"That sounds real useful--what sentence do you propose for a man who's been dead for 5 years?"
Retroactive international condemnation would do, and an apology from the U.S. and Eurpoean governments who provoked the UN into conflict with Serbia on behalf of the tyrant Tudjman.
A few other notes on your rabidly anti-Serb parade of lies:
a.) Wrong is wrong, whether committed by a Dem or a Pubbie. Yes, Klintoons criminal actions in Kosovo were supported by Bush and many members of the U.S. Congress. This is an eternal black mark on many otherwise fine records of public service.
b.) The total Yugolslav civilian casualties in the 1999 NATO/U.S. bombing were just over 2,100. My source is the official UN estimate for the bombing (the source is admittedly shaky, but the UN are no more or less an enemy of the U.S. than Human Rights Watch, heh heh). No stipulation is provided as to how many of those killed were in Serbia or...Serbia. I'm pleased to remind you that Kosovo was then and is still a province of Yugoslavia/Serbia, and was never a seperate nation.
c.) Bush was simply wrong about the so-called "threat" of Milosevic, as were many other good politicians practicing "politics that end at the waters edge" and informed only with the MSM's oft-false reports of atrocities in the region. 5 years on, they never found the mass graves that Clinton claimed provoked us into war against Serbia. Where are the 100,000 victims? The 10,000 victims? the 5,000 victims? The best report sofar of "mass graves" found in the region revealed that the sum total was just over 4,000 people, over 1,000 of which were SERBS, and no way to identify who were soldiers and who were civilians.
Oh, but Milosevic (and his band of Christian soldiers who dared,DARED to fight the encroachment of radical Islam and the KLA into Serbia) was a "bad man", so that's justification enough. You want to believe that, then I'll let you. On those grounds, I guess I can patiently await the bombing of far worse Muslim tyrants in Sudan, Iran, Syria, Lebanon, Nigeria, etc., all of which I'm sure you'll avidly support.
Right mark? Mark? Mohammed? (echo) (echo).
Post it on here & let’s all see it. UN documents are on the web, but the one you’re talking about may be somewhat obscure. After all, the ICTY, a subordinate organization of the UN, used no such “Official UN Estimate” when it was required to rule on the legality of NATO action. Instead it used the Human Rights Watch figure of 500 civilian deaths as corroborated by the 495 deaths recorded in the FRY Ministry of Foreign Affairs publication “NATO Crimes in Yugoslavia”. Look at paragraph 53.
Bottom line: every innocent civilian death is a tragedy, but given the total number of sorties; our Air Force, Navy, and Marine pilots did a wonderful job of hitting their designated targets while avoiding civilian casualties. Just like Saddam’s Baby Milk Factory, the Serbs were propagandizing as hard as they could to discredit our airmen and gain sympathy from the gullible.
Well, Kosovo was a part of the Ottoman Empire invaded by Serbia in the first Balkan War in 1912-13. Although it had not been part of Serbia for almost 500 years at that point, it was severed from the rest of the Albanian populated lands and awarded to Serbia by the Great Powers as part of the post-war settlement. The Albanians had been in revolt against the Ottomans just prior to then and, when the Serbs took over, the revolt started up again and in one form or another has continued for the next 80+ years. To the Albanians, the Serbs are occupiers and oppressors who were unjustly awarded possession of Kosovo in violation of the principle of self-determination.
You can say that happened 90 years ago—get over it. But, of course, the Serbs based their claim on events of five centuries ago. Memories are long in the Balkans.
As to “encroachment … into Serbia”, see the post above.
As to radical Islam, that’s a joke. The elected president of Kosovo is a Catholic. The Albanians are decidedly secular as I and everyone else who’s actually been there knows. When bin Laden sent his emissary to Kosovo in 1998, he was arrested in Albania and here’s a news report on what happened: He [Al Kader] confessed to being a member of one of bin Laden’s groups and told investigators he had been sent to give weapons to the guerrillas of the Kosovo Liberation Army, then beginning their war against the Serbs. The KLA had promised US officials it would not co-operate with fundamentalists. Mr Kader said the KLA had turned him down and that he had returned to Albania, still with his weapons.
So, yeah, in between drinking raki, refusing to take bin Laden's weapons, ogling the girls in mini-skirts, and volunteering at our consulate in Pristina to go fight the Taliban , those guys are real “Islamists”. Serb propagandists are selling the "Islamist" angle very hard, counting on the lack of first hand knowledge most people have of the real situation in the Balkans combined with our war on Islamist terrorism to gain them sympathy & support. It does seem to work on some folks.