I appreciate the judicious tone of your note. Hope this virus is one that spreads.
I have to admit to being uncomfortable with a 'support the bombing' tag. I defy anyone to find in any of the remarks any enthusiasm for the practical usefulness of the exercise.
As Brett, an anti-bombing poster, noted, what's really in question is occupation for peace-keeping. This separates him and a few others from some of the dishonest anti-bombing polemic, because the latter folks, under the rubric of "revolutionary defeatism" or anti-imperialism, oppose any intervention of any type by NATO countries, separately or in concert.
The bombing only makes sense as a prelude to intervention on the ground. A peace-keeping force is better off if its adversaries' military installations have gotten pulverized before-hand. They are more pissed off, but they have fewer tools for evil deeds. I'm no military genius, but I can understand that much.
I appreciated the posting from actual Serbs, rather then selective reprints from the bourgeois media (which of course can't be trusted either, but why be consistent when you can be biased?). I'd like to note that it refutes charges that NATO is "terror bombing." Terror bombing is when bombs are falling on your head, and you're terrified unto death. That is not happening, by and large. I also noted the letters from the Albanians, which reflected a keen sense of terror at the Serbs in Kosovo.
In the end the EU/NATO/US could simply stop bombing or do nothing more than bomb and abandon the Kosovari to massacre and permanent displacement. They've done this before, because as nobody here has denied, their motives are not simply or usually humanitarian.
The point that bears a little more development is the choice elaborated by Nowell, that between an expanding, bourgeois-democratic-capitalist EU and an under-developed periphery sprinkled with petty, butchering tyrants who some here would crown -- but only in these special circumstances -- with a residual mantle of socialism. (Even Russia, by now a crumpled mafiosi state, has gotten an honorable mention.) From an evolutionary standpoint, this sort of socialism is an abject failure -- witness the departure of Croatia, et al. (and imminently, Macedonia) from "Federal Yugoslavia." Chalk it up to IMF machinations or good PR, the devolution of Yugoslavia is plain. From a moral standpoint as well, as Prof DeLong stresses tirelessly, a consolidated bourgeois Europe looks better all the time.
We can speculate about the potential evolution of a Europe recast after WWII with vibrant, diverse socialist states led by heroic partisan leaders, and bemoan the complicity, nay, the leadership of the U.S. in blocking such an outcome, but that Humpty Dumpty is broken irrevocably. The anti-imperialists are living in the unrealized potential of an era that ended forty years ago.
Knee-jerk anti-imperialism is really trying to capitalize on U.S. isolationism and European indifference to a holocaust in a small place. This is not the first occasion for such a position. Nor does it have much of a political future. America Firsters didn't swell the ranks of the CP-USA. The impulse to help Kosovo (which clearly means more than bombing Serbs) is the same impulse to join a struggle for communal well-being. The right thing to do is what attracts the sort of people who could support socialism.
Max