Hi again, Brad. >I think that Srebenica had little to do with "war." Well, you'd be eliminating most wars of the twentieth century from the category of 'war' if you stood by this, Brad. But I see your point. Let's see; eight thousand unarmed men - sons, lovers, dads and brothers all - were taken away and coldly slaughtered, some, no doubt, brutally tortured, too ... Well, I admit it ain't quite the carpet bombing of Cambodia, but it's pretty much of the order of the sort of thing US troops got up to, say, in the Philippines a century ago or in the villages of Vietnam thirty years ago - perhaps Mladic's mob don't quite qualify for a chapter in the annals of the western-authored notion of total war because they let some of the kids and most of the women go ... War ain't shiny bandoleers at Waterloo any more, Brad - hasn't been for a long time. War is as bad as it gets. Including the ones you lot make - from Panama to Belgrade, civilians have represented far and away the majority of casualties. And at Dresden, Cologne, Hiroshima, Tokyo, Nagasaki and Hanoi they were the express target. (I think they were for several sortees during the Yugoslav bombing, too - what with those second passes at already ruined commuter bridges just as the ambulances arrived - but I'm sure NATO explained that to everyone's satisfaction, and I just missed it). Surely you know all this? >You may be right. I used to think as you do--that NATO intervention >in the former Yugoslavia was not likely to make things better. But >things like Srebenica convinced me to (largely) change my mind... I'm not just talking about NATO, Brad. They're only the most openly coercive wing of 'our' institutions. They delivered the penultimate blow - but it took the EC, the UN, a plethora of diplomats, and a trio of propped up nationalists on the ground to get us from a democratic federated Yugoslavia to the Srebrenica outrage in five years flat. And another five years' hard work successfully to deliver Tomahawk missiles to Belgrade commuters and make-up artists ... And, anyway, even if I do a Brad, and retreat from the historical and institutional context so that I can make neat moral judgements about isolated moments - I still wonder whether NATO really has made things better ... S'pose it all depends on your criteria and choice of moment of judgement, eh? Glumly, Rob.
