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.
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
First, the NATO bombing accelerated Serbian ethnic cleansing, as Gen. Wesley Clark predicted would happen; and second, NATO did nothing to stop the Albanian ethnic cleansing that followed the bombing campaign. So on those two counts, NATO's action was a failure -- unless pro-interventionists simply enjoyed the spectacle of Serbians getting "theirs."
But perhaps most importantly, how could anyone take seriously the claim that NATO was out to stop ethnic cleansing when far worse ethnic cleansing took place within NATO? Turkey's murderous policy against the Kurds was much, much worse than what Milosevic did to the Kosovars: some 30,000 villages destroyed, tens of thousands killed, 3 million refugees. Where was the left interventionist call to stop this? Indeed, NATO wouldn't have to drop a single bomb to curb this violence, assuming the US was serious about curbing it. Didn't anyone here find the sight of Turkish pilots, fresh from dropping napalm and cluster bombs on Kurdish villages, engaged in the NATO bombing of Serbia to be repugnant?
DP
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