Then the airstrikes starting causing a massive wave of hideous anti-Albanian ethnic cleansing. The left interventionists started loudly insisting they never supported the airstrikes, which only prove how halfhearted NATO was about protecting Kosovo Albanians. If only NATO would muster the will to risk its own soldiers, ethnic cleansing could be halted.
OK, so the war finally ended after much death and destruction. Since June 1999, we *do* have troops on the gound. 50,000 heavily armed NATO soldiers with robust rules of engagement, unified chain of command, etc., etc. -- they run the province like a fiefdom. Almost immediately upon their entry, ethnic cleansing begins again, this time against anyone who is not ethnic Albanian -- Serbs, Roma, Muslim Slavs, Turks. Corpses of Roma children are found in ditches; widowed Serbian grandmothers are gunned down in their own apartments. 200,000 non-Albanians are driven out of the province.
Well, now there's no excuse. The ground troops are already there. They are fully able, if they so choose, to stop the ethnic cleansing. But NATO doesn't lift a finger to stop it. According to most reports, within NATO it is the Americans (especially Jamie Rubin and Madeleine Albright), who formed the closest links with the KLA, especially Hashim "the Snake" Thaci, and who are most staunchly opposed to halting the violence.
Well this is a perfect test, isn't it? Has Hitchens penned a cri de coeur in the Nation urging a ground war against the KLA and its cleansers? Has Ian Williams? David Rieff? Susan Sontag? Anybody? Maybe someone has, somwhere. But I haven't seen it, and most likely neither have you, dear reader.
Instead, what I have seen are hand-wringing pleadings delivered to Kosovo Albanians in general urging toleration and peace in the vaguest terms (as if the whole society were directly responsible rather than the US-supported KLA thugs who were trounced in last year's elections.) Even worse, these pleas for less killing are usually couched in the spirit of Albanian nationalism: If you stop the killing, the world will like the Albanians more than the Serbs, and that'll sure show 'em, won't it!
This to me resembles nothing so much as the weak-willed, do-nothing puscillanimity in the face of ethnic cleansing for which the UN and the anti-intervention left were pilloried for years. Only now it comes from those who urged us so many times to stand up to "genocide." And why the reversal? I can think of no reason but this: Now, the ethnic cleansing is happening to the right people.
So it is getting increasingly impossible to regard the whole Balkan-intervention campaign of the last decade as a serious-minded effort to stop ethnic cleansing wherever it might occur as a moral principle. Rather, the events since 1999 have done nothing but confirm long-held suspicions that the whole left-intervention idea -- and this is a crude rendering, I admit -- is as follows: The Balkans are a place that contains Serbs and good guys. Our job is to help the good guys fight the Serbs. And if that causes more killing and mayhem than would otherwise be the case, sometimes the price of justice is regrettably high.
Seth
> ----------
> From: LeoCasey at aol.com[SMTP:LeoCasey at aol.com]
> Reply To: lbo-talk at lists.panix.com
> Sent: Wednesday, January 24, 2001 10:18 AM
> To: lbo-talk at lists.panix.com
> Subject: Kosova Redux
>
> Seth:
>
> I would agree that Jared Israel is not a "reasonable" representative of
> those
> who opposed NATO intervention in Kosova. In Michael's defense, however,
> the
> said Mr. Israel has made it his business to be omnipresent in cyberspace,
> as
> a veritable spam machine, and in whatever dark recesses he manages to
> miss,
> he has the ubiquitous Mr. Proyect to sing his praises. While one might be
> tempted to simply ignore them, this always run the risk that the
> uninformed
> might find no response to their "arguments."
>
> It also seems that you do a little of what you are blaming Michael for.
> For
> example, the most serious of those who supported NATO intervention on the
> left took a position in favor of a military invasion, and are hardly
> uncritical of the use of the air war option, much less of the use of bombs
>
> with depleted uranium. If you don't want to argue against a straw man, you
>
> need to address that position.
>
> Finally, certainly one of the most articulate proponents of intervention
> in
> Kosova was Ian Williams, and Michael posted her what I found a pretty
> definitive refutation of the argument with regard to Racak. But nowhere
> did I
> see his points addressed.
>
>
> << You'll notice that further up in my post I wrote: There were several
> high-profile massacres in Kosovo, most of them aren't questioned by
> reasonable people.
>
> I don't see what Jared Israel has to do with the above statement.
>
> If I wanted to, I could waste a lot of bandwidth on this list debating, in
>
> absentia, the outer fringes of pro-NATO sentiment -- I could set up a
> Jeanne
> Kirkpatrick strawman or a Robert Bartley paper tiger and knock them down
> just
> as easily.
>
> But that's too easy because there are a lot smarter people to argue with
> on
> that side of the fence. So I don't. But apparently the bomb-Serbia claque
> finds it too tiring to engage serious arguments on the other side; much
> more
> pleasing to dig up the rantings of the most insane pro-Milosevic specimens
> on
> the Internet and then congratulate themselves for detecting the flaws in
> their arguments.
>
> This isn't very impressive. >>
>
> Leo Casey
> United Federation of Teachers
> 260 Park Avenue South
> New York, New York 10010-7272 (212-598-6869)
>
> Power concedes nothing without a demand.
> It never has, and it never will.
> If there is no struggle, there is no progress.
> Those who profess to favor freedom, and yet deprecate agitation are men
> who
> want crops without plowing the ground. They want rain without thunder and
> lightning. They want the ocean without the awful roar of its waters.
>
>
> -- Frederick Douglass --
>
>
>
>