>One, the folks who opposed intervention in Kosovo dismissed the mass murder
>of Kosovars because they were variously described as drug runners, CIA
>agents or ethnic primitives. Thousands of deaths and hundreds of
thousands
>driven out of the country the year before the intervention were dismissed
as
>minor repression ...
-Let's not forget that 80000 of those Kosovar refugees ran to, not from, -Belgrade, Nathan.
This has got to be the lamest line of argument on earth. You have cultural clensing and the attempt by the government to destroy nationhood by the Kosovars, so as they flee to Serbia, thereby effectuating their own cultural dissolution, this is treated as arguing for the justice of Serbian intervention. When the US bombed the hell out of Cambodia in 1973, hundreds of thousands of Khmer went to Phnom Pehn-- does that show their love of the US-allied regime that destroyed their homes?
If you can point to any significant Kosovar group that today does not support the NATO intervention, I would be surprised. You can argue that the KLA and NATO oppressed the Serbs, but don't speak on behalf of Kosovars who have been crystal clear in their almost universal support for the intervention.
>because the Kosovars were seen as the "wrong" victims.
>Similar (if possibly slightly smaller) recent numbers of victims in
>Palestine are (rightly) highlighted by those same people as showing
nonhuman
>barbarism that deserves the extermination of the Israeli state. The
>inconsistency is awesome.
-So it would have been, had that actually been the prevalent line. It -wasn't, as the archives clearly show.
They hardly show that. There was repeated statements that a "mere" 2000 deaths in Kosovo made it all an internal issue that outside groups should keep their noses out of. Yet everyone calls for greater international pressure on Israel (correctly as I note). I made the comparison of the Palestinian and Kosovar numbers at the time and folks tied themselves in prezels, based on the illegitimacy of the Israelis as a people, to argue against the comparison.
>My view on the Kosovo war was to apply exactly the amount of violence
>against the Serbian state needed to back them off and SAVE LIVES. NATO
>killed far fewer people in the war than the Serbs had killed in the year of
>"peace" before the intervention., much less the mass murder engaged in by
>the Milosevic regime during that time.
-1) The deaths haven't stopped in Yugoslavia, so the count is ongoing. The -impoverishment, massive despoliation and the displacement of a generation -all add to the account. Little in Yugoslavia is solved, and poor little -Kosovo will never stand as securely stable independent entity.
Who said Kosovo ever would be "independent" in some Platonic sense? No country is and no socialist supports pure nationalist states. But the Kosovars do have far greater cultural autonomy, the right to speak their language and most of the goals they wanted when all they wanted was autonomy, not secession.
And any economic problems in Serbia are not due to the war but to the sanctions and other self-created problems of the state-kleptocracy that Milosevic had created.
2) High-level bombing is always, and has always been, the mass murder of innocents.
No, it's often the reduction of murder to far fewer civilian deaths than have happened in other wars. As Rwanda showed, you don't need bombing to commit mass murder of civilians. The issue is not method of murder but goals. Kosovo (unlike Iraq, Panama, Vietnam, or most other US interventions) was designed for minimal deaths with maximum effect to end the war.
>3) Many of the pre-NATO dead were participants in a civil war exacerbated
>(possibly precipitated) from the outside. I don't think we have the
>statistics available to us to compare bodycounts of commuters, make-up
>artists and autoworkers going about their business.
So the apologists for Milosevic claim. Since anyone sympathetic to secession gets defined in such statistics as non-civilian, it's a pretty easy claim but not persuasive. Most Palestinians killed can probably be considered combatants given how mobilized they are for support of attacks on Israelis-- so does that justify Israeli murders of Palestinians.
One reason I am unimpressed by the fine distinctions between civilian and military deaths is precisely because such distinctions miss the social mobilization involved in civil war and broad-based resistance. Rather than concentrate on such distinctions, I prefer to look at the justice of the cause. Murders in the name of cultural repression and injustice are wrong whether done against civilians or military. Murders done to end such repression and decrease violence in the long run is far more justified, whether done against obstensibly civilian supporting that repression or direct military targets.
To return, the whole numbers game and so on just reduces to the original point- these distinctions are just post hoc facts pile onto the original decision of whether particular victims deserve their fate. Once this last decision is made, lefties like the WWP et al just pile on whatever numbers games needed to devalue their lives.
-- Nathan Newman