DOUGBetsy wrote:Barbara offers: send in a specialized ground military to defeat the government/group committing the genocide.
DOUGHogeye wrote:But if you are concerned with murdering non-combatants, then a highly targeted commando-type unit is a moral option. But as you say, no self-respecting bloody State military would even seriously consider such a course "with no air cover." Yes, peaceniks like me and Dick Bennet agree with you, Doug - the notion of "just war" sparing non-combatants went out with WWI (and the development of aerial bombing.)
Again, for some of us, sparing non-combatants is of utmost importance. "Winning modern wars" is a big deal, I'm sure, to the statist mentality, but for accomplishing a specific objective (such as assassinating a ruler intent on genocide, or freeing hostages), such mass-murder is quite unnecessary.Doug wrote:It's not a matter of sparing non-combatants. You can't win modern wars without air cover.
DARHogeye wrote: Again, for some of us, sparing non-combatants is of utmost importance.
DOUGHogeye wrote:Again, for some of us, sparing non-combatants is of utmost importance. "Winning modern wars" is a big deal, I'm sure, to the statist mentality, but for accomplishing a specific objective (such as assassinating a ruler intent on genocide, or freeing hostages), such mass-murder is quite unnecessary.Doug wrote:It's not a matter of sparing non-combatants. You can't win modern wars without air cover.
DOUGHogeye wrote:I'll explain it again. I am not a utilitarian. I don't simply count bodies and act on the basis of "which results in even more deaths." In deciding my conduct, I choose conduct that does not murder people. In evaluting conduct of an actor, I deem conduct which murders people to be wrong (except when the survival of the actor is at stake.) In other words, I am against murder in principle, not in the expedient utilitarian sense.
So, if there is a murder gang killing people, and I can stop the murder gang by murdering innocents, I will not do it...
DOUGBarbara Fitzpatrick wrote: By Hogeye's definition, I'm a utilitarian - I want the fewest deaths total and not the fewest deaths I personally am responsible for. However, I do take his point about bombs and missiles - the civilian deaths may not be intended, but they aren't exactly accidental if you knowingly fire those things into a civilian area.
DOUGBarbara Fitzpatrick wrote: Air cover is only necessary to defend against the other side's air. If the other side doesn't have air, you don't need it either. We are not fighting, anywhere in the world, in such a manner as to actually need air cover
We are bombing civilian areas because every group we are fighting is comprised of small, "non-traditional" forces - guerrillas, insurgents, warlords, etc. - that hide, if not live, in those civilian areas. It is counterproductive. We are knocking out people who would have been on our side - and making enemies of their families - and that's everywhere, not just Iraq. We need to be using equally small, well-trained, ground forces and good intelligence (NOT tortured confessions) to find the actual insurrgents and take the fight to the real enemy - be it in Iraq, Darfur, or anywhere else.
The Iraqis may well have hailed the US Imperial Army as liberators if they had put down Saddam and the Baathist Party and promptly left. If they had stayed, as they did, they would be hated as occupiers no matter how many or few there were. What you say is absurd, like saying if only the Nazis had sent more troops into France, the French would have hailed them as liberators. Suggestion: Quit watching US TV news - it rots the mind. And beware the Stateholm Syndrome.Doug wrote:Even in Iraq, had we sent in enough troops to keep the peace, contra Lying Rummy's lowball numbers, the Iraqis may well have hailed us as liberators.
Darrel gave an example where it worked.Hogeye wrote:Face it: government is just as incompetent at preventing genocide as it is at most things.
Doug wrote:Even in Iraq, had we sent in enough troops to keep the peace, contra Lying Rummy's lowball numbers, the Iraqis may well have hailed us as liberators.
No, that would not have been good enough. We would have had to keep an infrastructure in place for basic necessities and for security.Hogeye wrote:The Iraqis may well have hailed the US Imperial Army as liberators if they had put down Saddam and the Baathist Party and promptly left.
The French government was not oppressing the French people when the Nazis invaded. That's ridiculous.Hogeye wrote: If they had stayed, as they did, they would be hated as occupiers no matter how many or few there were. What you say is absurd, like saying if only the Nazis had sent more troops into France, the French would have hailed them as liberators. Suggestion: Quit watching US TV news - it rots the mind. And beware the Stateholm Syndrome.
DARHogeye wrote: The recent Kosevo aggression... fought to overshadow Clinton's famous blowjob,...
DARbut was ostensibly anti-genocide if you believe lackey US media like Fox.
DAREvidence is that the threat of invasion hastened, encouraged, and accelerated ethnic cleansing.
DARAny claims to reduced overall genocide are mere propaganda.
The Foreign Office documents were responses to the courts' needs in deciding the status of Kosovo-Albanian refugees in Germany. Although one might in these cases suppose a bias in favor of downplaying a humanitarian catastrophe in order to limit refugees, it nevertheless remains highly significant that the Foreign Office, in contrast to its public assertion of ethnic cleansing and genocide in justifying NATO intervention, privately continued to deny their existence as Yugoslav policy in this crucial period. And this continued to be their assessment even in March of this year. Thus these documents tend to show that stopping genocide was not the reason the German government, and by implication NATO, intervened in Kosovo, and that genocide (as understood in German and international law) in Kosovo did not precede NATO bombardment, at least not from early 1998 through March, 1999, but is a product of it. - Important Internal Documents From Germany's Foreign Office Regarding Pre-Bombardment Genocide In Kosovo
The record is now crystal clear that NATO and the Clinton administration deliberately lied about Serbian atrocities in Kosovo to justify their intervention in a low-intensity civil war in the Balkans.
It turns out that as few as 2,108 people were actually killed in Kosovo over a period of months leading up to and including the period of heavy bombardment of Serbia by NATO forces.
This is hardly "genocide," as it was billed by Clinton, Defense Secretary William Cohen, Sen. Joseph Biden, D-Del., Sen. Chuck Hagel, R-Neb., former Sen. Bob Dole and David Scheffer, U.S. ambassador for war crimes.
By whipping up hysteria for an illegal bombing campaign, all of these men have blood on their hands.
It wasn't hundreds of thousands of dead in Kosovo, as some reports suggested. It wasn't even tens of thousands. It was, at worst, a couple thousand over a considerable period of time. That, of course, is still a dreadful and grisly toll. But, to put it in perspective, no global authority -- not the United Nations, nor NATO -- ever advocates intervention in the United States or anywhere else when the annual murder toll hits 2,000, which it does early in the first half of every year.
Think of the hyperbole we heard prior to the bombing campaign:
• "By the time the snows fall next winter, there will be genocide documented on a large scale in Kosovo," said Biden.
• "History will judge us harshly if we do not take action to stop this rolling genocide," said Hagel.
• "What we have in Kosovo and what (we) had in Bosnia was genocide, and that's why I think we should intervene," said Dole.
• "There are indications genocide is unfolding in Kosovo," said State Department spokesman Jamie Rubin.
• Cohen characterized the bombing campaign as a "fight for justice over genocide."
• Scheffer said Kosovo was one of the top three genocides since 1950, rivaled only by Rwanda and Cambodia.
But no one laid it on as thick as Clinton. He compared the atrocities in Kosovo to the Holocaust. Kosovo, he said, "is not war in the traditional sense. Imagine what would happen if we and our allies instead decided just to look the other way as these people were massacred on NATO's doorstep." - The real war crimes
The embarrassing truth is starting to come out that the Clinton administration lied to us about Kosovo atrocities, which were supposed to justify the bombing of Yugoslavia. In five months of investigation, and exhumation of the dead in Kosovo, U.N. war crimes investigators have found only 2,108 bodies.
Before the bombing, Mr. Clinton and Defense Secretary William Cohen repeatedly tossed out figures of 100,000 dead, and the State Department even claimed that up to 500,000 Kosovars were feared dead. Mr. Clinton claimed that his bombing prevented Slobodan Milosevic from "deliberate, systematic efforts at ethnic cleansing and genocide."
The chief prosecutor for the U.N. war crimes tribunal, Carla Del Ponte, can confirm only the 2,108 figure. That's what she reported to the U.N. Security Council.
Pathologist Emilio Perez Pujol, who led a Spanish forensic team looking for bodies, found only 187, mostly in individual graves. He calculated that "the final figure of dead in Kosovo will be 2,500 at the most. This includes lots of strange deaths that can't be blamed on anyone in particular."
The British, who seem to be more interested in getting to the truth than Congress, are pressuring Foreign Secretary Robin Cook to answer claims that Tony Blair's government misled the public over the scale of deaths in order to justify NATO's bombing of Belgrade. Alice Mahon, the Labor member of Parliament who chairs the Balkans committee, said that the Kosovo deaths were tragic, but did not justify the killing of Belgrade civilians by NATO's bombing. - Numbers game in Kosovo
