Second thoughts about Kosovo

The bombing of Serbia was actually a mistake in the sense of time, it came WAY to late. However, better late than never.

Serbia was THE nation that destabilized the Balkans due to it’s extremist xenophobic government who openly supported a Greater Serbia.

Let’s not forget that Serbia was the only state involved in each and every war on the Balkans during the 90’s.

If we wouldn’t have bombed Serbia, the results would have been the extermination of the Kosovar people leaving the Yugoslav army in fightings with the KLA in eternity until KLA would have turned from war to terrorism and attacked civilian targets in Belgrade.

Also, the bombing of the TV station was nothing but a success. Let’s not forget that the Serbian people was living in a dream where every nation in the world was against them in a world complot against the Serbs and that the Serbs fought for “the survival of the Serbian nation”. All this due to propaganda spread by Slobodan Milosevic for over a decade which not only radicalized the Serbian population to an extreme level but also caused extreme hatred between the ethnic sides.

Destroying the propaganda source of the enemy is a significant target in modern warfare and it’s a natural target. Let’s not forget that Serbia also had military bases around Belgrade which they used to supply the existing occupational forces in Kosovo. Not to mention the cremetery where the Serbian authorities was hiding thousands of civilian Kosovars that were massacred by Serbian forces, they even cremeted the bodies to hide the evidence. There are even satellite pictures of this cremation..

I’ve always had some mixed feelings about Kosovo, for the reasons you mention but also because it, quite predictably, lead to ethnic cleansing by the Kosovars and the the creation of a mafia-ruled unviable statelet. But, beyond that, I wonder what it would have taken to get the Russians to go along- not just because of their traditional loyalty to the Serbs. That was important but I suppose it could be overcome. Pan-Slavism generally has meant supporting Russia’s interests more than anything else, after all. But rather, I think their worry was that any action that justified Kosovo would almost certaily justify action in Chechnya, and Russia is, frankly, paranoid about that in the extreme. (I say paranoid since it’s so massively unlikely that any outside aid is actually ever going to come to the Chechens.) I don’t see how that could have been over-come.

Surely the commuter train bombing at least competes with the attack on the TV station on the outrage list. Maybe the justifications offered for the TV station bombing – “it was putting out a different story than our version and therefore was a legitimate military target” – gives it the edge.

Actually, the precedent for the bombing of Lebanon was set much earlier, with aerial bombing as such. See, for instance, Tom Engelhardt’s post at his blog, TomDispatch.com, on ‘air war, barbarity and the Middle East,’ part of which appeared as well in the Los Angeles Times on Aug. 6, 2006: http://www.tomdispatch.com/index.mhtml?pid=106273

For a nice analysis of the problems associated with NATO’s bombing of Serbia, see Henry Shue’s article, ‘Bombing to Rescue?: NATO’s 1999 bombing of Serbia.’ In Shue’s words, ‘the majority of NATO’s bombs and missles struck Serbia proper and its infrastructure, not the Serbian military, paramilitary, and police in Kosovo. The bombing, then, physically fits the geographic pattern for bombing for punishment purposes in that the targets are outside the military theatre, taking the theatre to have been Kosovo.’*

Marko Milanovic discusses a ‘textbook case’ for international law in a comment not long ago at the Opinio Juris blog (on international law and politics) that arose in a discussion of ‘proportionality’ as explained by Professor Mary Ellen O’Connell at JURIST:

‘I agree that the ICTY [International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia] Prosecutor’s report on NATO and the Kosovo conflict is a good example of how external review of the proportionality of military actions is both possible and necessary, even if the report, in my opinion, has serious flaws – though I am not exactly objective on the matter.

The example raised by Professor O’Connell, the attack on the Grdelica gorge bridge, is truly a textbook one: the pilot could quite lawfully target the bridge while the train was out of sight. Unfortunately, the train came quickly and the bomb hit it by mistake. Tragic, but not unlawful. But then, when the pilot realized that he had inadvertedly hit the train and the bridge was still standing, he launched a SECOND bomb which destroyed the bridge and further damaged the train, killing even more people. The Office of the Prosecutor unfortunately found that this incident is not even worth investigating, as they did with the bombing of the (ghastly) Belgrade TV station, with the NGO I work for, the Belgrade Centre for Human Rights, later unsuccessfully representing the victims’ families before the European Court of Human Rights in the Bankovic case.

While I do think military commanders in the field are entitled to some deference, I don’t see at all why the limits of that deference should only be in the most extreme cases. One view of IHL [International Humanitarian Law] is that the military is regulating itself, with soldier ethics and honour providing the impetus for respecting the laws of war. The other is, however, that we, as ordinary people, who do not have to fight in wars, still can pass moral and rational judgments on the people who do. The current Middle East conflict is a case in point.’
[Markovic is now associated with the University of Michigan Law School: if you google his name in quotes, you can find a page that gives his background and credentials; he frequently comments at Opinio Juris, and I’ve found his analyses to be quite reliable if not uncommonly insightful.]

Now, for books absolutely germane to this discussion, I trust it won’t be impertinent of me to suggest the following:

Buchanan, Allen. Justice, Legitimacy, and Self-Determination: Moral Foundations for International Law (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004).

*Chatterjee, Deen K. and Don E. Scheid, eds. Ethics and Foreign Intervention (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2003). [Shue’s article is Chapter 6, pp. 97-117]

Holzgrefe, J.L. and Robert O. Keohane, eds. Humanitarian Intervention: Ethical, Legal, and Political Dilemmas (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2003).

Jokic, Aleksandar, ed. Humanitarian Intervention: Moral and Philosophical Issues (Orchard Park, NY: Broadview Press, 2003).

joshb, “10,000 confirmed dead” from prewar Serbian government violence still sounds high by an order of magnitude or two. Could you please point me to a reference for that? I recall the number of Kosovar victims of government violence prior to the start of the bombing campaign being in the high three to low four figures.

Note: I’m not going to go off on a “Racak was staged” rant. It’s clear to me that Racak was a genuine massacre. But I am concerned about nailing the scale of the prewar violence.

Steve – Your argument would be taken much more seriously if you didn’t make up such stupid figures. (Actually, to be honest, it may be too late for you to be taken seriously. But it couldn’t hurt)

Wasn’t the precedent for attacking the tv station set in the El Salvador conflict? As I remember, one of the prime directives of the death squandrons advised by the U.S. was to destroy the rebel radio station, which kept popping back on again after being destroyed. However, as I remember, it was only destroyed in order to defend freedom of speech in El Salvador. Forging the rhetoric of democracy in support of wars against democracy is a very important part of spreading democracy across the planet.

Milosevic’s “notorious speech in Kosovo in 89” can be read online at: http://www.tenc.net/milo/milosaid.html

Judge for yourself whether it is notorious. Here’s a snippet:

“Equal and harmonious relations among Yugoslav peoples are a necessary condition for the existence of Yugoslavia and for it to find its way out of the crisis and, in particular, they are a necessary condition for its economic and social prosperity. In this respect Yugoslavia does not stand out from the social milieu of the contemporary, particularly the developed, world. This world is more and more marked by national tolerance, national cooperation, and even national equality. The modern economic and technological, as well as political and cultural development, has guided various peoples toward each other, has made them interdependent and increasingly has made them equal as well [medjusobno ravnopravni]. Equal and united people can above all become a part of the civilization toward which mankind is moving. If we cannot be at the head of the column leading to such a civilization, there is certainly no need for us to be at its tail.”

—

Meanwhile, here is what the liberal media watchdog FAIR says about the origins of ethnic cleansing in Yugoslavia:

New York Times correspondent David Binder filed a report in 1982 (11/28/82): “In violence growing out of the Pristina University riots of March 1981, a score of people have been killed and hundreds injured. There have been almost weekly incidents of rape, arson, pillage and industrial sabotage, most seemingly designed to drive Kosovo’s remaining indigenous Slavs–Serbs and Montenegrins–out of the province.”

Describing an attempt to set fire to a 12-year-old Serbian boy, Binder reported (11/9/82): “Such incidents have prompted many of Kosovo’s Slavic inhabitants to flee the province, thereby helping to fulfill a nationalist demand for an ethnically ‘pure’ Albanian Kosovo. The latest Belgrade estimate is that 20,000 Serbs and Montenegrins have left Kosovo for good since the 1981 riots.”

“Ethnically pure,” of course, is another way to translate the phrase “ethnically clean”–as in “ethnic cleansing.” The first use of this concept to appear in Nexis was in relation to the Albanian nationalists’ program for Kosovo: “The nationalists have a two-point platform,” the Times’ Marvine Howe quotes a Communist (and ethnically Albanian) official in Kosovo (7/12/82), “first to establish what they call an ethnically clean Albanian republic and then the merger with Albania to form a greater Albania.” All of the half-dozen references in Nexis to “ethnically clean” or “ethnic cleansing” over the next seven years attribute the phrase to Albanian nationalists.

full: http://www.fair.org/index.php?page=1459

I really hope that the folks here will do intellectual grabage pickup on the postings of the Milosevic defenders. His apologists love to selectively quote his speeched, naturally translated by them, to claim that he never unleashed a violent catastrophe in the Balkans. The number of victims was overestimated, the Serbs were provoked, other ethnic groups did “bad things” too. Anything but the willingness to accept his moral culpability for the carnage.

What you’re encountering here is the problem with a pacifist approach. There really are monsters who butcher groups within their countries that they don’t like, and a policy of refusing to ever intervene is a license for mass murder. The bar should be high, but my only regret in Yugoslavia is that the West didn’t intervene before hundreds of thousands died in Croatia and Bosnia.

Here’s Clenis interviewed by Rather on March 31, 1999. He’d just decided to start targeting Belgrade and he’s explaining why it’s a good idea: “to raise the price of aggression to an unacceptably high level so that we can get back to talking peace and security“.

Jim Henley wrote:

“10,000 confirmed dead” from prewar Serbian government violence still sounds high by an order of magnitude or two. Could you please point me to a reference for that? I recall the number of Kosovar victims of government violence prior to the start of the bombing campaign being in the high three to low four figures.

Jim, you’re right. The numbers dead were on-the-order-of a thousand or so.

However, the autumn of 1998 had seen massive displacement of refugees, with over 50,000 people on the roads at one point. (In retrospect, it now appears that this was a warmup exercise for the full-blown cleansing six months later.) And the drastic ramping-up of KLA activity after the Drenica massacre in March 1998 meant that the province was certain to undergo waves of violence with no end in sight.

After Drenica, support for Rugova and nonviolence collapsed; the Albanian population switched to supporting the KLA, giving them the “sea in which to swim”. The Serbs were then faced with a West Bank of their own making. (The other key event was the opening of the arsenals after the collapse of the Albanian economy in 1997. This put tens of thousands of rifles and AK-47s on the Balkan market cheap, converting the Albanians overnight from a relatively unarmed populace to one where almost every family had a buried gun.)

The shootings, bombings and kidnappings were set to continue endlessly, with a long-term ratchet upwards until either the Albanians were expelled or some outside power stepped in. After Drenica there were no good options. The NATO intervention was the least bad choice, though. If it hadn’t been done then, it would have been done later, after much more blood had been spilled.

This is where the Iraq analogy really breaks down. Baghdad today is what Pristina would have looked like in a year or two *without* the NATO intervention.

Doug M.

“The real problem with the Kosovo intervention is that it would not have been necessary had Europe and the US acted properly and intervened earier in Bosnia.”

This is the interesting question. What kind of earlier interventions are we talking about?

The NATO intervention was the least bad choice, though.

But what about the claim that a poison pill was inserted into the “Rambouillet accord” at the last moment in order to provoke a confrontation? See here.

You’ll note that Chris Bertram failed to identify a single word in Milosevic’s speech that deserved condemnation. The only thing that can be described as “notorious” was the liberal group-think that lined up to liken it to a Hitler speech at Nuremberg. David Rieff, one member of this conformist claque, eventually woke up:

“At the time of the Kosovo war, I had written that, if I had to make the choice, I would choose imperialism over barbarism,” he explains. “In
retrospect, though, I did not realize the extent to which imperialism is or at least can always become barbarism.” This admission alone makes At the Point of the Gun worth reading.

full: http://www.antiwar.com/bandow/?articleid=9186

Hmm. I think that a lot about this sort of question depends on what you assume to be true about the background conditions in which you’re deciding — which assumptions you take for granted and which you take to be up for question.

I think that a lot of the people involved in the Kosovo decision assumed, wrongly as it turns out, that foreign policy in the US and Europe would be made by people who were flawed, at times very short-sighted, maybe even stupid, but nonetheless basically reasonable adults who would not, for instance, seize the precedent of an action without UN sanction and say: see? We can do whatever we want! I also think that at the time that was a reasonable assumption to make: after all, even if someone was inclined to be a flaming and complete idiot who thought of foreign policy as if it were exactly like second grade, surely that person, on taking power, would have to think seriously about things, and moderate that view, at least a bit? Right?

Wrong. As we now know.

On the one hand, this does mean that the failure to get Security Council approval was a lot more important than it seemed. On the other, I’m not sure how foreseeable that was at the time. It requires: a President with a truly shocking level of irresponsibility, advisors who are not capable of introducing sanity into the proceedings, a party apparatus (in this case, the GOP) who is willing to allow this person to be nominated despite the irresponsibility and incapacity; a quiescent media, and a public willing to be led to war for no good reason. Or, in short: every imaginable check failing.

Who would have thought?

I have a question on this. How many of those killed in Kosovo were killed after Rambouillet? In short, did our bombing stop the worst atrocities or precipitate the worst atrocities.

First off, although Kosovo was used as justification for both Iraq and Lebanon, it was used differently in each case. In the case of Iraq, the rhetoric was twofold: 1) that the UN could not be relied on to pass resolutions supporting war, especially when veto members (France, Russia, China) had an interest in preventing it, and 2) that the UN could not be relied on to supporting intervention in humanitarian cases either. Most people will concede that Kosovo lends credence to the above arguments.
In the case of Lebanon, Kosovo was referenced by Olmert to justify his strategy of using air strikes in Lebanon. His claim was that his strategy was similar to the one used in Kosovo, and that 10,000 had been killed in Kosovo, so Europe had no right to complain about Israel’s actions. Of course, this is a blatant misrepresentation, and his numbers are a little high.
Basically, I don’t think that Olmert’s comments are anything but a blatant distortion of the facts, and that (irregardless of what one thinks of the war) references to Kosovo before the Iraq war did point out some flaws that the UN will need to resolve.

I, as a Kosovar can make this very very clear to you. Before NATO intervention, there was a few thousand civilians listed as killed by Serb forces. What many of you seem to forget though was that the Serbian regime put Kosovo in their hands already in 1989, from 1989 to 1998 they installed an apartheid society where Albanians slowly but surely were forced out of Kosovo. Due to wars in Croatia, Bosnia etc the situation of the Kosovars remained unknown to the rest of Europe.

– During this time, Albanian boys forced to military duty were sent back home, shot dead. Their families were told they “died in training”.
– Albanian was removed as the official language
– Albanians were forbidden to buy land in Kosovo
– Albanian was forbidden in school
– The university of Prishtina become a 100% Serbian university
– Almost each and every police officer in Kosovo of Albanian origin was fired
– Almost each and every Albanian working in the education or health sector was fired.
– Albanian media was closed, the Albanians weren’t allowed to run their own newspapers or TV channels.

To describe the situation of the Kosovars during this time it’s impossible to write down on a small message, therefore I recommend you all to read “Kosovo – A short history” by Noel Malcom. Which not only shows how the Serbian state has organized and engaged state terror against the Albanians in Kosovo during the 90’s but also before.

Let’s not forget that the Serbian “final solution for the Albanians” came already in 1937 (2 years before Adolf himself started expanding his “final solution” in Europe). You can find it all here:

http://www.aacl.com/expulsion2.html

If NATO wouldn’t have interviened, then surely sooner or later the ethnic composition of Kosovo would have turned to a Serbian favour by putting the Kosovar majority under poverty, by forcing them away, not giving them jobs, forbidding them to express their political will and not respecting the political, human or civil rights of the Kosovars.

It is indeed true that NATO strikes made the Serbs furious and they SPEEDED UP their plans to ethnically cleanse Kosovo (there is no doubt that this was their plan, Vojislav Seselj himself said it during a speech in Belgrad two days prior to the strikes, “If American aggression hits Serbia, there will not remain a single Albanian in Kosovo”).

Let’s also not forget that all of these massacres took place BEFORE NATO started it’s war:

Massacre in Rogove Village. January 1999
Massacre in Reçak, Nerodime. January 1999
Massacre in Abri e Epërme, Drenicë. October, 1998
Massacre in Lybeniq, Drenicë. Summer, 1998.
Massacre in Prekaz, Drenicë. February, 1998.

As I said I am a Kosovar myself, two of my close relatives were fleeing the terror from Gjakova, a major town in Kosovo. Their refugee truck was hit by a NATO bomb accidentally. The Serbs whined and said that NATO was targeting civilians, what is ironic is that these refugees were fleeing the same Serbian forces that complained about their death. Over 20 people died in that attack, but each and every one of their relatives said it openly that “NATO made a mistake, they are forgiven”. My cousin who died that day was only 21, his father still today doesn’t blame NATO.

The most important thing here which you all seem to have forgot is that not a single time during the 78 days of bombing did the Kosovars ask NATO NOT to bomb even though the situation of the Kosovar people became a living hell directly after the bombings. Some of you obviously are trying to make it look like life in Kosovo was a paradise before NATO came, it wasn’t. It was a hell, a slow hell though. NATO speeded the terror up, but it was also NATO who stopped it! Thank’s God for that, hadn’t NATO interviened then today we would have some tens of thousands of Kosovars living outspread through Europe without a homeland..

NATO speeded the terror up, but it was also NATO who stopped it!

The question is: was speeding the terror up and creating terror in Serbia by bombings necessary? Because, obviously, it would’ve been much better to achieve the end of hostilities without a war, bombings and speeding up the terror.

So, did American and European politicians really carried it out the way they did because of their concern for the Kosovo Albanians, or did they do it mostly for other reasons: to make an example, to teach a lesson, to boost NATO’s credibility and status and so on. The answer seems obvious.

Another thing I think my quote demonstrates is that Kosovo was a strong precedent for US unilateralism a la Iraq. The US would not accept a UN-led force, and it is difficult to see how the UN could authorize a resolution that denied its own jurisdiction. That is why, I think, there wasn’t pressure from the European allies to go to the UN. How could the UN possibly tell the Serbs they had to accept a NATO not a UN force? England and France did not want to face the chagrin of having to advocate such a thing.

On the same topic, don’t bother responding to “Steve” either. Anything from him will be deleted.

That’s too bad; I was kind of hoping to see what kind of contribution “Steve” was going to make to this thread (beyond “You liberals are stupid and evil and you make me sick,” of course). He brings pretty much a picture-perfect replication of whatever’s being said in the more noxious corners of the far right, without having to actually read LGF or listen to Hannity or Limbaugh or Coulter. Given that the level of denial about Iraq in that corner of the universe has evolved from merely ridiculous to truly awe-inspiring, I can’t help but be intrigued.

Abb1, the piece seems to be garbled and, in places, simply incorrect. Frex, no “Serb dissidents” participated at Rambouillet, and it is not true that “Serbia had expressed agreement with the main political proposals”

There are still questions about Rambouillet. But the idea that the poor Serbs had no choice but to accept a humiliating occupation of their whole country, or be bombed… no. It’s abundantly clear that the allies would have been satisfied with an occuption of Kosovo only; it’s just as clear that this was simply unacceptable to the Serbs. There was no point in the negotiations where the Serbs were even close to signing. (The Albanians came very close to not signing too, but that’s another story.)

Martin bento: of course Allbright was insisting on a NATO force. UN forces had been tried in Bosnia, and had accomplished exactly nothing. Srebrenica — the worst massacre in Europe since World War II — took place while UN peacekeepers stood idly by. The killing in Bosnia didn’t stop until large numbers of NATO troops were deployed.

Doug M.

Rereading the above post, I realize that I fell slightly into sarcasm. For this, I apologize. I think we are all better served by a polite and respectful discourse.

I assume you mean Russia. But what did Russia do to affect the outcome?

This is from an interview with Chomsky a few months back.

Last month marked the seventh anniversary of the beginning of the bombing of Yugoslavia. Why did NATO wage that war or I should say why did the United States wage that war?

Noam Chomsky: Actually, we have for the first time a very authoritative comment on that from the highest level of Clinton administration, which is something that one could have surmised before, but now it is asserted. This is from Strobe Talbott who was in charge of the… he ran the Pentagon/State Department intelligence Joint Committee on the diplomacy during the whole affair including the bombing, so that’s very top of Clinton administration; he just wrote the foreword to a book by his Director of Communications, John Norris, and in the foreword he says if you really want to understand what the thinking was of the top of Clinton administration this is the book you should read and take a look on John Norris’s book and what he says is that the real purpose of the war had nothing to do with concern for Kosovar Albanians. It was because Serbia was not carrying out the required social and economic reforms, meaning it was the last corner of Europe which had not subordinated itself to the US-run neoliberal programs, so therefore it had to be eliminated. That’s from the highest level.

Remarks from a supporter of the Kosovo intervention (“Jim, you’re right. The numbers dead were on-the-order-of a thousand or so.”) does rather back up my complaint that we were lied to, with piffle about 100,000 genocidal deaths before the bombing.

It was piffle, sure enough.

But: the Serbs cheerfully killed several thousand more Kosovar civilians /after/ the bombs started falling. And the killing and ethnic cleansing was prepared long in advance.

Kosovo was a bunch of Srebrenicas waiting to happen. The fact that various governments lied their asses off doesn’t affect this.

Anyway, we’re in agreement on the essential point: the attack on Iraq was separately rash and foolish, and drew little inspiration from Kosovo. None of the key players (except Blair) was the same; in fact, the commander of NATO during Kosovo, Wes Clark, was an early and vocal critic of Iraq.

Abb1: I have no problem with a military organization that wants to do military things. That’s natural. The question is whether the civilian leadership controls it and/or points it in the right direction.

Was NATO motivated in part by finding a raison d’etre? Quite possibly. Did this affect the essential justice of the war? No. The surgeon who removes my tumor may be doing it to make a payment on his new Humvee rather than out of an abstract love of humanity. As long as my tumor is removed, I don’t care. NATO may have been looking for a war; the war they found was one that needed waging.

Martin Bento: the document presented to Serbia initially /was/ a reasonable one for them to sign. Remember, Rambouillet was a process. The controversial appendix wasn’t added until quite late.

As to whether NATO would accept a settlement that didn’t involve occupation of all Serbia, I hardly have to read minds. I said it was abundantly clear that the allies would have been satisfied with an occuption of Kosovo only. That’s exactly what they /did/ accept — after bombing hell out of Serbia and winning the war. How much clearer could it be?

I hate to pull rank, but I lived in Serbia for some years. And even the Serbs agree that Milosevic would not — could not — tamely accept a NATO occupation of Kosovo. So, Rambouillet was a non-starter from the beginning.

Martin, Abb1 and John Q. — I turn again to my first point: the Kosovar Albanians are deeply, unanimously, even embarrassingly grateful to us. Even Albanians who had their homes bombed flat are grateful to us. They had nine years of hell under Milosevic. (In retrospect, it’s quite startling how many thoughtful Europeans managed to ignore the existence of an explicitly racist apartheid regime inside Europe itself.)

I had doubts about the justice of the Kosovo war, too. Until I went to Kosovo.

Partly it was the endless drumbeat of horror stories from the dark days of the occupation. But maybe more than anything, it was the profound and universal gratitude. When people keep saying “Thank you. Thank you for saving us,” it’s just hard to keep mumbling, “oh, but we shouldn’t have.”

Doug M.

…it’s just hard to keep mumbling, “oh, but we shouldn’t have.”

Well, it’s not a question of “oh, but we shouldn’t have”, but a question of “oh, but was it done by the right means?”

You know this story about a guy who goes to a doctor and complains about headaches, insomnia, depression and irritability? The doctor examines him and says: your penis need to be amputated. The guy can’t take it any more, agrees to the surgery, and sure enough all problems disappear. The guy is very grateful (but sad).

Later he goes to a tailor to get a new suit and the tailor tells him that to fit the new pants he needs to know if the dick normally hangs on the right side or on the left. And the guy, of course, says: “oh, doesn’t matter, don’t worry about it.” And then the tailor says: “oh, no, this is extremely important; if the pant are fit for the dick on the wrong side, you may get headaches, insomnia, depression and irritability like you wouldn’t believe…”

James, Saddam’s regime was also subject to overthrow; we had not much problem destroying it. The problem is that, unlike Serbia, we had to run the place afterwards, and chose to do one of our grand free-market experiments.

However, none of these practical matters have a place in international law, which has to be based on very general principles, not the specifics of each situation.

This discussion has made me look hard at Kosovo again. I stand by the position that the US rather dishonestly forced a war at Rambouillet. But I can see the political logic. Genuine peace-keeping would have meant a huge and indefinite commitment of US troops. Clinton was not strong enough politically to do this, nor would it serve US interests nearly as well as a good war. So he chose to kick Serbia’s ass once and for all. It’s hard to say the US should have ignored Kosovo.

On the other hand, Clinton and Clark lied copiously to garner support for that war. I don’t think those who condemn Bush’s WMD fibs can defend this. If the government is going to ask or potentially require me or my loved ones to risk our lives in war, I demand that it be up front about the reasons and the facts of the situation.

NATO also chose to keep out the UN and the OCSE. In part, this may have also been for the purpose of avoiding peace-keeping, but it looks more like it had to do with NATO’s geostrategic objectives. The UN is not going to sanction a permament American base in Kosovo; Russia would veto, but they would be right. Extending the reach of NATO is not and should not be part of the UN mission.

I think, though, that this situation brings out a general problem with the whole idea of peace-keeping troops. Keeping a peace requires a lot of troops, and they must come from countries with substantially no dog in the fight. But such countries will seldom have sufficient motivation for an open-ended commitment of such troops. It may be that UN peace-keeping is something that will only work in rare circumstances. The Srebenica situation – a UN team whose mandate exceeds the capacity its backers are willing to provide – would seem to be much more common.

Dan, unlike John I did oppose Kosovo at the time, and in part because of the precedent it established. Law is based on precedent, so I think examination of events in relation to international law have to try to be cognizant of them. Part of the problem is that the way this has worked out is a “slippery slope”. It would have been hard to make that argument in advance because “slippery slope” in on the standard list of logical fallacies, though slippery slopes are indeed how things work often out in life. Slippery slope arguments are not rigorously logical, but are often (not always) realistic.

Can someone provide a source for this “100,000 dead Kosovars lie”? I don’t remember being told that 100,000 Kosovars had been killed and this being used as justification for intervention. Who propagated this lie and when?

UN peacekeeping has been a spectacular failure for any shooting war. The UN & EU reactionary force failed spectacularly in this particular war. Why would anyone call for putting the UN in charge of intervention?

The US no longer places troops under UN command. There are many reasons for this. The most recent reason is the ICC treaty. Since Europe demanded US involvement, this required NATO command. Marin’s conspiracy theory is incorrect.

only a bright-line rule will serve. Experience has shown that UN authorisation is such a case – either you need it or you don’t.

John, what about the case “need it, but can’t possibly get it”?

Because there was no way Yeltsin’s Russia would ever approve of action against Serbia’s interests. Heck, Kosovo has been de facto independent for seven years now, and Russia is still balking. (Though Putin, much more pragmatic than his predecessor, has hinted he might go along… /if/ Kosovar independence is linked to approval of the Russian adventures in Abkhazia and elsewhere.)

A difference between Kosovo and Iraq: in 2002/3, a resolution for war could not get a majority on the Security Council. Hard as the US tried, no more than five or six of the fifteen members would vote for it.

In 1999, a clear majority of members were ready to at least implicitly approve force in Kosovo; only China, Greece and Russia objected. But Russia’s objections were non-negotiable, and Russia had a veto.

Second point: the Clinton administration did try in good faith to bring the UN into the process as much as possible, given the Russian veto power. Which is why Kosovo is a de facto UN Trust Territory today.

Not that bringing the UN into administration was necessarily such a great idea. But still.

Doug M.

Another thing, are we really going to adapt the standard that the UNSC can be disregarded if only one veto-holder strongly objects (though China also supported Serbia)? Where would Israel be if the world could say, well, we all think they should be forced from the occupied territories; the only problem is America. I think the security council needs to be restructured, and more power needs to pass to the General Assembly. But for now, the UNCS is what we have.