>But this "clean hands" attitude of those opposing relief for the Kosovars
This is utter horseshit. What relief for the Kosovars? Quoting Chris Caldwell in New York Press this week: "Clinton, Cohen and Albright began talking about ground troops as a hypothetical option for some later 'stage' of this operation. Transparent bluster, because strategically, the time for inserting ground troops was now. Right this minute! Load up the planes with paratroopers! Given that our stated war aims were to protect Kosovars, if we weren't ready to send ground troops then, we weren't ready to send ground troops ever.... What must have stunned even Milosevic is that we weren't even willing to fly our planes low enough to retard his troop movements. No - there was an asymmetry between endangered civilians and cosseted 'fighting' men that was morally obscene.... The fact is, we were willing to protect Kosovars (maybe), but only if it fit in with our tennis schedule. Any NATO politician who claimed he cared about the Kosovars as much as Serbs cared about Kosovo was lying. (And any NATO politican who actually believed it was institutionalizable.) If we had wanted to protect Kosvars, we'd've protected Kosovars."
Another quote: "The masterstroke that delivered Milosevic his unlikely victory was the very thing that nobody - obviously nobody among the NATO planners - even reckoned among his options: his launching of an all-out attack on Kosovo the moment the bombs started falling. Odd that NATO overlooked the possiblity, because throughout the Cold War, this is exactly the way the U.S. taught Latin American authoritarians to deal with superpower-sponsored radical peasant insurgencies. (Once NATO bombs started falling, the KLA fit this description in every particular.) Had Milosevic attended the School of the Americas...he'd have been taught to conduct just such a counterinsurgency, complete with population transfers at gunpoint, property damage, minings, summary executions, and various other means of 'drying up the ocean in which the fish swim,' as the Guatemalan Efrain Rios Montt used to put it so picturesquely...."
Doug