Reply #64: What we did wrong and how relevant to your values.

[Don1]

What Was Wrong
Too many civilian deaths...Too much hype and media propaganda to get us to intervene...our governmental and corporate control of the country up to this very day...black ops, creating insurgencies, and using Al Qaeda. Refusal for diplomacy through UN and using NATO instead of UN peacekeepers. It's basically the same criticsms as we now have of Iraq but to a lesser in degree.

How Relevant to Your Values
#1
Life -- the civilians in Yugoslavia had a right to life. We need to do more to curtail collateral damage, which is a euphemism for civilian deaths. Often, military commanders could care less about such things and the media fails to report it.
Liberty -- the people of Yugoslavia have a right to do their business without complete US domination.
#4
You said "phony excuses." The case of Yugoslavia was highly exaggerated. It was called such things as the greatest holocaust since WWII in our media. Lies. What is going on in Africa is a much bigger deal right now. Our media doesn't cover it at all.
#6
Access to information -- just about everyone I know has next to no knowledge on this issue. We were all kept in the dark about this one perhaps by both sides of the aisle. We are not trying to fix what is wrong there either, because we simply do not know.

Conclusion
We might want to see intervention, but we only do so if we imagine our government and military to be relatively harmless in comparison to what is being intervened. Our government and military have both been harmful to the citizens of Yugoslavia, but not to the same degree as problems that they had before intervention. However, the harm was and still is there. In the case of Yugoslavia, we could have done a lot better.