Kosovo War

[The Duke]

The Kosovo war was based on false statements about what was going on in Kosovo.  There was no genocide, there was a terrorist group called the KLA fighting for an ethnically pure Kosovo and a Serb army trying to keep a breakaway province from eroding their terrirtorial integrity.

The Serbs were guilty of a lot of bad things in Bosnia, but they were right in Kosovo.  We never got over the image of Milosevic as the bad guy and assumed he could do no right because of his atrocious behavior in Bosnia.  But he actually was the good guy here.

Where I disagree with Bono is that we targeted civilians.  Its true that we bombed civlian infrastructure like bridges, but this is also military infrastructure.  It has dual purposes.

The war was also poorly executed, leaving hundreds of thousands of Kosovar refugees (the innocent Kosovars got hurt while the terrorist militias got air cover) running into Macedonia and Albania, destabilizing the whole region unnecessarily.

[David S]

How about if we just stayed out of it? No part of our constitution says we're the world's policeman, and there were no American interests involved.

[Huckleberry Finn]

The Kosovo war was based on false statements about what was going on in Kosovo.  There was no genocide, there was a terrorist group called the KLA fighting for an ethnically pure Kosovo and a Serb army trying to keep a breakaway province from eroding their terrirtorial integrity.

The Serbs were guilty of a lot of bad things in Bosnia, but they were right in Kosovo.  We never got over the image of Milosevic as the bad guy and assumed he could do no right because of his atrocious behavior in Bosnia.  But he actually was the good guy here.

Where I disagree with Bono is that we targeted civilians.  Its true that we bombed civlian infrastructure like bridges, but this is also military infrastructure.  It has dual purposes.

The war was also poorly executed, leaving hundreds of thousands of Kosovar refugees (the innocent Kosovars got hurt while the terrorist militias got air cover) running into Macedonia and Albania, destabilizing the whole region unnecessarily.

No. There WAS the genocide in Kosovo. It would have been much worse without the NATO intervention. What I don't understand is how was Milosevic the bad guy in Bosnia and then suddenly the good guy in Kosovo? He's one big war criminal who should be hanged.

http://www.ess.uwe.ac.uk/Kosovo/Kosovo-Photographs.htm

http://www.ess.uwe.ac.uk/Kosovo/Kosovo-Massacres.htm

A one great effort of the Kosovo war was that it speeded up the collapse of the Milosevic Regime.

[jaichind]

For sure.  I opposed the Kosovo War from the beginning back on 1998 just like I equally opposed the Iraq War from the beginning back in 2003.

[jaichind]

The thing that was funny about the Kosovo War was that during the war we heard about how much the Yugoslav military assets were destroyed in the bombing.  In the end the NATO forces destroyed hundreds of dummy tanks, dummy air fields, dummy airplanes.  By counting the number of Yugoslav tanks and AFV that pulled out of Kosovo after the cease fire, I think only three (count them, three) Yugoslav tanks were destroyed by NATO bombing.
It really reminds me of the whole Vietnam "body count" thing and now the Iraq "hundreds of insurgents killed" line.

[I spent the winter writing songs about getting better]

Milosevic was a bad guy, we can all agree on that. Therefore who cares if some other bad guys interfere with his territory? If some terrorist group in Iraq such as the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) were to try to break away territory from Saddam, would Saddam become the good guy trying to stop them? Milosevic deserved anything bad that happened him.

[WalterMitty]

i respect bill clinton a great deal for doing the right thing in kosovo, even though it wasnt politically popular.

[The Duke]

The was no genocide as such.

The first "cause" of the attack on Serbia was the Racak Massacre.  The Racak Massacre allegedly was where the Serbs shelled a village, wiping out 45 Albanaian civilians.  However, nearly every firsthand account of the incident shows no shelling took place, rather that the Serb police arrived, arrested then shot 25 people hiding in a barn, and 20 more people who tried to flee the scene.  Of the 45 dead Alabanians, 40 were draft age males.  Only two women were killed.  Only two elderly men were killed.  Only one male under military age was killed.  40 of 45 were men of fighting age.  The rest of the village was left unharmed.  Why would the Serbs leave so many live witnesses if they had just committed an act of genocide?  The answer of course, is that there was no genocide.  This was counterinsurgency against KLA holdouts.  Oh, and by the way, ballistics tests prove that the men who were killed in Racak had fired weapons of their own, meaning that they were likely KLA soldiers not unarmed civilians.  There is an AP videotape of this incident, since the Serbs invited the western media to witness the operation.  The video shows no massacre, only an urban gunfight.

It was also alleged that Milosevic ordered the removal of all Albanians from Kosovo.  The facts are that 380 Serbs were put in jail for up to twenty years if they demanded that an Albanian leave Kosovo.  The allegation of the Serbs forcing Kosovars to leave Kosovo in the millions are also wrong.  The reality is that they left after NATO bombing began, and they left not because the Serbs were forcing them out but because they feared for their lives being in an area that could well become the site of a NATO v. Serb (And Russian?) ground war.  How do we know that there was no flight of Kosovar Albanians before NATO bombed the region?  Well, in part because the allegation that Yugoslavia was forcing the Kosovars out came only AFTER the NATO offensive began.  In Clinton's pre-war press conference, he mentioned only Racak as a cause for war, making no mention of the supposedly Serb induced ethnic cleansing that would become the cassus belli, after the fact that is.

Well, at least we toppled Milosevic right?  He was a bad guy anyway.  Wrong.

It was the Russians who stopped the war, not US bombs.  It was the Russians who convinced Milosevic to sign a treaty.  Milosevic was not toppled by the bombing either, he was beaten in an election (Serbia was a democracy, after all) over a year after the bombing ended.  The bombing actually increased Milosevic's popularity temporarily, as he had been increasingly unpopular for his incompetent leadership.

Simply doing nothing would has resulted in no refugee crisis, no soured relations with Russia, no dead Serb civilians and ravaged Serb cities, no expense of billions in US taxpayer dollars, and Milosevic still would have been out of power in October of 2000, beaten by Kostunica in the election.

[Huckleberry Finn]

Racak would have been just a beginning. If NATO hadn't acted determinedly fighting and killing would have widened. West waited three years on Bosnia before the intervention and they didn't want to repeat that mistake again.

Also you should remember that the NATO's peace-keeping operation has calmed KLA and forced Albanians to act more moderate way. Thanks to NATO leaders the war continued only couple of months. Without the intervention it would have lasted years and probably would have been ended by the Western intervention anyway.

Serbia wasn't a democracy. There was the election fraud in October 2000 and Milosevic stepped down only after the huge demonstrations.

[The Duke]

Racak would have been just a beginning. If NATO hadn't acted determinedly fighting and killing would have widened. West waited three years on Bosnia before the intervention and they didn't want to repeat that mistake again.

Also you should remember that the NATO's peace-keeping operation has calmed KLA and forced Albanians to act more moderate way. Thanks to NATO leaders the war continued only couple of months. Without the intervention it would have lasted years and probably would have been ended by the Western intervention anyway.

Serbia wasn't a democracy. There was the election fraud in October 2000 and Milosevic stepped down only after the huge demonstrations.

The election was won outright by Kostunica.  Milosevic wasn't trying to rig the election, he simply refused to accept its outcome.