212)	6/6/1999 12:29:00 AM
From: George Papadopoulos	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 17770

Some sensible stuff from Buchanan about the war...I may not agree with most of his overall views but IMHO he is now too far off the mark here. Published in Washington, D.C. 5am -- June 2, 1999 www.washtimes.com TOP POLITICAL STORY Buchanan: 4 in GOP are Clinton 'copies' By Ralph Z. Hallow THE WASHINGTON TIMES Pat Buchanan said yesterday that he has four principal rivals for the Republican presidential nomination and all of them "are virtual Xerox copies" of President Clinton and Vice President Al Gore on the most important issues facing the nation. He said the four -- Texas Gov. George W. Bush, former Red Cross President Elizabeth Dole, Sen. John McCain of Arizona and publisher Steve Forbes -- all share the same views on everything from Kosovo, China trade and international banking and trade organizations to foreign aid and "open-borders" immigration. Mr. Buchanan reserved his strongest condemnations for the war against Yugoslavia, which he called "Bill Clinton's misadventure." "The Serbs have seen their country smashed by Americans they once admired," said Mr. Buchanan, who is making his third bid for the GOP nomination. "The Kosovars have suffered a catastrophe. . . . The U.S. has seen its superpower status and reputation for decency tarnished by the pounding of a tiny country that never threatened us." "It is neither just nor moral for a superpower to ravage the civilian economy of a country for refusing to give up sacred land [the province of Kosovo] that has belonged to Serbia for generations," he said, drawing applause from a National Press Club luncheon audience. Mr. Buchanan said if any one of the candidates he designated as his main rivals wins the GOP nomination, "we risk a replay of 1992 and 1996, where both major parties will agree on most major issues, and a pillow fight will ensue over some dinky tax cut." "This may satisfy the political establishment, but it would cheat Middle America," said the conservative commentator. He warned that "tens of millions of Americans will not vote, millions more will cast protest votes for [Ross Perot's] Reform Party, the Taxpayers Party, the Green Party and the Libertarian Party." A general election in 2000 between Mr. Gore and one of the "Xerox copy" Republicans would represent a "politics of inconsequentiality," Mr. Buchanan said. Americans, he said, would be condemned to a choice between "two compulsive interventionists" who believe in "open borders" on immigration -- "one-worlders, enthralled by a Utopian vision of a different America or seized by the allure of some New World Order." Calling his main GOP rivals "good and able individuals," he said their biggest mistake has been to endorse the war against Serbia. "I believe truly this war is the product of a hubris and an arrogance that has marked American foreign policy since our triumph in the Cold War and against which I have been warning since the end of that Cold War," he said. "I am here to underscore my profound disagreements not only with Mr. Clinton and Mr. Gore, but with my principal rivals," he said, and singled out Mr. Forbes for wanting to arm the mostly Islamic Kosovo Liberation Army. Mr. Buchanan said such a move would assure "an Afghanistan-type war between Muslims and Christians." Mr. Buchanan commended Mr. McCain "for forthrightness and not engaging in trivial pursuits but contending about the central issues of our day." Referring to the senator's popularity with the news media -- his hawkish views on Kosovo have earned him numerous TV appearances -- Mr. Buchanan joked that Mr. McCain "is clearly this year's favorite for the 1999 William Ginsburg trophy -- named after Monica Lewinsky's legendary lawyer." Mr. Buchanan noted that Mr. Ginsburg once "appeared on no fewer than five Sunday morning talk shows in a single morning." Mr. Buchanan, who challenged President Bush in the 1992 GOP primaries, also had some barbed humor about the former president's son. The younger Bush has surrounded himself with former Reagan and Bush advisers on national and foreign affairs and has refrained from campaigning for the nomination while Texas lawmakers were still in session. "And now that the Long Parliament known as the Texas Legislature has adjourned and Gov. Bush has emerged from his tutorials, perhaps a great debate over America's destiny and role in the world can now get under way," Mr. Buchanan said, drawing gales of laughter from the audience.