[battlegearboat]

We need to protect our precious bodily fluids.

[Wolverine]

Clark didn't finish the job in The Balkans:

KOSOVO SERB FARMERS UNDER FIRE
Seven Serbs from the village of Banje in the municipality of Srbica were shot at from submachine guns as they set out with two tractors to harvest apples from their property near the village of Radisevo, which is inhabited exclusively by ethnic Albanians.

Beta News Agency, Belgrade
October 27, 2003


SRBICA - Seven Serbs from the village of Banje in the municipality of Srbica were shot at from submachine guns as they set out with two tractors to harvest apples from their property near the village of Radisevo, which is inhabited exclusively by ethnic Albanians.

Village spokesman Milutin Kovacevic advised today that they were under fire at from several directions for over an hour and that they were extremely lucky that no one was hurt or killed.

The Serbs sought sanctuary in the nearby woods. Individual shots continued even after Danish KFOR troops rushed to their assistance and provided an escort so they could return home, said Kovacevic.

Banje and the neighboring village of Suvo Grlo are the only two villages in the municipality of Srbica where Serbs are still living, completely cut off from their surroundings and subject to frequent attacks by their Albanian neighbors.

[cwb]

"I've seen this struggle for the psychology of a nation at war before. Four years ago, NATO's military commander, Gen. Wesley Clark, faced a similar barrage of pessimism from the press and from members of Congress hostile to President Clinton's war in Kosovo."

This is the biggest load of crap I've ever heard. The media was not pessimistic to Clinton's war in Kosovo. To the contrary, it was the US media who practically acted as the WH Press Secretary as they helped sell the war in Kosovo to the American people. Christiane Amanpour has accused the US media of toeing the WH line in Iraq while she openly supported the war in Kosovo The media was only to happy to show the anti-war demonstrations during Iraq, while there was an almost complete "anti-war blackout" during Kosovo. And I know there were demonstrations around the globe as well, as it was in Greece that Cinton recieved a literal "egging" for his participation in this conflict.

I rememeber watching the refugee exodus and how it was described as a human catastrophy; but not one word on how it was the threat (and act) of US/NATO bombing that caused this carnage. No..instead we were presented with images of helpless victims who needed to be rescued by the unilateral US. After all, there was no UN resolution for this war as that president intentionaly avoided the UN because he knew Russia and China would've vetoed it. At least Bush made several atttempts with Iraq. At the same time, in Iraq, we heard how Bush would be responsible for causing a humanitarian crisis as Iraqi's would flood nearby countries, as they exited the war zone. Not! So Bush gets blamed for a humanitarian crisis that never occurred while Clinton gets a pass on a crisis that did occur. Yeah...I can just see the media's pessimism.

In Kosovo we were told of the mass graves and how we had to stop the genocide. The media was only too happy to "inform" the pubic of these atrocities to build pubic support for this war. In Iraq, the opposite was true; the media knew about the atrocities but decided to keep that a secret in exchange for access to Saddam. The irony being, that genocide (Kurds, Marsh Arabs) was more rampant in Iraq than it ever was in Kosovo. If we had an honest media, the humanitarian crisis in Iraq may have been enough to justify war, but it was obvious from the beginning we didn't have an honest media.

How the media can beat-up on Bush about civilian casualties in Iraq when all effort was made to avoid them, is another example. In Kosovo, Clark waged an all out 78-day aerial bombardment from 15,000 feet that intentionally targeted life-sustaining infrastructure. This included power grids that provided electricity to hospitals and water supplies...and yet, not a word was mentioned about this to the American public. But by golly, a bomb explodes in an Iraq market place and the media has already assigned blame, even though no proof existed of who did it.

What I found most interesting when looking at these two conflicts, was the Media's natural inclinations (or lack thereof) for investigative journalism. In Iraq, the media wanted to be everywhere...including embedded. While there were no ground troops, or frontline per se, in Kosovo, there was absolutely no "public" follow-up. I don't recall Christiane Amanwhore or CNN tracking through war-torn Kosovo/Serbia to show us the damage that was caused by US/NATO bombs. I don't recall the visits to hosptials to show the public the victims of this war....I don't recall the media showing one child who was the vicitim of US/NATO aggression. And we know there were civilian casualities, because some counts have listed it as high as 4,000-6,000, which is over twice the count of the supposed genocide that occurred. In other words, more people may have been killed during the war than before the war..but you won't hear about this statistic during Clark's campaign. Just like you won't hear that, that war is not over.

[Coop]

I never believed Bush's claim that overthrowing Saddam Hussein was essential to the war on terror. I'm angry that Bush continues to invoke that bogus rationale for the invasion. But the assassinations and indiscriminate bombings we're witnessing in post-Saddam Iraq really are part of the war on terror.

That's as clear as mud.

[Incorrigible]

This looks to be turning into a Balkans thread!

[wayoverontheright]

" I never believed Bush's claim that overthrowing Saddam Hussein was essential to the war on terror.

I'm sorry, but we simply cannot allow this statement to become fact.

There is no scenario whereby terror can be eradicated that doesn't include the deposing of Saddam Hussein, who had been financing terrorism openly, and who's to say he wasn't enabling terrorist acts against our country in a covert manner.

The rest of the terror cabal now has a possibility of being dealt without military action, but only because of the presence of our guns in Iraq.

[Tailgunner Joe]

From Of Paradise and Power, by Robert Kagan, pp. 48, 49.

General Clark and his colleages complained that the laborious effort to preserve consensus within the alliance hampered the fighting of the war and delayed its conclusion. Before the war, Clark later insisted, "we could not present a clear and unambiguous warning to Milosevic," partly because many European countries would not threaten action without a mandate from the UN Security Council - what Clark in typically American fashion, called Europe's "legal issues." For the Americans, these "legal issues" were "obstacles to properly preparing and planning" for the war.*

During the fighting, Clark and his American colleagues were exasperated by the need constantly to find compromise between American military doctrine and what Clark called the "European approach."**

"It was always the American who pushed for escalation to new, more sensitive targets...and always some of the Allies who expressed doubts and reservations." In Clarks view, "We paid a price in operational effectiveness by having to constrain the nature of the operation to fit within the political and legal concerns of the NATO member nations"***

* Clark, Waging Modern War, pp. 420, 421.
** Ibid., p. 449.
*** Ibid., p. 426.

[Howlin]

one reporter told Bush.

Making news.