>On Behalf Of Seth Ackerman
>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.
...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?
It's these analogies that show the rigidness of analysis by those discussing the Kosovo situation. THe Kosovo intervention may have been the wrong thing, but it was not Nicaragua, not a simple extension of the Cold War, Milosevic is not Daniel Ortega, and the sources of information that cued most pro-intervention progressives did not come from the military.
Just the comparison of the Sandinistas to Milosevic should make most anti-interventionists of the 1980s cringe.
But the crucial difference is that many of the human rights groups who documented the brutality of US-backed contras are the ones who documented the abuses by Milosevic. And it was not the US military that raised inital concerns about "missing" refugees, but progressive human rights groups who interviewed refugees fleeing Kosovo. Yes, we can have another round declaring Human Rights Watch and all the other human rights groups fronts for imperialism, but I don't buy it and neither do a host of other folks, even many who opposed the intervention.
In fact, a number of anti-interventionists highlighted the possible death counts as much as supporters of intervenion, arguing at the time that it showed the folly of the NATO intervention. But the source of the information speculating on large numbers of deaths were from credible human rights groups.
I am very glad that those worries ended up being false, and for me it makes the intervention all the more justified, since autonomy for Kosovo was achieved with far fewer deaths than either supporters or opponents of intervention thought likely.
The problem in Kosovo was one of suppression of democratic and cultural rights. The murder and ethnic clensing were the tools to effecting that suppression. However you want to debate the body count numbers, the raw reality was one of Milosevic's regime repressing Kosovo and its people.
You can argue with someone else who was motivated by obsession with mass deaths. I said at the beginning of the intervention that 2000 deaths in the previous year were plenty, since they were linked to antidemocratic repression.
People keep projecting ideological opponents who had to have 100,000 dead to justify intervention, which allows them to play numbers game debates rather than debating the core issues of Milosevic and the regime he ran.
-- Nathan Newman