The UN, heavy-handed in Serbia-It was a cardinal mistake to extradite Milosevic.

Jerusalem Post ^ | 12-31-03 | SHLOMO AVINERI

[pepsionice]

Considering the alternative was to sit there and watch a bloodbath between these two groups. And this show would have been nighly shown by CNN until the point where you simply said enough is enough. As for the case against Milosevic....its hard to see how you let dozens of other world leaders walk off freely when they hundreds if not thousands....and you simply want to impress the media with high morals by taking Milosevic.

[Cicero]

NATO did the right thing to intervene in 1999 to protect the Kosovo Albanians from Serbian atrocities.

I'm sick of this nonsense. Slobo started out as a troublemaker, but the Serbs committed fewer atrocities in Kosovo than the Albanians.

If the Serbs were committing genocide in Kosovo, then how come the percentage of Albanians rose from something like 50% at the death of Tito to 90% at the time that clinton decided it would be nice to bomb Belgrade?

The Albanians in Kosovo were behaving much like the Palestinians in Israel. And they likewise included numerous terrorists who came in over the border to kill Serbs. People STILL don't understand what clinton did in the Balkans. He helped our enemies and bombed our allies.

[gershwin]

You really haven't read very carefully about events in Bosnia if you think the intervention avoided a bloodbath. Just the opposite and continuing to this day in Kosovo. In Bosnia all those "peacemakers" are getting tired, running out of personnel to keep their sloppy arrangements in place. If said intruders had minded their own business the whole thing would have been settled with minimal bloodshed long ago.

[dmz]

So Milosevic was merely a "trouble maker"? What, kind of like the kid down the street throwing snowballs at cars?

Can you please point out how Slobo and his gang were our "allies"?

[Seselj]

Can you please point out how they were our enemies? What threat did they pose to the US, or to any of America's allies?

[thoughtomator]

They were fighting Islamic fascists, maybe?

There is no rationale that justifies intervening in Serbia but not intervening in Rwanda, where 20 times as many people were killed.

[Hoplite]

There is no rationale that justifies intervening in Serbia but not intervening in Rwanda, where 20 times as many people were killed.

A destabilized region around Rwanda doesn't affect American trade as much as the then destabilized and "soon to be even more destabilized by 1.6 million Kosovar Albanian refugees" Balkans Milosevic was making in 1999.

[thoughtomator]

So the argument is that we attacked Serbia for economic reasons? I don't recall that as having been part of the arguments made.

We intervened on falsified reports of Serbs engaging in widespread massacres.

[Hoplite]

No - we intervened on widespread reports of Serb repression against Kosovar Albanians which were borne out by subsequent events and investigations.

Milosevic was first warned about his mistreatment of Kosovar Albanians in 1992 by Bush the Elder, and had his last real chance of keeping Kosovo in October of 1998. He threw it away in the spring of '99.

[Seselj]

Don't worry about hoplite... His argument is that Nato intervened to reverse the exodus of Albanian refugees from Kosovo. He doesn't seem to realize that this exodus happened AFTER the bombing started, ie the bombing caused the refugees, not the other way around.

[thoughtomator]

I don't recall any of the charges against the Serbs being substantiated. The only mass graves found (the most serious of the original charges), for instance, had Serbs in them.

By all the evidence available to us today, it was the Albanians killing the Serb minority, not the other way around.

[norton]

OK article except that it maintains the legitimacy of invasion in the first place.
There has never been an adequate alibi for intervention in what was Yugoslavia other than German/Croat/Albanian ambitions and Clinton's several fantasies.

[Hoplite]

The only mass graves found (the most serious of the original charges), for instance, had Serbs in them.

Then you choose to remain ignorant.

Over 800 Kosovar Albanian victims have been found in Serbia itself, transported there in a replay of Srebrenica's failed "hide the bodies" ploy. Particularly damning is a mass grave found on the grounds of the Serbian secret police, who, showing the usual motivation have failed to investigate how the corpses got there.

Btw, by the end of 2001, just over 4,200 K-Albanian victims had been exhumed from mass graves in Kosovo itself, so your views of Kosovo appear to lack a factual foundation.

You might want to rectify that situation.

[thoughtomator]

If 4200 dead were sufficient to warrant US intervention, then we would have troops in almost every nation on the planet.

In the run-up to war, the kind of numbers that were asserted by the Clinton administration were in the hundreds of thousands.

Clearly, the war on Serbia was a complete fabrication.

[Hoplite]

You don't appear to be able to follow the conversation - the war was fought to end Serbian repression of Kosovar Albanians and prevent refugees from destabilizing the Southern Balkans.

The "100,000 dead" issue arose from a statement to the effect that there were over 100,000 Albanian men unaccounted for inside Kosovo, and given Serb atrocities in Bosnia, there was reason to fear for their health.

Does the lack of finding WMD's in Iraq or the hyperbole surrounding the issue prior to our invasion invalidate our actions there?

No.

Same - same with Kosovo.

[greenwolf]

There seem to be two sides to this one. The one side includes Slick Clinton, Hillary Clinton, Madeline Albright, Wesley Clark, the KLA and AlQuaeda, and a nation of pimps and drug-dealers known as Albania, the the other side appears to consist of Slobodan Milosevic and at least one branch of the Christian church.

This one simply doesn't strike me as terribly difficult to figure out.

[greenwolf]

I don't recall any of the charges against the Serbs being substantiated.

Some are further from being substantiated than others, particularly the story of the Bosnian Serb 'death camp' at tchornopoliye. This one almost makes Joseph Goebbels look like an honest man by comparison.

[thoughtomator]

Even granting that assumption for the sake of argument, we still lack a valid basis for US intervention. Concurrently there was Saddam, violating daily his ceasefire signed with us, and with a million plus confirmed (not suspected) dead to his 'credit', and constantly threatening not only minor trade routes but in fact the entire global energy economy. Yet we did not intervene there. We watched the slaughter of six million in Rwanda and even more in Burundi and Zaire and did absolutely nothing. In Sri Lanka there were over 50,000 confirmed dead and many many more tortured, disappeared, and maimed, but to date we still have not intervened. And there were many many cases like this, worldwide - yet the only intervention was against Serbia.

What then justified attacking Serbia in the context of no action in many similar and even in far worse cases?