Here’s a quote. Can you guess who said it? (And no peeking!)
We must give, and have given, this policy with our allies and with the United Nations every opportunity to work. It is evident, however, that the cost in human lives in allowing this policy to continue is too great. In addition, and perhaps more importantly for the United States, we are now in a position of ignoring, as many did in the 1940s, one of the worst crimes committed in history. If we ignore these behaviors, no matter where they occur, our moral fiber as a people becomes weakened. As the Catholic Church and others lost credibility during the Holocaust for not speaking out, so will the United States lose credibility and our people lose confidence in themselves as moral beings if the United States does not take action.
Since it is clearly no longer possible to take action in conjunction with NATO and the United Nations, I have reluctantly concluded that we must take unilateral action.
If you were guessing President Bush, you’re way off.
It was Howard Dean writing to President Clinton about the war in Bosnia.
Now, if it’s a moral imperative for the United States to intervene to end the Bosnian genocide, why is it a moral wrong for the United States to intervene to end the manifestly worse genocide in Iraq? If it’s acceptable to act unilaterally in Bosnia, why not Iraq?
My guess is that it’s only because a Republican is doing it…
1.) There was an active genocide being conducted when he wrote that. Iraq had no such genocide.
2.) There was a risk that other countries, specifically Russia, would enter the troubled areas without any international backing, and place zones under Russian occupational control, which could have been disastrous for our eastern European allies, few of whom were consolidated enough in 1995-1996 to be safe from revolution.
But it’s not like context matters, is it?
Of course not. No genocide here. Nope, not at all, just ignore those mass graves on your way out. Those 300,000+ people (probably closer to a million) all went on vacation.
That would be news to me, since the Russians didn’t have the military strength to cause much trouble in the region, didn’t want to, and in fact helped end the war. There was the worry that the Russians might divide Kosovo, but to suggest that it would cause a revolution in Eastern European countries that were hundreds of miles away is more than a little off. The Balkans are not going to have significant effects on the Baltics…
If you’re referring to Wesley Clark nearly starting World War III at Pristina Airport, thankfully the British had cooler heads and refused to follow orders. This incident is one of the (many) reasons Clark was fired from his post at NATO.
Russian troops *are* in Kosovo, and they are not under the direct command of NATO. They’ve been there since 1999.
We had no presiding interest in going into Kosovo, but we did so anyway without UN approval to end the conflict and protect the Albanians and Muslims.
Considering that 60,000 were killed in Baghdad alone, and that new mass graves are being found in Iraq each day, to suggest that the ethnic cleansing of Bosnian Muslims is somehow more deserving of action than the ethnic cleansing of Shi’ites, Marsh Arabs, Chaldean Christians, and Kurds in Iraq is not a justifiable position to take.
The longer we talk, the littler the words in my vocabulary have to become to make a point with you, Jay.
If you wanted to say that we had a moral imperative to go into Iraq to stop a slaughter, I say you have to go back to 1988 and 1992 to make that case with me, since that was a period of known genocide (as in a systematic attempt to wipe out an ethnic group–in this case the Kurds). We didn’t go in then, and you’re going to tell me that this invasion was about preserving Iraqi lives?
Now, contrast that with Kosovo. We went in and stopped an incident of ethnic cleansing in process, and at the same time helped to secure the borders of our ally Macedonia. Iraq’s neighbors were pretty secure when we had over a quarter-million troops in the region.
And as to the Pristina airport incident–you’re right in surmising that this is the incident I’m alluding to–the fact that we had an incident with Russian troops proves my point exactly. As long as troops not under NATO or US command could enter the region, there was a risk of a clash. The sooner the area was secured, the sooner the fighting would end and the less likely it would be that another power would make a claim for control. Having another power there feeds anarchy, and makes a democratic consolidation that much harder, since a new level of uncertainty would exist in the area, However, an international force, with strict operational guidelines and set precedents for behavior, eliminates some of the risk that would come about from having multiple commands operating in the region. In Kosovo, the faster we got in, the safer we would be, and we could stop a massacre. In Iraq, we went in with such humanitarian luminaries as Islam Karimov backing us up to avenge a decade-past repression and defend our country from the apparently nonexistent weapons that it had never used against us and couldn’t deliver to us itself.
The genocide in Iraq went on after the Persian Gulf War when Hussein systematically attacked the Marsh Arabs and the Kurds, leading to the no-fly zone. 1993 saw many attacks against Shi’ites and other groups in Iraq.
There was ongoing genocide in Iraq right up to the fall of Saddam, and the moral imperative to intercede does not diminish with time. So long as the Hussein regime was in power that imperative existed, and finally the US did what it should have done a long time ago and removed that totalitarian regime.