[Azaro]

(Original post by kingsholmmad)
Fine. Then, isn't it our moral duty to do just that? I know we're not going to succeed but shouldn't we at least try?

no, why? so we' ll hear the next 50 years the West interveines in place which are nome of their business?

[kingsholmmad]

(Original post by Azaro)
no, why? so we' ll hear the next 50 years the West interveines in place which are nome of their business?

We're going to do that anyway. Surely, if we're going to be castigated for our failings, then it's better that we fail for the right reasons? Surely it's better to interfere because we want to stop people being killed in their hundreds (our moral duty) rather than because we want to make a fast buck (our human instinct)?

[pr0view]

Relevant video of starkey on why intervention nearly always backfires.

[Clessus]

(Original post by pr0view)
Relevant video of starkey on why intervention nearly always backfires.

Kosova was not a disaster. It is better to be a (supposed) "UN protectorate" than a colony of Serbia. It may not have been 100% perfect, but I daresay stopping ethnic cleasning, and defeating Milosevic was not what one would call a "complete disaster". Was the intervention in Kosova a success? Ask the people there, they will tell you. The referances to the liberation of France as just demigogic nonsense.

[pr0view]

(Original post by Clessus)
Kosova was not a disaster. It is better to be a (supposed) "UN protectorate" than a colony of Serbia. It may not have been 100% perfect, but I daresay stopping ethnic cleasning, and defeating Milosevic was not what one would call a "complete disaster". Was the intervention in Kosova a success? Ask the people there, they will tell you. The referances to the liberation of France as just demigogic nonsense.

Depends whether you ask a Serb or an Albanian.

[Clessus]

(Original post by pr0view)
Depends whether you ask a Serb or an Albanian.

Albanians were over 85% of the population, and this overwhelming majority supported the NATO intervention both before and after.

I know what you are implicitly referring to. Yes, it's a great blot on the Western alliance's record that it failed to protect the Serbs, but would you really have been happier if it had been the 85% majority that was driven from its homes, rather than the 15% minority ?

[pr0view]

(Original post by Clessus)
Albanians were over 85% of the population, and this overwhelming majority supported the NATO intervention both before and after.

I know what you are implicitly referring to.Yes, it's a great blot on the Western alliance's record that it failed to protect the Serbs, but would you really have been happier if it had been the 85% majority that was driven from its homes, rather than the 15% minority ?

The Balklans is a messy and controversial subject where you can't please everyone just like with Israel & Palestine.

My initial point been that people usually resent foreign soldiers on the ground even if they have just been liberated them.

[Clessus]

(Original post by pr0view)
The Balklans is a messy and controversial subject where you can't please everyone just like with Israel & Palestine.

My initial point been that people usually resent foreign soldiers on the ground even if they have just been liberated them.

And my point being that this is not always the case. Kosova and Libya are 2 examples. There are other places in which we should have intervened, and where we would not have been seen as conquerers (like Bosnia and Rwanda), but one-nation Conservatives like Starkey were listened to, and we all know the result (genocide in both cases).

(as a side note, while the Balkans are controvertial in certain circles, unlike the Israel-Palestine conflict were one should be relatively even-handed, in the case of the Balkans there is a very clear case of who is in the right,who is the aggressor, and who is the victim)

[Hewitt]

Please read my blog post on my views on Syria: http://thethoughtsandmusings.wordpre...ghts-on-syria/

[Stalin]

(Original post by Hewitt)
Please read my blog post on my views on Syria: http://thethoughtsandmusings.wordpre...ghts-on-syria/

I just read your article, and whilst it offers nothing new, you advocate a military intervention based on humanitarian grounds, the responsibility to protect, whilst conveniently forgetting about Assad's stockpile of chemical weapons.

If Western powers - and I say this because it certainly won't be Arab powers - intervene militarily in Syria, prompting a vociferous backlash by Assad, in which chemical weapons will almost certainly be used against Israel, Saudi Arabia and various other neighbouring countries, or given to groups like Hezbollah, will the intervention, built on a foundation of damage limitation, not have done the opposite by igniting the entire region?

I don't want to see Assad in power anymore than you do, but it would seem that an intervention would do far more harm than good, namely sparking a regional war that would be so devastating that it would cause you and I problems in the West. Furthermore, the tables are turning: it would appear that Assad will not be able to hold onto Damascus, Aleppo, et cetera, and will be forced to retreat to the Alawite Mountains.

In other words, why interrupt your enemy when he is making a mistake?

[rawkus]

(Original post by Clessus)
(as a side note, while the Balkans are controvertial in certain circles, unlike the Israel-Palestine conflict were one should be relatively even-handed, in the case of the Balkans there is a very clear case of who is in the right,who is the aggressor, and who is the victim)

Really? It is true that one would be a fool to try and and argue that the Bosnian Serbs were the main victims of the conflict, however it is still not as clearly divided between the aggressors and victims as you claim it is.

Most people on this forum will know about or at least have heard of Srebrenica and the Siege of Sarajevo. Less however will have heard of Krajina, Mostar, Lasva Valley and the Karadordevo agreement. Whatever the Bosnian war was, it certainly was not a "very clear case".

Equally neither was Kosovo. The Serbs didnt one day wake up in the mid-1990s and decide that Kosovo would look better without ethnic Albanians. The mid-1990s saw a bunch of attacks on Serbian personnel. Now granted this doesn't justify in any way the eventual Serbian reaction, but it does taint this black and white idea that the Serbs were the aggressors from the beginning. In Turkey we have seen Kurdish villages razed to the ground during an equally brutal and over the top reaction to a local insurgency, yet instead of Ankara being bombed, Turkey is welcomed into NATO?!

[Clessus]

(Original post by rawkus)
Really? It is true that one would be a fool to try and and argue that the Bosnian Serbs were the main victims of the conflict, however it is still not as clearly divided between the aggressors and victims as you claim it is.

Not really, it's clear the Bosniaks were the victims, and the Serbs and to a lesser extent the Croats were the aggressors.

Most people on this forum will know about or at least have heard of Srebrenica and the Siege of Sarajevo. Less however will have heard of Krajina, Mostar, Lasva Valley and the Karadordevo agreement. Whatever the Bosnian war was, it certainly was not a "very clear case".

I assume that you are referring to the Krajina exodus or Operation Storm? While there were inexcusable crimes committed by Croatian forces during the operation, and it is a good thing that Ante Gotovina was convicted of warcrimes during the operation, it is important to remember that;

The operation came after the Krajina Serbs had ethnically cleansed around 150,000 Croats from the region in question, and after all the ethnic cleasning in Bosnia. This is not to justify what happened, and the perpotrators of the killings in the aftermath should be punished, but it is more a case of "what goes around comes around", rather than an indication of the nature of the conflict. There is no doubt the Croats committed abuses during Operation Storm, but it does not warrent comparison with the actions of the Serbs in Bosnia.

Despite all the crimes against Serb civilians that accompanied Operation Storm, the fact remains that it was an entirely necessary, legitimate military action that should rightly be celebrated. Operation Storm and its aftermath killed roughly betweeen 700 and 1,200 Serb civilians. But it 1) saved the lives of tens of thousands of Bosnian Muslims in the Bihac pocket; 2) defeated the Great Serbian project; 3) liberated Croatia, allowing it to become a normal, independent state (rather than another Cyprus, which it would have become had Operation Storm not taken place); and 4) led directly to the Dayton Peace Accords, which belatedly ended the war in Bosnia.

To quote Balkans historian Marko Attila Hoare;

Although supporters of the Great Serbian cause have claimed that Operation Storm was ‘the largest ethnic-cleansing operation that occurred in the whole Yugoslav war’, not only is this false (the Serbian assault on Bosnia in 1992 was an ethnic-cleansing operation far larger in scale), but Croatia’s role in the exodus of at least 150,000 Serb civilians from the so-called ‘Krajina’ region was entirely subordinate and secondary to the Milosevic regime’s own role.

Croatia also had a legal and moral obligation to launch Operation Storm. The Krajina Serb army was engaged in an offensive, from Croatian territory, to conquer the Bihac enclave of the neighbouring state of Bosnia. As we all know, the conquest of Srebrenica involved the genocidal massacre of 8,000 Muslims by Serb forces, out of a Muslim population of about 40,000. The Bosnian government had every reason to fear that, if the assault on Bihac succeeded, the 200,000 Muslim inhabitants of the Bihac pocket would have been subjected to an even larger massacre. Had Croatia not acted to prevent this, it would have become an accomplice to this Serbian act of aggression against Bosnia, perhaps even guilty of failure to prevent genocide under international law.

Operation Storm resulted in the exodus of at least 150,000 Serb civilians. However, for the most part this was not a case of Croatia rounding up the Serb civilians and transporting them out of the territory; it was a planned evacuation carried out by the Krajina Serb leadership itself. I am not doing an Israeli style "they were ordered to flee by their own leaders" bs, unlike the supposed "radio broadcasts" in 1948, the evacuation orders for the Krajina Serbs are well documented.

The other cases you give (Mostar, Lasva Valley and the Karadordevo agreement) were all actions carried out by petty, chauvinistic despot Franjo Tudjman, and should rightfully be condemned. Thankfully, Tudjman's petty imperialism was ignominiously crushed by the Bosnian army.

The Serbs didnt one day wake up in the mid-1990s and decide that Kosovo would look better without ethnic Albanians. The mid-1990s saw a bunch of attacks on Serbian personnel.

Likewise, the Albanians didn't suddenly decide to attack Serbian police for no reason. This only came after the illegal and unconstitutional abrigation of Kosova's autonomy in 1989 by Milosevic, the introduction of neo-aparteid rule and heavy police repression for years afterwards. At least the Kosovars tried several years of peaceful struggle to achieve independence, in the face of Milosevic's violence and repression, before they resorted to armed struggle out of desperation. In this, it resembles the situation in Syria.

In Turkey we have seen Kurdish villages razed to the ground during an equally brutal and over the top reaction to a local insurgency, yet instead of Ankara being bombed, Turkey is welcomed into NATO?!

Turkey has greatly improved its record towards the Kurds in recent years, and has persued a constructive regional policy (as opposed to Greece and Serbia). And besides, the bombing of Serbia came only after Milosevic had already performed two rounds of ethnic cleansing and was attempting to perform a third (the claim that the bombing campaign increased the death toll is only ever made by Greater Serbian nationalists, "anti-imperialists" and their fellow travellers, never by the actual victims themselves).

Like the Chomskyite left is doing currently with Assad, the movement in opposition to the Kosova war in the west marked the scraping of the bottom of the "anti-imperialist" barrel, with its selective opposition to war (it did not oppose Milosevic's against Croatia, Bosnia of Kosova), selective support for national sovereignty (it did not uphold Bosnia's or Kosova's) and selective respect for UN resolutions (it did not support those directed against Milosevic). Milosevic, like Assad – the phoney socialist, phoney anti-imperialist and phoney champion of national sovereignty – both remain an appropriate hero to all those for whom opposition to "Bush and Blair" is so absolute as to override all principles – such as democracy, anti-fascism, human rights, gender equality and national self-determination – that might once have been unquestionable for all politically honourable people.