>nathan, max, margaret, others who support the bombing
I don't think of my own position as 'support[ing] the bombing', but more on that below.
>[clip]
I appreciate and largely - perhaps totally - agree with your analysis, clipped here for brevity.
>when the bombs stop dropping, will they be replaced by a strategy of
>humiliation and starvation as is the case in iraq?
This would be the worst possible non-solution. What we're doing in Iraq is indefensible on any rational ground.
One of the earlier US presidents -- i want to say Reagan because he was such a criminal putz, but i think it was actually Carter, whom i respect -- made a policy that we don't do 'surgical' operations to get rid of psychopathic rulers such as Saddam. I may be woefully cynical, but it seems to me there's a very obvious reason for that -- self-protection! If the US can assassinate Saddam, then Saddam or Qaddafi or someone else can assassinate Clinton (or whomever). So a tacit agreement is made to disallow all that! Can't risk the top scum!
So, since getting rid of their psychopath is disallowed, our psychopaths'll make the people miserable instead. It's the criminal way! Feh.
>will nato send in ground troops, which seem much more likely to have
>an effect, and will those now defending intervention sign up for this
>or (better) an international brigade?
I think of myself as supporting not the bombing, but rather a resolution that takes care of the needs of the peaceful first. So yes, i would very definitely support even very-long-term deployment of ground troops.
>and, having said that, a question I would ask of those both for and
>against the bombing: what other strategies can be offered? I for
>one have no idea about concrete strategies, and I am never too
>enamoured of so-called diplomatic solutions which would mostly likely
>end in partitions, bantustans, and the expansion of already bloated
>geopolitical orbits marking a continuation of racism and racist
>hatreds on a new terrain.
I'm still unconvinced that i understand all the dynamics of population shifts and migrations into and out of the region. The Serbs apparently have a longstanding cultural claim on the region. The Albanians now are the indesputable majority of the population, but how did it get that way, and when?
If the Albanian majority doesn't date back any further than WW2, then the Serbs may have a defensible claim to continued political control of the area. Should the Albanians enjoy cultural separatism? Yes, if at their own expense (for schools etc.) What if they don't want to live under Serbian administration? Perhaps then they should have the right to have their property bought out so they can afford to relocate to, e.g., Albania (which I presume, for argument's sake, would welcome them... although perhaps with no more warmth than some Jews were welcomed in Israel)
>in the short term, the aim would be to put a halt to the bombings.
>that is indisputable, since the bombings have not nor will cease the
>slaughter.
Agreed that bombing, by itself, will not stop the most important part (and if they don't aim better than they've been doing, it will actually make things worse) But i decline to take the position, as a few (not you) have done here, that by carrying out the bombing, NATO are responsible for the stepped-up Serbian predations. That's the same sort of warped thinking that an abuser exhibits, who steps up the abuse after the cops leave. Abusers and enablers try to claim that third parties (the cops, the neighbors who called them, etc.) are responsible for the increased abuse, but that's psychopathic nonsense. Abusers are always responsible for their own behavior.
=margaret