Nathan takes refuge in a spurious moral equivalence. After all a life is a life is a life, so what does it matter if you kill civilians instead of soldiers. Like Macbeth, he is so steeped in gore that it is as easy to go on as back.
But if there is no difference between killing civilians and soldiers, what is the complaint against the Milosevic regime, exactly? Isn't the very point of Serbia's wrongdoing that the use of the army against the Kosovars is disproportionate to any complaint over the assassination of Serb policemen?
Of course there are civilian deaths in a war - that is unavoidable. But there is a difference between choosing civilian targets and not. Nato's attacks on bridges, television stations, factories and upon cities outside of the fighting zone is the deliberate selection of civilian targets.
Incidentally, the IRA did make a conscious decision to avoid civilian casualties after some of the more bloody bombing campaigns, for the sincerely held reason that they were not at war with the British people but with the Crown Forces. The British press was full of scepticism about the fine distinctions between legitimate targets and illegitimate ones, but it was important to the IRA.
The point overall is that the specifics of Nato's war are, as the Chinese rightly say, barbaric, because its general thrust is barbaric. The selection of the Balkans as the terrain upon which Nato asserts its moral authority is secondary to the over-riding mission. In the last decade, US and UK elites have blundered from Iraq to Somalia to Haiti to Bosnia, back to Iraq and now to Kosovo, in the quest for a bogeyman that will make them truly righteous. The hundreds of thousands of people killed in this perverse quest did nothing in particular to single themselves out. They just happened to be in the way of the West's moral crusade.
In message <016801be9c06$22e93c00$d2f48482 at nsn2>, Nathan Newman
<nathan.newman at yale.edu> writes
>Seth Ackerman- "Oh my God"This preference for killing soldiers over civilians seems a strange
>preference for socialists. On average, soldiers are more working class than
>the population as a whole. The whole ban on killing civilians, like the
>traditional war rule against assassinating enemy leadership, looks like a
>mutual class protection scheme among the elite. The elite's children will
>not go off to war as soldiers and the elite themselves are protected, since
>they are blameless civilians who are untouchable by the "laws" of war. So
>the costs of war are borne only by working class soldiers, making war safe
>for the elite on both sides of the conflict.
>
>As the Church Lady would say, "How convenient."
>
>--Nathan Newman
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>
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-- Jim heartfield