Stop the bombing!

Gar Lipow lipowg at sprintmail.com
Sat Mar 27 09:54:15 PST 1999


Prior to the bombings, the official U.S. figures were 2,000 ethnic Albanians killed in Kosovo -- as Noam Chomsky pointed out about the number of Colombians killed annually by the Colombian military -- in the face of rather nastier Guerillas than FARC. (None of which justifies what the Milo was doing.)

Since the bombing, the massacres of Kosovors have escalated. The number of ethnic Albanians forced to flee have increased. I have nothing in *principle* against the idea that the U.S. military could accidentally wander onto the right side of history (as happened in WW2). But I see no evidence here. In fact 100% of the evidence so far is that bombing has made things worse for the people it was supposedly trying to help, weakened the democratic opposition to Milo in Yugoslavia, alienated Russia and greatly damaged the chances of long term peace between the U.S. and Russia. (And to those who call that appeasement -- all U.S. presidents prior to Clinton had the very sensible policy that you damn well do put some effort into not provoking a war with people with large number of nuclear warheads pointed at your cities.) The point is we are taking all these risks and hurting rather than benefiting the people of Kosovo.

Now we are talking about a ground war. Since military strategy is not my area of expertise, I am not going to assume that a large number of NATO troops will die if a NATO ground war starts. But I would be willing to bet that more than 2000 Serbians and ethnic Albanians die if a ground war starts. If a ground war does not start then this was another in a long list of American "let's kill people to send a message" actions. If you want to send a message, use e-mail. Bombs and missiles transmit death, not information. This is not a video game.

And the worst of it is, we did have other options. At a certain point we simply held out peace treaty and told Milo, sign it. These were the "negotiations" during the last three or four weeks prior to the bombing (which was only delayed that long to give the Albanian Kosovors a chance to sign it as a cover for the bombing we already intended to do.) If you seriously want peace in Kosovo, try including non-governmental organizations (such as the "Women In Black") in the negotiations -- not giving them veto power of anything, but having their representatives in the room to make suggestions and bridge differences. Not as glamorous as bombing, not as flashy -- but a damn sight more likely to do some good.

Since there is no chance this bombing will save a single Kosovar Albanian's life, there must be some other purpose in it (whether the ones mentioned by Yoshie are correct or not, something of the sort must explain it). For Milo, of course this bombing is a wonderful thing. His bare majority, in the face of an outside attack, will turn into an overwhelming majority. Increased repression is tolerated. Public opinion turns against dissenting parties, and alternative media, as a threatened people rally round their leader.



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