<...>
> If the broad leadership of the Kosovar people, from KLA military types to
> Rugova, all argue that the military strikes are in the interest of their
> people, I wonder how others can argue in their name for its uselessness?
>
> The Kosovar leadership may be wrong of course, but it seems rather
> self-assuming for others to speak for their interests.
<...>
these are very fair questions, but representational politics-- 'speaking in the name of'--isn't some zeus-begat procedure that is simply legitimate as such. it's a procedure that assumes a specific kind of juridical framework: not just the more or less duly appointed 'broad leadership' that you speak of, but an extant forum in which that speaking is done, procedures for synthesizing conflicting statements, coherently formulated questions, and above all a *civil* (and i mean that technically, not sentimentally) political milieu. none of that is present in this situation. my girlfriend and i could proclaim me to be the emperor of our apartment and decide that our nieghbor makes too much noise and call on NATO to turn their apartment into a parking lot. why not? it would be very self-assuming for anyone to challenge the legitimacy of my demands, seeing as i'm the 'broad leadership' of my apartment. do the italian fishermen who are trolling for bombs have anything to say about this? or the macedonians or greeks or bulgarians? it's awfully self- assuming of the KLA et al. to speak in the interests of the neighboring countries whose sovereignty and stability is threatened by tidal waves of refugees and the occasional errant bomb. this is an international war, and the supranational in- stitutions that supposedly serve as the framework for resolv- ing these matters--the UN, the ICJ, etc.--have been sidestepped. spokesmodels in various NATO countries piously refrain from saying anything that might encroach on these institutions' established right to impose order: they'll have their chance, cook says, *after* the war is over. of course, they frittered their repsonsibility to attend to these matters for almost a decade. but it's not like history is a multiple-choice exam with a teacher who's got the correct answers locked away in the drawer of her desk, and that the UN 'failed' in any ver- ifiably objective sense. there's no One Right Way to analyze what's going on; but appealing to a republican tradition of representational politics as though it's 'natural' or 'uni- versal' is a very limited way of assessing the legitimacy of NATO's actions.
cheers, ted