>>While delaying its detailed response, it was perhaps significant that
>>yesterday the NATO spokesman insisted that the attacks on the sanatorium in
>>Surdelica and the bridge in Navarin were legitimate military targets. There
>>was no response to the questioning of why the bridge was attacked during
>>the middle of the day, when it might be expected to have civilians on it.
>>Shea's reply was merely to give a list of gross numbers of Kosovo Albanian
>>civilians displaced, tortured or murdered.
>>Some of this might just be widening the margins of tolerance of the amount
>>of civilian casualties there are prepared to say are accidental collateral
>>damage.
>>But there are real possibilities that the NATO command has shifted its
>>concept of what is a legitimate target. This would be consistent with their
>>impression that morale has broken in the Serb population in the last couple
>>of weeks. It may be calculating that the deaths of 50 Serb civilians in two
>>days, far from strengthening Serb resolve may weaken it ahead of a crucial
>>sert of meetings determining the interpretation of the G8 conditions which
>>Serbia has said it will accept.
>>I was against the widening of the war to economic targets and I am against
>>this further widening. But I would say to the many sincere, intelligent,
>>informed , and committed left-wing subscbribers that it is not enough
>>merely to oppose everything that western governments do as a matter of
>>course. It is necessary to oppose them on the basis of a wider strategy
>>challenging their claim to be the hegemonic arbiters of international
>>justice and instead pinpoint the issues that would shape a juster concept
>>of international world governance, which is being fashioned now, through
>>such struggles.
>>In this case that includes recognition of the right of the people of Kosovo
>>to self-determination. That is why Carter's criticism of NATO is reformist
>>but more useful than the blanket 'revolutionary' critical stance of more
>>left wing members of marxism-space.
>>
>>Chris Burford
>>London