Rebuttal to Nathan

[Seth Ackerman]

I was out sick Friday, so I'm only getting to this now.

Two points:

1) Nathan, you're grotesquely missing the point.You remember the Nicaraguan
MiG crisis? To deflect attention away from the 1984 Nicaraguan elections,
the Reagan Administration planted leaks at NBC, CBS, and New York Times from
"senior Administration officials" that there were "preminary indications"
that the Soviets were delivering MiG fighter jets to Nicaragua. This
successfully whipped up hysteria about Soviet penetration of Latin America
and the threat to Harlingen, Texas. 

As soon as the election was over, the "senior officials" went back to the
reporters and told them it was a false alarm--the "preliminary indications"
turned out to be in error. Nathan, your argument expects us to believe that
these propaganda attacks are really false alarms and honest mistakes. You
would never accept that explanation when it comes to Nicaragua, but as soon
as Slobo's involved, somehow the Pentagon turns into a band of couragous
truth-tellers? 

Of course NATO never said it had proof that 100,000 Albanians had been
murdered. If it had, sooner or later it would have had to come up with
100,000 bodies. Instead, NATO said that 100,000 Albanians had gone
"missing." NATO was "concerned" about the "unknown fate" of these vulnerable
individuals. The goal--which worked--was to create the illusion that the
Serbs had maasacred tens of thousands.

Maybe you think Sec. Def. William Cohen ACTUALLY THOUGHT 100,000 Albanians
had gone missing, and was simply expressing his concerns out loud during an
appearance on CBS' Face the Nation. By the same token, maybe you think that
Jamie Shea really believed that 700 Albanian boys were being used as human
blood banks by the Serb military, as he claimed at a NATO press briefing. My
reading of the situation is that the military was doing what it has always
done in times of war. It lied to soften up public opinion, mainly by making
the enemy seem way more bloodthirsty than they actually were. 

2) How do you know what Yugoslavia was or was not willing to accept before
the bombing? None of these alternatives was ever pursued by Albright. Her
goal from the beginning was to bomb. Newsweek's well-informed diplomatic
correspondent, Michael Hersh, reports that Western intelligence agencies
were predicting shortly before Rambouillet that Milosevic would be open to
NATO troops in Kosovo. But those reports "disappeared" once Albright started
insisting on a referendum on Kosovo independence. Steven Erlanger of the NY
Times reported (Feb. 23) that Belgrade officials were tossing around ideas
like "leavening" a NATO force with Russian troops. Again, that kind of talk
was the last thing Albright wanted to hear. As she now admits, her goal at
Rambouillet was not to get an agreement, but to get "clarity"--that is, a
Serb "no" and an Albanian "yes" which would force the Europeans to approve a
NATO activation order.

So, maybe the Milosevic was never willing to be reasonable. Maybe all his
concessions were just negotiating ploys. Maybe he was planning all along to
reneg at the last minute. We'll never know. But we do know for sure that
Albright was negotiating in bad faith.

Besides. Kosovo would have been better off just keeping the OSCE monitors in
place.