> There is considerable doubt whether there would have been any massacres in
> Kosova if there had been no NATO intervention. Credible doubts have been
> raised about whether that caused the massacre, at least occasioned it.
> It's now established that contrary to the NATO story justifying the
intervention,
Hundreds of thousands of people were forcibly driven out of Kosovo before a single NATO bomb fell (a fact I see you've chosen to ignore entirely).
> there was no large scale killing before the intervention.
Why think that the large scale killing was a response to bombing? Obviously, the Serbs knew that they had to get their ethnic cleansing done in a hurry, but I doubt it motivated any "large scale killing" that wouldn't have eventually happened anyway, and probably on a larger scale.
> That makes the story a bit different from the Soviet/Nazi case, where,
btw, it is
> bizarre to describe the Soviet defense against the Nazi invaders as as
> "intervention."
Sloppy semantics on my part. I didn't mean to imply that the Soviet advance and the NATO bombing were similar with regard to motiviation, means, or ends.
> If Iraq had invaded the US, killed millions of our citizens,
> devastated our neighbors, etc., and carried out massacres of its own
people
> on a huge scale, it would be a different story. jks
As you know, I think the last item you rattle off can serve as a sufficient condition for intervention, while you insist that we necessarily sit idly by (in the name of "US out of everywhere") and allow the massacred to depose their killers. Excuse me if I find liberal interventionism more appealing than hard left realpolitik. Although, I should add, that doesn't mean I endorse an invasion of Iraq (as you said, there are no massacres to be stopped there at the moment, and none on the immediate horizon).
-- Luke
> jks