But I'd like to disabuse you of the notion that the Pentagon stopped lying when the Cold War ended. You say it was "progressive human rights organizations" who promoted the inflated atrocity reports during the bombing. But it wasn't Amnesty International who told the Wall Street Journal the following:
(WSJ 12/31/99: "We were all hamstrung," a NATO official says. As the war dragged on, he says, NATO saw a fatigued press corps drifting toward the contrarian story: civilians killed by NATO's bombs. NATO stepped up its claims about Serb "killing fields.")
If you want to have a more interesting discussion, we can talk about this comment you made:
The problem in Kosovo was one of suppression of democratic and cultural rights.
How does democracy figure in here? And how does it relate to nationalism? US Ambassador Warren Zimmerman used to tell the Bosnian Serbs--who complained that their desire for "self-determination" was being trampled--"Hey, that's democracy. That's majority rule. Bosnia held a referendum and you guys lost." I assume you agree with Zimmerman, Nathan.
Well, during the Kosovo crisis of 1998, Milosevic repeatedly offered to hold a Serbia-wide referendum on Kosovo's status. Of course, the Serbs outnumber the Albanians in Serbia. (And the Albanians would have surely boycotted the vote.) But no one took this offer seriously.
So what does democracy mean here? What is the proper unit of democratic deliberation? Kosovo or Serbia? Bosnia or the Serb Republic? Croatia or Krajina? Yugoslavia or Bosnia? I'm not sure there are any certain answers. But Western liberals like yourself have somehow managed to decide against the Serbs in every single case:
The Serbs were for integration in the cases of Kosovo and Yugoslavia. The West was for secession. The Serbs were for secession in Bosnia and Croatia. The West was for integration. The Serbs lost every one of these battles (with Bosnia a possible draw.) And then everyone accuses the Serbs of having a paranoid victim complex.
The mistake that Western liberals make is in assuming that the Kosovo Albanians simply want back their human and civil rights that were (indisputably) violated by Serbia. In fact, their main demand is for *national* rights--that is, ethnically defined self-determination over Kosovo. But if Albanians deserve national rights in Kosovo, why didn't the Serbs deserve them in Bosnia? And why should anyone have thought that once the Albanian nationalists assumed power in Kosovo they would refrain from harrassing Serbs (or worse) just as the Serbs did to Albanians when they held power?
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Nathan Newman [SMTP:nathan.newman at yale.edu]
> Sent: Monday, March 20, 2000 5:36 AM
> To: lbo-talk at lists.panix.com
> Subject: RE: Rebuttal to Nathan
>
>
> >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
>
>