Reply #44: Genocide.

[Don1]

"And just one question about your mention of the Bosnian war: Wasn't our purpose in getting involved in that to stop the genocide? And weren't we successful in that? Do you think that our involvement in that war seriously went against the value I specified in this thread?"

This is kind of like saying that the US war for independence was genocide against the British. Or the Iraqi war is genocide...100,000 Iraqi civilians have been killed. Whenever you have two different ethnicities, religions, or other groups in armed conflict with one another it will appear as genocide.

This is not to say that horrible acts did not occur from both sides in which civilians of the opposing side were targeted. They were. Everyone was going crazy there with social paranoia, kind of like us after 9-11 where many US citizens were running around beating up Muslims. Or kind of like us where the MinuteMen have run down to the border to fight Mexicans. It is just that the paranoia was taken to the next level in the former Yugoslavia. Groups of people, often civlians, were led away to be slaughtered because the paranoid thought that one group had to be pre-emptive against the other to defend itself. It is a lot like Bush's pre-emptive war against Iraq, killing 100,000 civlians...just on a local scale with several towns doing the same thing. And it was one group against the other. Muslims were leading away Serbs that they accused of aiding the enemy and Serbs were leading away Muslims.

Perhaps, one can call it genocide. It is just important to know the facts before the label. Do not know the label first, then assume the facts. Both sides killed civilians there and the counts were greatly exaggerated by the US media, as usual. For example, the deaths in Srebenica were in the hundreds and not in the thousands. And it is important to be consistent, too. Thousands, maybe even tens of thousands died in Fallujah, Iraq, through systematic slaughter using napalm on citizens who were forced to stay in city boundaries. If you choose a definition of genocide to include events in former Yugoslavia, then you must also include Fallujah, Iraq.

As to the question of intervention...something had to be done, but what? First, the US did not have the proper information about what was done and who was doing it. Second, it makes sense to intervene, but with what tools are you intervening? The US military? "Air support" which is just another euphemism for bombing targets along with civilian collateral damage? We bombed the Yugoslavian version of the World Trade Center because it was considered a military target...

What about the US employing tools, like black ops, propaganda, and the creation of insurgencies using Al Qaeda? Yes, Al Qaeda. According to NATO reports written by the Dutch soldiers in Yugoslavia, Al Qaeda, including bin Laden, was present in Yugoslavia while we were trying to create Muslim insurgencies there to wrest the government control from the Serbs. Coincidence? I doubt it, since only a couple of years before, we had employed bin Laden to do the same thing in Afghanistan.

And the end result? A capitalist security state in which all business both government and corporate goes through a US approval process. Are the people generally happy, though? Yes. Are people running around killing each other? No. Was it overall a good thing? Yes. Could we have done a lot better? Yes.

Back to your original question: "Do you think that our involvement in that war seriously went against the value I specified in this thread?" My answer is yes.