Vietnam was an immoral war and we fought on the immoral side. The fact that you want to compare Milosevic to Ho Chi Mihn says a hell of a lot about your politics.
And you forget, Kosovo is (or was) 90% Albanian. Like a lot of the propaganda you've posted, the whole debate ignores that fact as this is not Serbian territory. It is the Serbs who are in hostile territory. No one sane would advocate trying to occupy Serbia; any US troops would be in Kosovo in alliance with Kosovans against the invading Serbian forces.
Which goes to Doug's argument that "But this is all perfectly consistent with U.S. bombing strategy, from Dresden through Hiroshima through Iraq, to terrorize civilian populations in order to undermine popular support for and destroy the human infrastructure of regimes the U.S. is at war with."
I don't have reports of the bombing targets, so we will have to find out what was hit, but every indication so far is that unlike Dresden and Hiroshima (and unlike Basra in the Gulf War), NATO has not targeted civilian populations for bombing. Terror bombing has been a tactic in the past by the US, but that has not been used so far against Serbs.
It is not Milosevic who single-handedly created 500,000 Kosovan refugees. It is his military and paramilitary squads and it is military targets that NATO has been hitting. To equate that with terror bombing is wrong.
All this discussion about terror and demonization of Milosevic has a point. Let's stop demonizing Milosevic and demonize the Serbian population that has supported this leadership that has promoted wars and ethnic clensing among its neighbors for years, leading to hundreds of thousands of deaths. And let us note, unlike the Iraqis who have no vote for their leadership, the Serbs have a semi-operating electoral system and supported Milosevic. They are culpable for his acts in a way the Iraqi population never was for Saddam Hussein's brutalities.
I am getting rather tired of hearing how the bombing is making the "good German" liberal Serbs further support Milosevic. If they knowingly support him and the cultural genocide in Kosovo, they are morally culpable for the Serbian leaderships atrocities.
--- Nathan Newman
-----Original Message----- From: Yoshie Furuhashi <furuhashi.1 at osu.edu> To: lbo-talk at lists.panix.com <lbo-talk at lists.panix.com> Date: Sunday, March 28, 1999 6:56 PM Subject: Why Don't You Enlist, Nathan? (was Re: 500,000 Kosovans nowrefugees)
Nathan wrote:
>On this we agree. NATO is moving towards deploying ground troops, even if
>the US may not participate. The whole sanitized bombing approach is not a
>good approach (although the best that could be politically pushed in this
>initial stage); a more forthright commitment to troop deployment would be
>better - as I noted in earlier posts.
Hey, why don't you enlist in the US military or the KLA, if you truly believe that the KLA represents the interests of people in Kosovo? Otherwise, you are just an armchair hawk.
***** DAVID HACKWORTH NO ENTHUSIASM FOR WAR AMONG THOSE WHO'D FIGHT
Thirty years ago, President Clinton, National Security Adviser Sandy Berger and Secretary of Defense William Cohen seldom missed a war protest rally. When they were young and vulnerable to the killing fields of Vietnam, they just happened to be big time anti-war movers and shakers.
Now all three have morphed into high-profile members of the "Bomb 'em back to the Stone Age" club as they strong-arm the Serbs and Kosovors to the peace table.
In 1972, that's exactly what Nixon and Kissinger tried and failed to do in Vietnam. Remember Linebacker 1 and 11 and the bombs falling by the freight-train load? Remember how when the bombing didn't work, those two hawks scrambled to settle for "peace with honor?" And how, in the end, there was no peace and no honor --- and almost 400,000 U.S. casualties?
Unless they've lost a screw somewhere, people who fight wars don't want anything to do with war. Those that haven't, like Sandy and the two Bills, are too often hot to trot whether war makes sense or not.
Since none of these born-again war-mongers will be risking their own lives in the skies over Serbia or in the mud of Kosovo, I thought I'd ask some real warriors, those who'll do the dying or have already endured the insanity of battle, for their thoughts on the Clintonian solution to Kosovo.
An infantry sergeant: "They're amateurs playing with real bullets. ... Good people will get killed again for bad policy."
A fighter pilot: "Our country is on a collision course with disaster. Congress, as usual, is rolling over and ducking their responsibilities. Whatever happened to the War Powers Act?"
A Navy CPO: "The Balkans have been a powder keg for a thousand years. If Clinton hadn't spent the '60s avoiding war, maybe he would have learned from the mistakes we made in Vietnam."
An Army engineer: "Who will tell the mothers and fathers of those who are killed in action? Bet your boots it won't be those who order us there, but we who wear the uniform, we who bear the scars of battle."
An Army colonel: "That place is not about freedom and independence ... it's about hatred that oozes out of blood-caked dirt. We have no business sending American troops into that ethnic hornet's nest."
A Navy commander: "We'll be going against well-trained Serbian forces. Thirty-two German divisions couldn't do it [in World War II]. When our boys come home in body bags, what will the war enthusiasts tell the nation?"
A Vietnam vet: "You can't occupy an unwilling country, nor change their hearts and minds with napalm and explosives. Think about it. Did the Germans win over France? Did we win over the Vietnamese?"
An Air Force colonel: "Air power won't hack it over Serbia. We've bombed Iraq for eight years and they're still standing. And they're pussycats compared to the Serbian tigers."
An Army sergeant: "We've forgotten the main lesson from Vietnam: Never get involved in another country's civil war."
A Special Forces colonel: "Sun Tzu taught : 'Know your enemy.' We failed this lesson in Vietnam and now are repeating the same mistake in Kosovo."
A former Army woman soldier: "Sending U.S. troops into Kosovo is a disaster. Aside from having no business there, we stand to lose much and gain nothing."
An Air Force captain: "I don't mind dying for my country, but I'll be damned if I want to die as part of Clinton's New World Order."
A Navy pilot: "It'll be a slugfest in rotten terrain, with serial killers much like the Russians faced in Afghanistan. This isn't a peace mission, it's a kamikaze raid!"
An Army major: "Has anyone thought out an exit strategy? Is it open-ended like the mess in Bosnia? If it is, then say so up front and level with the American people who'll have to station troops there for decades as we've done in the Sinai."
Congress should talk to our warriors, past and present. They make a lot more sense than all the mumbo jumbo coming out of Washington. Maybe it's because they've been there and done that --- the hard way.
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David Hackworth Is A Retired Army Colonel Writing On Military Affairs. The Address Of His Home Web Page Is http:www.hackworth.com.
Reproduced with Author's Permission; for "fair use only."