HTTP://WWW.STOPNATO.ORG.UK
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Dear Miroslav,
You might have spared us this one, from
the notorious Conrad Black's National Post.
A far better feature from the same source was that of
former Canadian ambassador to Yugoslavia, James
Bisset, of a few days ago.
Two wrongs don't make a right, and the fact that the
criminal aggression against Yugoslavia four years ago
had even less 'justification' than the current one
against Iraq doesn't make the latter justified itself.
Respectfully,
Rick
--- Miroslav Antic <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> HTTP://WWW.STOPNATO.ORG.UK
> ---------------------------
>
>
> <http://www.nationalpost.ca/home/story.html?id={>
>
http://www.nationalpost.ca/home/story.html?id={0415D939-43E6-4260-9CBD-B
> 47E06E43413}
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> Friday > March 14 > 2003
>
>
>
>
> Why this Kosovo dove became an Iraq hawk
>
> George Jonas
> National Post
>
> Wednesday, March 12, 2003
>
>
> Recently a reader took me to task for inconsistency.
> "You were a dove
> during the Kosovo war," she told me. "Why are you a
> hawk on Iraq?"
>
> Madam, I'm glad you asked.
>
> I dislike war and oppose it as a matter of course
> unless I'm convinced
> that avoiding war is more dangerous. This definition
> fits military
> action to depose Saddam Hussein. It didn't fit the
> North Atlantic Treaty
> Organization's campaign against Slobodan Milosevic
> and his government.
>
> For a start, whatever Milosevic did -- and he did
> plenty -- he made no
> attempt to develop weapons of mass destruction.
> Yugoslavia never had
> programs for nuclear, biological, or chemical
> armaments. Unlike Saddam,
> the Balkan dictator had no plans to use such weapons
> himself or make
> them available to international terrorists.
>
> Milosevic posed no threat to the West in general or
> America in
> particular. He had no hostile designs on any NATO
> country. He didn't
> want to export his thuggish rule, or even his
> influence, outside the
> borders of the former Yugoslavia.
>
> Saddam fancies himself a modern-day Saladin with
> dreams of regaining
> Jerusalem for the Arab nation. Milosevic had no
> comparable ambitions.
>
> What Milosevic did want was distasteful enough. The
> ex-Communist
> dictator, reincarnated as a Serb nationalist, wanted
> to hold together
> the reluctant nations of the moribund Yugoslav
> federation by brutal
> force. In the course of doing so, he may well have
> committed crimes
> against humanity in Bosnia and Kosovo, for which
> he's now being tried by
> an international tribunal.
>
> The ethnic Albanian-Muslim majority of Kosovo was
> unhappy in Yugoslavia.
> Some wanted autonomy for their province; most wanted
> to secede, either
> to establish an independent state or to unite with
> others in the region
> to form a state of greater Albania. The Kosovo
> Liberation Army employed
> violence to achieve this goal, to which Milosevic
> responded with
> reprehensible measures that included attempts at
> ethnic cleansing.
>
> Nasty as this was, it posed no threat to NATO. The
> West had no stake in
> greater Albania anymore than in greater Serbia. The
> Dayton accords
> specifically confirmed the territorial integrity of
> what remained of
> Yugoslavia. When NATO's intervention came, it was
> based partly on
> humanitarian considerations, and partly on ideals of
> multiculturalism,
> dear to Western liberals, but rather alien to both
> sides of the warring
> parties in Kosovo.
>
> This seemed to me inadequate as a reason for going
> to war. The West was
> interfering in a race in which it had no horse. NATO
> didn't achieve
> multiculturalism either: The Albanian Muslims
> returned to Kosovo, then
> ethnically cleansed most Serbs from it.
>
> When NATO attacked Milosevic, the Serb leader wasn't
> in breach of 18
> previous UN Security Council resolutions. He hadn't
> been warned to
> disarm at the pain of "serious consequences" as UN
> Resolution 1441
> warned Saddam. The attack on Milosevic, far from
> being authorized,
> hadn't even been canvassed at the United Nations.
> NATO justified its
> action by saying it was pointless to ask the UN for
> authority because
> the answer would be no.
>
> I'd be the last to suggest that a sovereign nation
> (or a military
> alliance) should never act without the blessing of
> Kofi Annan's
> apostolic seat in New York. I only think it's
> incongruous when liberal
> protesters, who cheered the flower children's war
> against Milosevic
> without any UN blessing at all, now find 18 such
> blessings insufficient.
> This week, if the Security Council votes down the
> joint U.S.-UK-Spanish
> proposal -- or if France and Russia exercise their
> veto -- it will be
> the United Nations refuting its own authority. If ,
> or rather when, the
> U.S.-led coalition attacks Iraq it will be with the
> specific mandate of
> Resolution 1441, a mandate the leaders of NATO
> didn't even seek against
> Yugoslavia.
>
> I called the Kosovo conflict the flower children's
> war because it was
> Bill Clinton, Tony Blair, Gerhard Schroeder, Javier
> Solana, and their
> friends -- politicians who emerged from a '60s
> generation of confused
> peaceniks, eco-freaks, draft resisters, and flower
> children -- who,
> after a life-long opposition to NATO and everything
> it stood for,
> hijacked NATO to act out their mushy liberal
> fantasies of fitting every
> region into the Procrustean bed of a multicultural
> dream.
>
> Some, like Mr. Blair, have since seen the light.
> Others, like Mr.
> Schroeder, are still in the dark.
>
> As a leader, Milosevic was a nasty piece of goods,
> but compared to
> Saddam the one-time communist apparatchik was Mother
> Teresa. To go no
> further, if Saddam had ever submitted to a type of
> election he could
> actually lose -- as Milosevic did -- the question of
> Iraq would have
> been settled 12 years go.
>
> In any genuine election involving the whole of Iraq
> -- Kurds, Shiites
> and all -- Saddam would have been defeated after the
> Gulf War in 1991 as
> surely as Milosevic was defeated after the war in
> Kosovo. Of course,
> it's hardly surprising that Saddam didn't expose
> himself to Iraq's
> voters. If he had, instead of sitting in Baghdad, he
> might occupy a cell
> next door to Milosevic in the Hague. The spectre of
> international
> prosecution doesn't encourage loathsome leaders to
> relinquish their
> office voluntarily or to submit themselves to the
> gamble of elections --
> but that's another story.
>
> C Copyright 2003 National Post
>
>
>
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