Posted on 09/20/2002 11:27:26 PM PDT by DTA
Published on September 20, 2002
Kosovo Over Baghdad
Subjective Objectivity
by Paul Reyfman
In 1999, most Americans supported President Clinton in his fight to oust Yugoslavian dictator Slobodan Milosevic. At the time, few liberals said things about Milosevic like Milton Viorst did in a Sept. 12 New York Times opinion piece about Saddam Hussein: "The Soviet Union's ultimate fall with barely a whimper vindicated America's patience, and in time Saddam Hussein too will vanish." Why was it not sufficient to wait for Milosevic's regime to fall apart?
The case against Yugoslavia was simple: genocide. In a statement to Congress on Wednesday, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said, "No terrorist state poses a greater and more immediate threat to the security of our people and the stability of the world than the regime of Saddam Hussein in Iraq." Nobody could have described the situation in the Balkans as nearly so pressing and so influential to global stability.
The main case for war was to stop genocide. The fact that, upon conquering Yugoslavia, Allied troops found no real evidence of genocide (as reported in a Dec. 31, 1999 Wall Street Journal article) was conveniently played-down. In the article, Spanish pathologist Emilio Perez Pujol said, "Rwanda was a true genocide. Kosovo was ethnic-cleansing light." When many of the sites for alleged mass graves were investigated after the completion of the successful invasion, the graves were not found.
According to an article in the Oct. 29, 1999 Los Angeles Times, original estimates put the number of Albanians killed in the genocide at 100,000. Death toll estimates soon dropped to 2,500. The Wall Street Journal article elaborates that the numbers of corpses found were low (around 2,000 in November of 1999), and often it was difficult to determine whether they were indeed the bodies of war-crime victims.
I opposed the military action in Kosovo, and I am not sure of how I feel about the current Iraq dilemma. I do not understand, however, how liberals can get away with condemning Bush today after having supported Clinton in 1999 without even explaining how the two situations are different. This is precisely the sort of partisan hypocrisy that constantly muddles American politics. It turns out that it is very easy to hate the Republican President unconditionally and love the Democratic President unconditionally. All one need to do is maintain a complete lack of consistency in one's opinions.
Both Slobodan Milosevic and Saddam Hussein committed many atrocities against their people; there can be no doubt about that. I sympathize with the view that America should not be imperialist in its influence over world politics. I cannot, in good conscience, support intervention in the politics of any foreign power, as long as that power keeps to itself. Anybody who uses such criterion to oppose attacking Iraq should not have supported attacking Yugoslavia.
Across the globe, there have been, are currently, and will be, countless tyrannies. Developing countries are particularly susceptible to the shaky politics that beget terror regimes. This does not mean under any circumstances, however, that the United States (or NATO or the United Nations or any other mask that America could hide behind) would be justified in intervening in these regimes. It was justified in 1999 because a widely supported Democratic President wished it to be so. And there can be no doubt that the media helped Clinton dupe the American people. This is evidenced by the fact that, to this day, the average American still believes that genocide was occurring in Yugoslavia before the 1999 invasion. Military action against Iraq does not have support of the media because Bush is a Republican and an easy target.
Partisan politics is country cancer. The only way that our democracy will work is if people learn to separate individual political issues from the labels that support them. After 9/11, many people were relieved to see that partisanship was forgotten for a while. Just as America overcame last year's attacks and the everyday life of its citizens has returned to normal, the everyday hypocrisy of American politics has followed suit. Any person who supported the 1999 ousting of Milosevic but who does not support an ousting of Hussein today has a responsibility to America of explaining such a dichotomy.
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