> I'm not sure what point you are making, but it should be clear that the
> aid package was proposed by the Clinton Administration and blessed by
> Human Rights Watch, who also gave the Clinton administations'
> humanitarian efforts in the Balkans their imprimatur.
>
> http://www.colombiasupport.net/200002/wp-hrwreport-0224.html
I was agreeing w/ you! FY2000 and 2001 would have been yrs. that the budgetary priorities in national security policy were being shaped by these types of centrists, http://opednews.com/kall1003_Podesta_Center_for_american_Progress.htm (an anecdote about John Podesta. Long-time Ca. State Senator, Nick Petris, and I walked a precinct in '88 together for Dukakis, in neigborhoods in Oakland that had supported Jesse Jackson. W/O prompting from me [I was up to my eyeballs doing some volunteer work for the Christic Institute publicizing the "Secret Team" thesis of Daniel Sheehan on the origins of Iran-Contra, at the time], Petris in the car ride back, started complaining that he had given Podesta tons of info on the "October Surprise" allegations against Reagan/Bush, that Petris thought would sink Bush. Podesta refused to air the case via the Dukakis campaign. This was after the disastrous, bloodless reply of Dukakis to CNN's Shaw re: what if Kitty, your wife was raped. I felt that Dukakis should have gone for broke, and thrown in the Nixon October Surprise of '68, via some of the same set of operatives (Richard V. Allen) towards Anna Chenault, that sinked LBJ Paris Peace Talks pressure on the SVN to compromise w/ the NLF. (Richard Holbrooke was a young protege of Clark Clifford on the USG team ar the talks.)
Anyway, back to the point I wasa trying to make, implicitly. Yes, as Bob Dole said in '76 (and Carl Oglesby too at the '65 anti-war March in D.C., preparation for which, was one more in the series of movers and counter- moves that drove the New Left away from Old Left right-wing social democrats in LID and AFL-CIO), all the wars of the 20th C. have been, "Democrat Wars, " but, one also has to recognize that the left-wing of the party has been, along w/ the realist wing of the bourgeoisie (remember Harold Willens, who funded a group og big businessmen against the Vietnam War, along w/ folks like Stanley Sheinbaum and Max Palevsky of Xerox or IBM), was, along with the street pressure of millions in the streets, what shortened the war and prevented North Vietnam from being nuked (the Haldeman Diaries and other Nixon admin. autobios and histories back this up, I betcha Ellsberg says the same in, "Secrets.") and getting the US out. Driven, of course, by the heroic resistance of the Vietnamese themselves, w/ important military support from the USSR and PRC. Liberals got us in, and radicals pushing liberal elites and widening ruling class splits, got us out. That the USG, has a structural imperative and as a captive of capitalist/imperialist interests and, well the logic of capital itself as elucidated by that fellow w/ the beard (1818-1883), to be a counter- revolutionary hegemon, forever looking for new arenas for rape and pillage and pilferage and pollution, is pretty elementary radical ABC's. However, the US Left, the explicitly socialist/communist, anti-capitalist left, by itself, could not fill a sports stadium that seats 45 or 55K, despite there now being a slight majority, according to some poll data, now against the war. Like center-right pundit, William Schneider said once in The Atlantic, apropos of the Culture War and his experierience knocking on doors in working class neigborhoods of Boston for the anti-war Vietnam Summer in '67 or '68, the majority of those he spoke w/ hated the war ("Those Harvard smartypants got us into it.") and hated the anti-war movement at Harvard and the rest of the country and "snot-nosed" hippies, even more.
Lastly, on humanitarian intervention and HRW, which s/b discussed again here, more fully, as I reminded Steve Philion, there are many that hold policy making and researcher positions w/ HRW, that come out of the Left, like Joe Stork, who was an editor of MERIP, who wrote for Monthly Review Press in the mid-70's a book on Oil and Imperialism, Reed Brody, who wrote, "Contra Terror in Nicaragua, ' for South End Press, who was just interviewed by Pilger for a documentary on Afghanistan and George Black, who worked for NACLA.
(I remembered that Cockburn had attacked, Jose Vivanco of HRW in The Nation in the last yr. or. Here Jeff St. Clair, I can assume, does not think he is the Devil, http://www.counterpunch.org/stclair07162003.html "Twenty years ago General Ríos Montt ran a military regime that killed thousands of people," says Jose Miguel Vivanco, executive director of the Americas Division of Human Rights Watch. "Today he should be on trial, not running for president." On another list, a Puerto Rican marxist-leninist who called me, gasp, a liberal, the other day, recently, again, said that Clinton's foreign policy was worse than Reagan's! Replying, I mentioned the Guatemalan genocide (over 200K killed) http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/latin_america/guatemala.html , "... assassination of Guatemalan leftists...", esp. horrific under Rios Montt, fully supported by Reagan, who said Montt was , "getting a bad rap on human rights, " by groups like HRW's America;s Watch and AI.
David Chandler, who has written for New Left Review, has a book very critical of the Bosnian intervention, published by Pluto Press (Far right hawk, Roger Fontaine of Reagan's NSC and the notorious, Sante Fe Committee, has a blurb by Chandler on the back cover of a book of his from CATO on himanitarian intervention.)
http://www.unu.edu/p&g/kosovo_full.htm , "KOSOVO AND THE CHALLENGE OF HUMANITARIAN INTERVENTION: Selective Indignation, Collective Intervention, and International Citizenship." http://www.foreignpolicy2000.org/library/issuebriefs/IBHumanRights.html http://www.ploughshares.ca/content/WORKING%20PAPERS/wp012.html Human Rights Watch 2000, Civilian Deaths in the NATO Air Campaign, vol. 12, no. 1 (D), February. [Online] Available from http://www.hrw.org/reports/2000/nato/ .
A volume w/ a mix to agree w/ and disagree w/ The New Killing Fields Massacre and the Politics of Intervention
Edited by Kira Brunner and Nicolaus Mills,
Introduction by Michael Walzer
Basic Books A group of war reporters and analysts looks back on the killing fields of the late twentieth century and poses questions for the future of human rights.
The New Killing Fields revisits Cambodia, Yugoslavia, Rwanda, and East Timor--sites of four of the worst instances of state-sponsored killing in the last half of the twentieth centur--in order to reconsider the success and failure of U.S. and U.N. military and humanitarian intervention. Through original essays and reporting by, among others, David Rieff, Peter Maass, Philip Gourevitch, William Shawcross, George Packer, Bill Berkeley, and Samantha Power, The New Killing Fields asks about the future of peacekeeping in the next century. In addition, theoretical essays by Michael Walzer and Michael Ignatieff frame the issue of both past and future intervention in terms of today's post-Cold War reality. As human rights abuses increasingly occur in "failed states" such as Afghanistan, which pose international security threats, the future of human rights will not be, as it once was, considered solely a question of the beneficence and charity of the West.
-- Michael Pugliese, way overposted