>If the KLA had been fervent socialists rather than fervent
>patriarchs & reactionaries that they are, in all likelihood, the West
>would have supported Milosevic against them.
Whilst the KLA leadership pretty well marked themselves as bad eggs (after all, we got to hear an awful lot from them), I think it'd hardly be fair to characterise everyone who was forced or moved by circumstances to join the KLA as patriarchs and reactionaries. Many KLA fighters, especially in latter days, did indeed see themselves as socialists, but many found that a federalist lefty stance wasn't enough to stop the Serb militias turning 'em out (in whose defence, though many doubtlessly deserve none such, it should be noted that it's hard to make subtle distinctions during counter-insurgency operations [which is why blanket liquidations like My Lai are so common] - and downright impossible if many of your men are moved by carefully seeded blood'n'soil nationalism). After that, the homeless lefty Kosovar might as well join the KLA (units of whom were apparently happy to off blokes not sufficiently keen to join). Messy and ugly.
>The West knows how to choose "the lesser of two evils" according to its
>own >economic & geopolitical criteria.
Not sure about that, either, Yoshie. They don't always get that right. I'm of the opinion, for instance, that the US's knee-jerk anti-independence stance in southern Africa, Indo-China and the like was pretty foolish in their own terms. They drove many a nationalist into Moscow's and Beijing's arms by simple virtue of reading every instance of pro-independence sentiment as necessarily bolshie. Much better to have seduced 'em than antagonised 'em, I reckon.
>Many leftists in the West, however, would
>rather say a "pox on both houses," so as to maintain the beautiful
>soul: the beautiful soul "lives in dread of besmirching the splendour
>of its inner being by action and an existence," as Hegel criticized
>in the _Phenomenology of the Spirit_. Imperialists could care less
>about the beautiful souls of the Left, though. In their eyes, anyone
>who opposes imperial ventures out of whatever motive -- socialist,
>nationalist, anarchist, environmentalist, indigenist, religious
>pacifist, black nationalist, contrarian, etc. -- is _by definition_
>supporting the Enemy (in this case Milosevic); Remember how MLK was
>treated by the U.S. government. And, objectively speaking,
>imperialists are correct, at least in short terms: (objective, not
>subjective) opposition to imperialists attacks = (objective, not
>subjective) support of those who are attacked.
Well, I reckon we fall too often for the terms of public debate. Hussein and Milosevic aren't difficult to demonise, and it's understandable that westerners would like to give their elected leaders, their taxes and their brave boys & girls in uniform the benefit of any doubt. As long as we confine our interventions to the contests of the moment and the gladiators beloved of the mass media (ie individualism and dehistoricisation), we might as welll fart at a thunderstorm.
How did 'we' get to this? What role did 'we' play? How foreseeable was this? How often in other times and places have 'we' done the same things with the same consequences? Qui ganare? Questions like that are the way to go, I reckon. Each moment has a political economic history, and part of that history is always the suppression of that fact.
Cheers, Rob.