>Of course NATO never said it had proof that 100,000 Albanians had been
>murdered.
No, but Bernard Kouchner did.
In message <000b01bf9258$0bc4fde0$8818fea9 at nsn2>, Nathan Newman <nathan.newman at yale.edu> writes
>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.
This is really quite disingenuous. The 'ideological opponents who had to have 100 000 dead' are not projections, but Bernard Kouchner, Nato and its cheer leaders during the war. Those who are trying to unpick the war propaganda are not 'playing a numbers game'. On the contrary, it was Nato's propagandists who were playing a numbers game. The spectre of genocide was a vital element of the war propaganda. Extraordinary numbers of Kosovan dead were needed to justify the bombing of civilian targets in Serbia, such as bridges, television stations, hospitals and suburban houses.
>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.
Here again, Nathan's arguments descend into ideology. Kosovo today is not in any sense autonomous. It is a colony run by the United Nations. It has a 'civilian' administration run by a French politician. It is occupied by the armies of nineteen countries. On the model of Bosnia, we can expect it to become a United Nations protectorate without any measure of self-rule in perpetuity.
The substantial achievement of the Kosovan war is that the military of Nathan's fatherland have established a considerable presence in Eastern Europe, a prize that was denied them throughout the long Cold War. Provoking local conflicts is the means by which Nato justifies its continued military presence in the Balkans. -- Jim heartfield