> "I will honestly say that it is not clear that we can prevent the
> slaughter in Kosovo without ground troops, but it is clear that
> stopping the bombing will guarantee that the slaughter will
> continue... My express support for the war was that intervention
> would prevent further mass murder..."
>
> ...Or you can just argue (as you did) that empirically, there would
> have been fewer Kosovar deaths without intervention. That's an
> unproveable point one way or the other.
In fact the threat of intervention did successfully prevent further mass murder, or at least it might have; in the middle of March Belgrade had been pressured to the point that they were willing to allow troops in U.N. uniforms occupy Kosovo. This was BEFORE the bombing began. You might not have known the details of this counteroffer, or even its existence, on 3/28, but you do now and Albright did then.
The FRY army and the Serb paramilitaries murdered x victims in Kosovo during April, May and June. y is the count of the "accidental" victims of NATO's bombs. Only God knows x and y, but now they are exact numbers. (By "victims," in this context, I refer only to Albanian Kosovars. Whatever relative value, however minimal, you assign to the lives of the Serbian civilians who were killed during the bombing only adds more weight to my argument.) In late March, NATO's commanders publicly anticipated that x was likely to be pretty big, and in the McNamara tradition, you can bet that for each scenario in the war-plan, someone in the Pentagon had y calculated to two or three decimal places.
It's absurd to claim (despite McNamara) that anyone might been able to precisely anticipate the values of x or y before the war; but everyone, including even dumbass civilians like me, guessed they'd be painfully large numbers. In the middle of March the Albright gang had Milosevic's counteroffer in their hands. At that moment the alternatives and their consequences were clear: had Washington accepted Belgrade's counteroffer at Rambouillet, then ground soldiers in U.N. uniforms would have occupied Kosovo in late March or early April, and roughly x + y lives would not have been wasted. Instead Washington deliberately rejected Belgrade's proposal, and bombed and bombed and bombed; thus x + y lives were needlessly sacrificed. For what? Nathan, how can you justify that?
I am also pessimistic concerning your word "autonomy." In the absence of NATO troops, for how long could Kosovo hold its new Northern border? The KLA state enjoys its "autonomy" courtesy of the U.S. State Department, but State giveth and State taketh away. A puppet can not be autonomous. Ngo Dinh Diem, Manuel Noriega and Saddam Hussein also enjoyed "autonomy," for a while.
Yours WDK - WKiernan at concentric.net