Easy, with my three typing fingers. I considered the fact that Suharto butchered at least five hundred thousand when he first took power in 1965 with full U.S. assistance, and another two hundred thousand in East Timor in 1975, again backed by the CIA all the way, and extrapolated from there. So maybe I was incorrect. Do you think I'm disappointed because events may not turn out so horrible as I predicted? I'd a thousand times rather print out my post in 72 point text on 24 lb. card stock, marinate it in Tabasco and eat it in front of jeering witnesses in the town square, than have had events in Timor uphold a flawless record for accurate prognostication.
Besides, that post wasn't one hundred percent in error. As I recall you advocated a military attack, and I suggested "no one needs to wave any guns around, just make one phone call and remind the Indonesian govt. that we have got their economy by the balls, so they can either pull their troops back and let U.N. peacekeepers in or we start squeezing down." Was that correct, or did we have to drop any bombs?
Don't get out the Tabasco quite yet. As of today, we still have no reason to believe the militias and the Indonesian Army have stopped butchering civilians yet, and Dili has been burnt to the ground, and tens of thousands of pro-independence Timorese have been transported at gunpoint into Indonesia - when, if ever, do you suppose they will be allowed to return? - and all those thousands of dead Timorese sure aren't going to rise up and come back to life if and when those U.N. peacekeepers finally show up. As pleased as I am about the turn events have taken, these new developments won't add up to jack, if Jakarta completely demolishes East Timor first.
Also, we were comparing Timor with Kosovo. As a counteroffer to Rambouillet in mid-March, Milosevic assented to allow U.N. peacekeepers to occupy Kosovo, and if the U.S. had gone along with that counteroffer there would have been neither massacres nor mass deportation of Albanian Kosovars in April, nor civilian casualties due to NATO bombs, nor mass deportations of Serbian and Romany Kosovars in August. But NATO preferred belligerence and bombed Serbian industry flat. Either NATO intended all along to ethni-cleanse Kosovo and destroy Serbia's industries - heavens no, certainly that can't be the case! - or NATO is run by idiots. To be consistent in Timor with our apparently senseless behavior in Kosovo, which God forbid, the U.S. would have to ignore Habibie inviting the U.N. forces in, and spend the next few months blowing up all of Indonesia's factories and power plants from the air, while pro-Indonesia militias roam East Timor on the ground, freely murdering whomever they will.
> I accept I do not know him well. And we can all get things wrong. But
> I have to wonder whether WDK comes from the large school of leftists
> for whom the fact of criticising one's government is more important
> than the accuracy of the analysis behind it.
Feel free to attribute whatever motives you like to my pessimism. I hope I am wrong more often about issues such as this.
Yours WDK - WKiernan at concentric.net