-----Original Message-----
From: Doug Henwood <dhenwood at panix.com>
To: lbo-talk at lists.panix.com <lbo-talk at lists.panix.com>
>Speaking of which, Nathan, I'm waiting for your comments on Paul Watson's
>latest LA Times article, which found little evidence for your horror
>stories on the Kosovan ground. Is he a dupe of Milosevic too? Is the Times
>Mirror Corp. being run from Belgrade?
The first answer is that the broadly documented stories by refugees supplied by human rights groups and the fact of a million refugess is more compelling to me than one individual reporter.
Secondly, any Kosovars left have their own reasons and ability to have stayed in the first place, either they did not share the majority aspirations for independence or were flat out collaborators with the Milosevic regime. In either the nice or the nasty version, they would have had little reason to flee and less reason for the Milosevic regime to make them flee. These are speculation and I still base my support for the intervention on the pre-intervention reports of oppression - which still constitute over a decade of full-scale societal civil disobediance against a repressive regime.
But as I've noted, the fact that many anti-interventionists seize on every story to downgrade the existence of suffering by the Kosovars is again the reason why I think that objectively the anti-intervention movement ends up creating an ideological front in defense of Milosevic's oppression, whatever the best intentions of those who might be opposing it while personally believing in the oppression
--Nathan Newman