>The line that connects Afghanistan to Iraq is not a straight one by
>any means. But the oblique connection
That's a beaut. Neither is the line connecting me to Madonna a very straight one. He's entered Bartley-land with this stuff.
> is ignored by the potluck peaceniks, and one can be sure (judging
>by their past form) that it would be ignored even if it were as
>direct as the connection between al Qaeda and the Taliban. Saddam
>Hussein denounced the removal of the Sunni Muslim-murdering Slobodan
>Milosevic
Apropos this, a piece from Tuesday's FT.
Doug
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Financial Times - January 14, 2003
COMMENT & ANALYSIS: A cautionary tale from the Kosovo war By Quentin Peel
Trust Donald Rumsfeld. Just when it starts to look as if war in Iraq may not be inevitable, the US defence secretary orders another 62,000 American troops to head for the Gulf.
The move will certainly keep up the pressure on Saddam Hussein. It is pretty clear that Mr Rumsfeld and his fellow hawks in Washington are still set on one overriding aim: what they so delicately call "regime change" in Baghdad. The search for chemical and biological weapons by United Nations inspectors is merely a means to that end.
The defence secretary is certainly not the first senior US official in recent times to make the removal of a nasty government leader from another country a top priority. Madeleine Albright, the former US secretary of state, said as much about Slobodan Milosevic, the former Yugoslav president, who is now on trial before an international court for war crimes and genocide.
"Getting rid of Milosevic is my highest personal priority," she told her staff, just after the US-led bombing was stopped in Kosovo in 1999. "I want him gone before I am gone."
Her words are quoted in the last instalment of The Fall of Milosevic, a gripping and timely series of television documentaries currently being broadcast by the BBC and soon to be shown in the US. They tell how Mr Milosevic, the ruthless Serbian ruler and architect of "ethnic cleansing" in Bosnia and Kosovo, was overthrown by a combination of war, popular revolution and his own blinkered arrogance and perverted nationalism.
It is a story with some clear lessons for the policy of the US and the rest of the international community towards Mr Hussein and his Iraqi regime.
In the first place, the programmes, drawing on a large series of interviews with many important participants, show how the Kosovo war so nearly proved counterproductive for the Nato allies. Instead of lasting a week, the bombing continued for more than 70 days. When it stopped, Mr Milosevic was able to present it as a victory.
Second, they reveal how it was the desperate intervention of Boris Yeltsin, Russia's president, that ended the increasingly futile bombing campaign, rather than any serious military threat by the Nato allies, which were bitterly divided over the use of ground troops.
Most important, however, this instant history shows how it was not the war but the revolt of the Serbian people that at last overthrew the Milosevic regime. The war may have helped the revolution but without the popular uprising that preceded and followed it, the war would have accomplished very little.
Instead of undermining Mr Milosevic, whose power had been on the wane in the preceding months, the Nato bombardment rallied Serb nationalist sentiment to his cause. It also exacerbated the persecution of ethnic Albanians by Serbian forces in Kosovo, precipitating an ever more frantic exodus of refugees, the very people it was supposed to protect.
The programmes underline how cynical and yet naive many of the participants were in seeking to manipulate events to their own ends. Thus commanders of the Kosovo Liberation Army, the fledgling guerrilla movement, describe deliberately provoking Serb atrocities to court international opinion. The Serb paramilitaries responded with sickening enthusiasm.
Once the bombing campaign had started, things rapidly started to go wrong for the Nato allies, even though they had moral justification on their side. The Serbs hid their troops and armaments and the bombers hit empty bases. Nato ran out of targets but the "ethnic cleansing" continued. So it turned to economic targets in Serbia.
That in turn appalled Mr Yeltsin, who had watched the whole campaign against his fellow Slavs with mounting consternation. Yet therein lies one of the most fascinating twists in the tale.
Just as the Nato allies looked certain to get sucked into a bloody and debilitating ground war, Mr Yeltsin saved them from the embarrassment by helping to secure a peace deal.
Even then it was done more by luck than by judgment. Mr Yeltsin was desperate. The war was undermining his entire pro-western strategy. His generals were up in arms. He decided to bully Mr Milosevic into withdrawing his forces from Kosovo and allowing Nato-led troops - with Russians participating - to replace them.
Of course the same scenario will not happen in Iraq. Russia does not have the same sympathy there. But Kosovo showed that military intervention is a very blunt weapon that can easily have the opposite effect to the one intended.
The most important conclusion is that without a popular uprising Mr Milosevic would not have been overthrown. It took an extraordinarily brave population to take to the streets and confront the full might of the Yugoslav security forces.
There was undoubtedly encouragement from outside - but not a lot. Washington provided some money for the election campaigns of the opposition and bullied the differing factions into uniting behind one candidate. But it was only when Mr Milosevic still tried to falsify the result and force a second round that the voters revolted and marched on Belgrade. It was the ballot, not the bullet, that did it.