<html> At 17:59 24/01/01 -0500, Leo wrote: <blockquote type=cite cite>The strongest argument, made by the best proponents of intervention, took this form: </blockquote> I agree very much with the spirit of Leo's summary. At any particularly moment anyone had to decide in however small a way how much to influence a continuation of the apparent developments and how much to inhibit them. Any post mortem also needs to take into account the different range of political possibilities in each country. Britain was the strongest for the intervention of ground troops throughout the war. Public opinion in Britain is used to losing troops annually from the conflict in Northern Ireland. The deaths in Sierra Leone last year also did not rock the government. So at the beginning of the war there was in Britain a very credible non-pacifist left wing opinion that the massacre of Srebrenica should not be allowed to happen again. But that same constituency, represented most articulately by the Guardian Observer publishing trust, vigorously reported every failure of NATO's claimed moral goals and contributed to a debate that almost brought NATO to the point of surrender. Why Yugoslavia surrendered first, has not yet really been revealed because we do not yet know the internal debates within the Serbian Socialist Party. The suggestion that some people dislike Serbs on principle does not indeed address the progressive interventionist argument at its best. Nor is it convincing for critics of interventionism to be on the same side as the right wing British Conservative politician who stood up in the House of Commons and said that the Serbs are a good christian people who have always been our allies. Any criticism of interventionism has to consider the arguments alongside the arguments for global intervention in East Timor. Many supported this although again the number of proved massacres turned out to be much less. They are still not calling for the capitalist occupation force to be withdrawn. Why not? it might be asked. In that case intervention was on the side of Christians.  Although the Balkans have now been stabilised by international finance capital (at a price) and the chain of population movements has been halted and hundreds of thousands of people have returned to their homes, the Balkanisation of a region has now shifted to the much more populous east Asian archipelago. There millions of people in Indonesia and the Philippines, who should be united against the cruel effects of the global capitalist system, are killing themselves in an apparent endless chain of communal violence. Manifestly air bombing is not only useless but impossible. But no serious left wing position can credibly rely on a pacifist anarchist moral position of non-intervention by the international powers. Indeed the progressive demand should be that those who run the global capitalist economy must accept the responsibility to remedy the appalling situation! That is what would both have a chance of concretely exposing the imperialist nature of events, *and* at least slightly ameliorating the position of the working people of East Asia. Moralistic sniping that always assumes left wingers are  spluttering frustrated critics or smug know-it-alls is useless. The point is "to change it". Seth wrote <blockquote type=cite cite>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.</blockquote> On this specific point Seth is again not addressing the argument at its strongest. It is clear that global finance capital has worked systematically to prevent the KLA and Thaci from assuming leadership of Kosovo, and is pleased with the result of the recent election in which the KLA party was beaten by Rugova's. That is quite consistent with how it has successfully influenced the elections in Croatia and Serbia. It is difficult for any state authority to stop communal or ethnic violence even with the best policies, but the penetrating reason why NATO has not been more successful in restricting retaliatory violence against Serbs and Romany in Kosovo is because they did not trust a basically democratic solution. They should have been aiding the KLA from the beginning in return for assurances that the KLA would avoid anti-democratic excesses. Only the KLA had the armed force on the ground among the Albanian population to have imposed effective state control over the Albanian population to stop these retaliatory murders. But there is no way that international global finance capital would have wanted a radical democratic state power in Kosovo. That is the penetrating criticism that is the pertinent comment on subsequent communal deaths. Otherwise to those outside the Left the balance sheet in broad terms appears pretty clear: Messy business, and tragic that some deaths are going on but it is better that a million people were allowed to stay in their territory and have a chance to decide their educational system and laws. That is the broad picture that will appear. A one-sided leftist position harping on about the abuses (undoubted) of state power will not dent it. Most people, rightly, are not anarchists. They believe in the necessity of state power, and also want the world more orderly and safer. *That* is the basis on which we should attack global finance capitalism. Chris Burford London </html>