The strongest argument, made by the best proponents of intervention, took this form:
1. Military intervention in Kosova was required to stop what had become a practice of serial ethnic cleansing which had gone for years throughout Bosnia, with the killing, rape, torture and displacement of thousands upon thousands for no other reason than their ethnicity.
2. The proper form of intervention which would bring the ethnic cleansing in Kosova to an end as quickly as possible with the minimum of harm was a ground, military action.
While the NATO bombing campaign did eventually bring an end to the ethnic cleansing, it did so at an unnecessarily high cost in terms of lives and property in Kosova. The choice to do an air campaign alone was made purely on the basis of political calculations in Washington, London, Bonn, Ottawa and elsewhere that their citizenry was not prepared to see the lives of their soldiers lost, regardless of the justice of the cause. After all, the victims of this ethnic cleansing were Moslems. It is quite logical that one could have opposed that choice, and still seen the absolute necessity for military intervention. Moreover, the use of depleted uranium bombs was entirely without justification, even within the terms of a purely air war campaign.
Now I know that it is a lot easier to impute an entirely different set of arguments, one which portrays support for intervention not in terms of conceiving of it as an indispensable step to end ethnic cleansing in the former Yugoslavia, but as the embrace of imperialism, militarism and what have you. Like it or not, that is not the reasoning which was employed by serious folks. If you want left supporters of intervention to recognize that were opponents who did not deny the sordid record of ethnic cleansing on behalf of Milosevic and crew, then it is about time that you recognize that there were supporters of intervention who called from ground action, not an air war, and did not excuse, for a moment, the use of bombs with depleted uranium. You can't expect respect, if you are also not prepared to extend it.
That is all that I have to say about the subject at this time. I simply find it inconceivable that I am about to convince anti-interventionists on this list that intervention was a necessary step to end ethnic cleansing, or that they are about to convince me that this was a crime of American imperialism.
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 --
-------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: <../attachments/20010124/fa26a04a/attachment.htm>