Posted on 03/22/2013 3:11:04 PM PDT by DeprogramLiberalism
[This is a companion piece to an essay I posted earlier in the week in regard to the tenth anniversary of the Invasion of Iraq: #22 The Quiet Funeral of Bush Lied - Thousands Died! Bill Clinton's war with Serbia over Kosovo in 1998 starkly illustrates the double standards of contemporary American liberals. It is written in the first person to liberals, but also for conservatives.]
Liberals believe that former President Bush lied to the American people to get support for invading Iraq (this erroneous belief will be completely debunked in #22 The Quiet Funeral of “Bush Lied – Thousands Died!”). They called it an “illegal war”. For this reason many liberals have wanted the former President to be somehow held accountable. During his Presidency they wanted him impeached and many have called for jail time. But where was their outrage when former President Clinton lied to the American people to get their support for a war with Serbia? [*aoxunnp] [10] President Clinton attacked Serbia with no U.S. interest in Serbia or Kosovo, no threat to America, no congressional approval, and without even bothering to consult the United Nations or formally inform them of his intentions. Providing very dubious evidence, his administration claimed “500,000″ ethnic Kosovars had disappeared as a result of “ethnic cleansing” by the Serbs, and on television he compared it to the “Holocaust” of World War Two when six million Jews were exterminated by Hitler’s Nazis, but the only legitimate comparison to the Nazis was Clinton’s flagrant use of propaganda to sell his war. It all turned out to be a complete fabrication. Even the most inflated casualty numbers from questionable post-war survey estimates topped out at 12,000. Actual body counts range up to only a few thousand. [6yds64e] [11] Many of those deaths were ethnic Serbs killed by American bombs and the Kosovar KLA Muslim terrorists that precipitated the Serb military action in Kosovo in the first place (incidentally, the KLA were recognized as Islamic terrorists by the U.S. government at the time). [*282hm8, *7d39eku] [12] President Clinton actually aligned America with a recognized Islamic terrorist group that essentially were domestic terrorists in Serbia. Did liberals demand rock-solid evidence before the war began? No. Did liberals demand a UN resolution before entering the war? No. So here is our next 800 pound gorilla. Where were liberals demanding impeachment and jail time for former President Clinton for conducting an “illegal war” based on outrageous administration fabrications of propaganda? Where are their parallel demands for Clinton to be tried for the same supposed crimes as Bush?
One can attempt to argue that there were extenuating circumstances with the Iraq invasion that singles it out from the Serbia attack, but that would only be making my point for me. For instance one might claim that very few American troops died in the Serbia war, but that changes nothing in the basic argument, because all that is saying is that at the beginning of the Iraq War before many American troops had died, the war was in effect justified, only to lose its justification after a certain undefined amount of casualties. That hardly makes sense. At least Bush jumped through all of the right hoops, getting UN resolutions, congressional support, providing time for inspections and at least attempting to validate his reasons for the Iraq War. Another argument might be that innocent civilians died in the Iraq War. This was true in the war with Serbia as well. Here is a video of the bombing of a civilian train by an American jet that resulted in 27 civilian deaths: [*67x2yj5] [13] And here is that story along with another about the killing of 60 Albanian refugees: [*5scyjta] [14]
I’ve never heard a liberal justify their condemnation of Bush on the extenuating circumstances, but only on the basic premise that Bush supposedly lied. In fact that was and still is the liberal mantra: “Bush lied – thousands died!” That issue will be dealt with later, but for now we definitely know that Bill Clinton did not tell the truth about his administration’s reasons for going to war against Serbia. There is no debate on that. His claim of supposedly “500,000″ ethnic Kosovars being “ethnically cleansed” and comparing it to the “Holocaust” was a flat out fabrication specifically designed to deceive the American public. (As a side note, this is not the first war entered based on a fabrication by a Democratic President. It has since been discovered and released in 2005 by the National Security Agency that the congressional Gulf of Tonkin Resolution which basically authorized the Vietnam War was also based on an invented incident by Democratic President Lyndon B. Johnson’s administration. [*2tcalk] [15] Where is that liberal mantra: “Johnson lied – 58,000 American soldiers died!”?)
What about you, American neighbor? Were you a liberal who conveniently excused former President Clinton’s gross vilification of the Serbs and the subsequent war? Did you even know that the Serbs were responding to a domestic terrorist insurgency within their own country? Maybe you didn’t even know that the Serb war was based on a gigantic fraud. Of course that would not be entirely surprising since the orthodox media filter didn’t exactly report that part of it, but there were liberals that knew. There were big name liberals in the Democratic Party that knew. The orthodox liberal media knew. They could have made it common public knowledge if they had chosen to do so, but they didn’t. After all, Bill Clinton was one of theirs. But former President Bush? He was the political opposition. They preferred to keep you ignorant, knowing little or nothing of Clinton’s deception and instead hypocritically demanding so-called justice for Bush. You were played like a fiddle on these two wars, American neighbor (and much more than you yet know – later).
I don't want to be presumptuous, but I first published my essay with this Wikipedia reference in June 2012. I wonder if some liberal may have read my essay and responded with that edit.
As best as I can tell, the automated part had to do with the original paragraph containing in-text citations of sources rather than simple footnotes. The problem is, though, that this wasn't merely a changing of format. A lot of information was deleted and new information added or shifted around (e.g., at first I thought the Monica Lewinsky distraction charge was added, but then saw that it had just been moved).
Nearly an entire paragraph of detailed evidence of exaggeration of losses by the Clinton administration was removed (including the 500,000 claim). All that was retained -- shifted to the next paragraph -- was the mere general accusation ("U.S. President Clinton and his administration were accused of inflating the number of Kosovo Albanians killed by state forces."). That really lets the Clinton administration off the hook. Charges aren't nearly so damaging as evidence they're true. :-)
Thanks for doing this. I am learning more about how Wikipedia works. Since the flagrant global warming edits were exposed a few years ago I have been even more wary of Wikipedia even though I still value it as a source of information (again, the WayBackMachine is always your friend).
This is a bit above my pay grade, but someone has to set the parameters within which this bot works. It seems just a little too convenient that such damaging information was selected for removal. In fact, I suspect that it was a human decision deliberately implemented by a bot to cover tracks.
Yup. I even had a link on the WayBackMachine disappear once, but I found an alternative. I doubt it was anything nefarious though. However, this Wikpedia edit definitely has a smell about it.
In the meantime, I am wondering when the petitions and protests will begin from liberals demanding that Bill Clinton be brought up on war crimes. But I won’t hold my breath. ;-)
bfl
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