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"I am never going to say that Milosevic was a boy scout, but I certainly am very sceptical about clinton and the left's motives for going after him. I also happen to think that the average Serbian suffered as a result of our attack on their country but I guess this is always the case, isn't it?"

There were three reasons -- and three reasons only -- for the US to attack Serbia over the Kosovo issue.

1. The recent impeachment.

2. The Cox Report.

3. Juanita Broaddrick.

The Clinton administration desperately needed a major distraction for the media and the public, who might otherwise have chosen to linger on the above three items.

And that is, in my estimation, the only reason that we attacked Serbia: Bill Clinton's ass needed saving. Note that one of the major lobbyists for a Balkan War was CNN, who were totally duped (perhaps willingly so) by the staged "massacre" at Racek.

Serbians (and Kosovars) died so that Bill Clinton's political career could survive.

I have never been so ashamed of my country's policies as I was in this affair.

In my view, Milosevic was "no Boy Scout", as you say. But he and the Serbs had every right to defend themselves against a brutal ethnic insurgency. This was totally a domestic matter. Moreover, only twelve years prior, the New York Times (!!!) was demanding assistance to the embattled Serbian minority in Kosovo.

I basically agree with your analysis okie. I too was dismayed by the attack against Serbia and felt that the motives were primarily political. I'm open to the suggestion, however, that there may have been a confluence of factors (which is often the case) such that clinton's political needs dovetailed nicely with other, geopolitical needs that may be harder to ferret out. Oil pipeline politics? Internal NATO politics? The interests of Bob Dole who had ethnic ties and had been pushing for the Kosovo cause for a fairly long time? Tony Blair was a passionate advocate for the Serbian war. Sure, Blair's a lefie, but it was not his ox being gored by impeachment. What was in it for him?

But, basically I agreed with your case at the time and still do. Look at all the lefties and dems in congress who are now so vehemently anti-war (Daschle, Biden, others) who were pounding the table and wanting to bomb Serbia back to the stoneage.

It sure was a strange, almost parallel universe time. The bombing of the Chinese embassy, and the excuse that it was due to old maps (when you could go to yahoo or mapsquest and see the embassy in its present location) was one of the weirdest episodes of the whole affair. You can never go wrong saying this, but I do think there is much we don't know about it all! I do know that the impeachment evidence that was in the Ford building is still under lock and key. Another weird episode was Bush 41's speech to 100 Senators in Executive Session, behind closed doors, asking them to spare clinton's sorry ass.

Nice post.