I've read a lot of your posts now, and most of the time I either agree with you or am forced to think about an issue more carefully. With the one exception of the Kosovo situation. For some reason you put blinders on when this topic comes up.
>>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.
Sam's point was not to compare Milo to Daniel Ortega, or even to say that the situation (what was going on and how the US should have responded) in Nicaragua in the 80's was analogous to Kosovo in the 90's. His point was to illustrate the way in which the US elite (the Administration, the Pentagon, etc.) will manipulate the public in order to sway public opinion in the direction it wants it to go. Want to interfere in Nicaragua's election? Leak stories about the Russians selling Migs to the Sandinistas.
Want to bomb Kosovo? Play up stories of missing Albanian men in Kosovo and spread all the dirt you can find about Milosevic all over the papers.
This is not a difficult point to grasp, and yet I've never seen you deal with it head on. Instead, you invariably address a tangential issue, like you do here by claiming Sam's real point was to somehow draw a parallel between the Sandinistas and Milosevic.
>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.
I don't remember these reports, but you could very well be correct. Still, there is virtually no way Human Rights Watch or any other human rights group could know what was going on inside Kosovo or the simple reason that all observers had been kicked out. True, many of these estimates were coming from the refugee stories, but this is still a lot different than being on the ground inside Kosovo and being able to observe what was actually happening.
I believe it is also true (and people can correct me if I'm wrong) that the OSCE monitors were removed at the request of NATO or the US, and that just prior to the bombing the US lobbied and obtained a reduction in the funding of organizations which deal with refugees. This is suspect behavior at best.
>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.
This I don't understand at all. Kosovo may be autonomous, but the avarage Kosovar has little voice in the politics of the region. Either KFOR or the KLA is running the show, depending on where you live. Secondly, less carnage inflicted by the Serbs makes the relative damage caused by NATO that much more significant and in my mind argues AGAINST intervention, especially in light of the fact that the repression increased significantly when the bombing campaign commenced (as was also predicted).
>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.
This is still going on, only it is the KLA which is carrying out ethnic cleansing instead of Milo. The raw reality is that the KLA is still repressing various minorities inside Kosovo as we speak.
The worst part is that this was entirely predictable. The KLA had shown its true colors long before the bombing campaign. So NATO merely succeeded in replacing one repressive apparatus with another, and in the process totally undermined the opposition to Milosevic within Serbia and the more democratic resistance in Kosovo led by Rugova. It's hard for me to imagine a worse outcome.
Brett