Okay Lear. Today is your lucky day. I don't know enough about Afghanistan to speak on it, though that wouldn't stop me if it was as prominent an issue as Kosova. The apparent binary choice you offer between a) Soviet control of E. Europe, and b) democracy with ethnic carnage is one I will forego, since the latter is a counter-factual which merely reinforces your argument. My bias before the fact, when ethnic carnage is more a possibility than an eventuality, would be to support democracy. I'm another 'big election guy.' > . . . > What you seem to be unable to grasp is the principle you are advocating. The principle you are supporting is that should one group within a "parent" country attempt to pull away, and were the country to use violence to prevent it, any another country has a perfect right to offer an ultimatum to >> Serbian govt action in K. goes well beyond "violence" in my view. You're minimizing it by this choice of words. >> that country and to persue a full-scale war against that country should >> To me full scale war means the obliteration of the Yugo govt and nation-building in Serbia. My objectives are much more limited -- self-determination for Kosova, so the military activities would be as well. I would not support a campaign to dislodge and replace Milo, only to chase his people out of Kosova. >> that country refuse the terms of the ultimatum, even if that country offered to pursue autonomy for the group with international monitoring. >> I don't believe Serbia is (or ever was) interested in accepting "autonomy" for Kosova. If it was, that would be a different situation. Three weeks ago would be a different situation too. >> Fairness means you accept your argument for us, not just for other people. Max, are you prepared to accept this principle for the United States and the countries it supports in their violence against their people? Do you really want to be on the side of the British and French who wanted to bomb Washington and New York City because we used violence to suppress the South in seceding from the Union? > Your example is a little wacky, but I take your general question, which I would rephrase as: when is violation of a nation's sovereignty defensible in the matter of grievances by national minorities? I'd say when the national minority faces the level of destruction being visited upon Kosova by Serbia currently, or worse. I've also allowed that the situation of the Kurds and East Timorese appear quite similar. So too would have been the campaigns of the Israeli government against Palestinians at various times in the past. This is not to say that violence is always the preferred course, but that it could be defended in these contexts as a last resort. The case of the ante-bellum South was a totally different story. There was no national oppressed minority, but rather the question of a slave system versus rising bourgeois industrial capitalism. Supporting the North is an easy call. There is no comparable socialist model in Serbia worth defending in light of their treatment of Kosova. > You continually avoid my questions, presumably because you have no answer and prefer your personalized attacks and tiresome Manichean complaints when someone disagrees with you, as to why the US destroyed the democratic opposition and refused to consider the very promising Serb Parliament offer of autonomy in Kosovo followed by international observers. > Maybe the U.S. should have taken the deal, maybe not, maybe they miscalculated, maybe they had something more malign in mind. I have no idea, and nobody has convinced me they do either. What matters now is how to save Kosovars. I don't think a cease-fire does it. > You and Nathan also ignored my reply to the simplistic argument of "doing good" just by accident or happy by-product, which appears to be your position regarding the US actions in Kosovo. Let me repeat Nathan's argument and my reply: > > . . . Ergo, should a "humanitarian" end result from the acts of Clinton, it is merely incidental, a fortunate accident, that the ends deserve the label "good". Given that, one can therefore ask the likelihood that a state with a rich history of violence and flagrant abuses of human rights and civilized norms might undertake an aggressive and violent foreign policy campaign *and* have the ends accidentally turn out to be "humanitarian". >> If, lacking any specifics as to the situation, I was asked the simple question on the probability of a Clinton/NATO action coming to a good end, I would assign it a low, but non-zero value. But I'd say it's our responsibility to consider every case on its own merits, however unlikely, when the scale of violence presently underway in Kosova is underway. > The relevant question to ask is not "Did the US intervention save some lives?", but What were the other options and why did the US persue the one that was guaranteed to sharply escalate the atrocities?; What could have saved the most lives and why did the US not persue that?; >> These are relevant as historical matters, but less so right now. Your next one is what matters most: > What could save the most lives now?. >> But then you go off the track again: > Why did the US persue the only avenue that it knows: destroy any democratic opposition, offer an ultimatum, then use deadly force, when it admitted very candidly that it's preferred approach would result in *more* people being killed, and 3/4ths of the refugees were generated *after* the bombing began? Of course, this is to totally ignore the humanitarian crisis that is caused by bombing the social and economic infrastructure of Serbian cities. Max, why do you not count the children, men, and women of Belgrade, as worthy of humanitarian concern? Don't they figure into your moral calculus when you are weighing how much "good" the bombs do? > This last is just silly. I've made clear my concern. I won't rehash it. > The question remains of why you believe that more people would be saved by dropping bombs than by pursuing diplomacy. >> I don't. If you remembered any of my posts, you'd know that. In regard to the merits of bombing the U.S.A. for assorted offenses, I'd agree (as I've said before) that in certain cases (e.g., Kissinger/Nixon's Christmas bombing of Vietnam) it would have been defensible, if there had been anybody big enough to do it. But there wasn't and isn't, so there's little point in raising it. The U.S. is the big dog; when it does something bad, the only way to stop it is by internal and external non-violent political protest, not as a matter of morality, but of practicality. Cheers, mbs
