Up late with an Everest of essays ...
You write:
>The mine problem will be dreadful. What could be more reasonable then than
>for NATO to stop dropping cluster bombs in return for the Serb regime not
>laying mines over Kosovo???
This might have been reasonable three days ago, when a land assault was still well outside the realms of rational expectations (well, I didn't expect it, anyway). The indictment stunt and the various clues being leaked to us from other sources seem to indicate that we're going to have a real shootin' war after all. That means the prospective invadee would not see such a deal as reasonable at all. Mining is just about all they have that NATO doesn't.
>Except that there are bigger demands to be made. (And I do asssume that no
>effective campaigning is possible in the west without at least making some
>reference to the aggression by the Serbs against the Kosovans).
I'd word that more carefully. It might (understandably) seem to many Albanian Kosovars that all Serbs are hateful murderers and rapists. And it certainly seems to most westerners that all Albanian Kosovars are innocent passive victims. Neither of these is a tenable position for us to take if we're going to have at all a useful chat about this.
>No doubt these suggestions will stick in some people's throat, but without
>considering specifics and timing there can be no campaigning that actually
>changes the world. It would be a revolutionary reform if out of these wars
>there was a ban on mines and cluster bombs.
To ban mines not only hurts mine producers (the salient ones of which reside in NATO countries - making it unlikely from an economic point of view), but, more importantly, are one of the few, er, efficacious weapons affordable to poorer warfarers (hence unlikely from a political point of view). And cluster bombs are great against armour formations. If I were a NATO grunt, I'd take a dim view of any humane decision to leave the destruction of those tanks to me and my M16.
'Revolutionary reform' in the context in which NATO has landed us would be the dissolution of NATO or the codifying of a charter that categorically disallows unilateral military action on its part where a member nation is not being attacked. World responses to intranational atrocities should be predicated on (an admittedly inevitably formal - but who's after a perfect world, eh?) world deliberation and legitimation.
I reckon THAT'S the route to take, meself.
Cheers, Rob.