If it really were the case that air-strikes (or ground forces) might alleviate the situation of the Kosovars - or indeed the Serb civilians who had been attacked by the KLA - then I certainly would not stand on ceremony.
But the empirical lesson from Iraq, Bosnia and Somalia would seem to be that such interventions do not improve the situation, or offer protection, but aggravate conflict. It seems wrong to me that the Kosovars were persuaded at the Paris peace talks that they had something to gain from escalating their conflict with Serbia. The truth is rather the opposite. The failure of Western policy, it strikes me anyway, is not a surprise, but the obvious outcome.
In all seriousness what did anyone think would happen when a national minority invited Nato to lead bombing raids on Yugoslavia? Our foreign secretary has said that no-one could have anticipated the perfidy of Slobodan Milosevic. But in truth the Yugoslav army would have shown a wholly unexpected forbearance if they had not attacked the KLA.
So when Nathan writes
>
>It may be better to let such people die, rather than strengthen the power of
>imperialist hegemons - the argument being that the power of that
>imperialism causes more suffering in aggregate than the specific mass murder
>this selective use of power may prevent. That is a hard-headed
>anti-imperialist view that has plausibility.
I would turn the argument around: intervention is aggravating the conflict and accelerating the deaths. It is a hard-headed humanitarianism that seeks to liberate people by bombing their towns and forcing them into war with their enemies.
>Jim asks about the fate of the Kurds. Well, others have
>asked the same question in recent weeks. There have been hundreds of
>articles with comparisons of the fate of the Kurds to the Kosovans in the
>last few weeks -- which is all to the good. In fact, there are many
>realpolitick establishment folks who have opposed NATO's Kosovo operations
>precisely because raising human rights issues is a double-edged sword.
I wish that were true, but again the lesson appears to be that a sympathy for the Kurds of Iraq is entirely compatible with a war against the Kurds of Turkey. I guess that is because what we see is not sympathy at all, but crocodile tears shed for the sole purpose of justifying the otherwise explicitly racial hostility to the Iraqi people.
> If
>NATO intervened on behalf of the Kurds then, would those opposing Kosovan
>intervention also oppose intervention on behalf of the Kurds?
There are limits to speculation. There seems to me to be no possibility that Nato would ever support Kurdish independence. Though of course I would be pleased to be proven wrong. They could start by withdrawing military support from the Turkish government. -- Jim heartfield