Hegemony is not a matter of pure repression; even military hegemony is extracted through suppression of barbarism that many who oppose the hegemon find an even worse alternative. One can argue that the US as the hegemon may even play a role in feeding the very barbarism that in turn justifies its military actions. That is reasonable and I agree with that.
So what? We should protest those actions that feed that barbarism- the poverty, the intolerance, the political self-dealing among elites, and so on. Unfortunately, the protests during that phase of the cycle are never that large.
But when that barbarism has taken off and transformed itself into the slaughter and repression we have seen documented in Kosovo, protesting the military actions of the hegemon to stop that slaughter leaves the victims of that barbarism to die and suffer. So we end up doing little to short-circuit the hegemon's role in feeding the barbarism, while curtailing the hegemon's corresponding role in stopping the barbarism - a rather unbalanced role for the Left to play in this cycle.
Yes, we should vigorously condemn the arms trade the US participates in that feeds local conflicts; we should condemn the ways US protection of Turkish and Israeli repression of their minority populations creates a climate that can justify dictatorial slaughter of Kosovans in the name of "national security"; we should do the historical analysis of how the assaults on Yugoslavian pluralistic sovereignty, dating from the preemptive recognition of Slovenia, started the chain of nationalist posturing that led to the present ethnic clensing.
But to allow Kosovans to die because you can't stomach the fact that the potential savior of their cause is also partly the cause of their distress, well that's frankly an immaturity in the face of the hypocrisy and nastiness of the moral compromises that we face in our global system. I respect the pure pacifist position that argues that a pure ideal of non-violence in all conflicts can feed an ethnic of "study war no more." But almost no one on this list at least is promoting that view, but merely the view that war by the US specifically cannot be justified. And it is that position that seems untenable in this case.
I am quite open to the arguments that bombing cannot be successful in helping the Kosovans. That pragmatic argument that bombing merely strengthens the Serbian leadership and intensifies repression may be valid. But there are two responses- one is to call for a pull-out; the other is to discuss the moral imperative of the war and whether a deployment of troops in Kosovo to prevent ethnic slaughter may be needed. That would be a serious escalation of the conflict, but that is a response to the pragmatic arguments about the limits of bombing Yugoslavia into submission.
On the more ideosyncratic side of why I support the intervention, I was travelling in Eastern Europe back in 1990- a few years before the whole Yugoslavia conflict fully exploded. I was in Bratislava and ran into an alternative radio journalist from the US who had just come from interviewing ethnic Albanians down in Kosovo. He was still shaken from the experience. Yugoslavia military officers and found him there and were at first hostile in a limited way, demanded to know his business and so on. They then demanded to check his backpack. They found tapes of his interviews and played one.
The second they heard Albanian words on the tape, their hostility turned from casual hostility to full-out deadly threat. The journalist was hauled down to the police station and given a classic 36-hours psychological third-degree - bright lights, being kept awake straight for the whole period, verbal threats and a general regime that shook the journalist to his heart. My impression was that only the fact that he was an American probably kept the regime non-physical in its torture.
This was back in 1990, note, when there was no large Kosovan mobilization. It is the reports of slaughter in Kosovo combined with the news blackout imposed by the government that makes the whole situation chilling. We know enough about the slaughter in Kosovo that to find out later that wholsesale genocide is happening would morally stain today's protests to their roots.
--Nathan Newman