Initial estimates were much higher than that. But there is a big difference. We knew an unjust atrocity had occurred in the WTC attacks. We could see it. The attack was never in question, the unjustness was never in question, only the body count. And it was quickly revised downward as information came available. That it was lower than what any reasonable man would have guessed was great and indicative of some divine protection still afforded us.
In the serbia situation we were relying on the politicians who were telling us that "genocide" was occuring. "100,000 missing and may have been murdered". That indeed made the Serbian Socialist party look like scum.
But what if the Socialists were fighting against Islamic terrorists? Which is what they claimed. A couple of thousand killed in battle could be completely explainable as deaths in a just war against terrorists.
you've climbed into bed with the Serbian Socialist Party and all it's associated scum on this one.
I'm not fond of socialists. Socialism is a failed economic model and is stupid. I am less fond of dictated socialism like the Soviets as opposed to democratic socialism like the French. It's still a stupid model but the people chose it.
But I'm not sure that the Serbian socialists were murderers instead of defenders. We know there are elements in Islam that are murderous, terrorist and expansionary. Which of the two, the Socialist or the Islamists, were more evil? I don't know.
Find a quote.
One of the links I posted last quoted Secretary of State Cohen as saying "100,000 missing and may have been murdered". The facts are pretty clear, from both the Times article and the Boston Globe as well as the other links. They led us to believe a huge massacre had occurred, when it hadn't.
Why pose a rhetorical question when the answer is readily available? The Albanians are more motivated by ethnic bonds than they are by religion, and the ties between the KLA and any Muslim terrorist group that we're worried about are dwarfed by their ties with the diaspora here in America. It's almost as if the LDK and 10 years of political oppression never occurred in these threads - Milosevic invalidated the non-violent opposition in Kosovo and played into the KLA's hands by making them the only game in town if you were a Kosovar Albanian and you were tired of European apartheid in Kosovo.
You point to our being able to see the WTC attacks as a differentiating factor, but we had also seen what had happened in the Balkans at places like Vukovar and Srebrenica, and saw the same leaders and units moving into Kosovo - once the first plane hit, was there really a doubt as to what the second would do once it came into the picture?
The Serbian Socialist party is scum, Danny - and they gain far too much traction here on FR by retooling their lies for an American audience. There's this whole weird Stockholm syndrome thing going on with some Serbs and Milosevic - don't buy into it.
Finally, yes, the actual quote is along the lines of "they may have been murdered", which again invites a discussion as to the accuracy of the information presented in the article at the head of this thread, no?
It's an old argument, btw, and ignores the forcible expulsion of over 800,000 civilians out of Kosovo and into Albania and Macedonia.