targetting a regime which had already committed one genocide and gotten away with it, NATO was awfully handy

Here we go again :(

Can you please substantiate your allegation that there was genocide committed by the elected government of rump Yugoslavia against Muslim Bosnians?

That's the official line pushed by Bill Clinton, Tony Blair, Wessley Clark, Madeleine Albright and all the other Western heroes that most on ET would like to send to the Hague.

It's the official line pushed by CNN, the NYT the BBC, ...  the very same MSM that ET-ers love to hate.

Besides, from a factual perspective may I remind you that on 26 February 2007 the ICJ ruled that THERE WAS NO GENOCIDE in Bosnia. It was a civil war in which all ethnic sides suffered casualties.

Kosovo as a low-level counter-insurgency prior to NATO getting involved. Not an ethnic cleansing or genocide at all. In fact, one of the worst massacres (at Racak) was recently uncovered as a fraud when the head of the UN Forensics Team, Helen Ranta, came clean.

You can't start a war with someone for something they did five years prior.

The Serbs were involved in a crackdown on the KLA. In this fighting, the KLA had killed Serb civilians and the Serbs had killed Kosovo Albanians. About 1,000-1,500 had been killed in equal numbers in the years leading up to the first dropping of NATO bombs.

The American team negotiating the terms of peace was horrid. Jamie Rubin, Wesley Clark, Madeliene Albright, all had a peace agreement at Rambouillet. The Serbs agreed to total withdrawal. The KLA, Hasim Thaci, did not go along, and the Americans were forced to create a sham of an agreement (Appendix B) which everyone knew was a no-go for the Serbs. They had peace at Rambouillet, and the Americans chose war instead. It was a cowardly choice which mimicked what had been done in Bosnia in 1991-1992 when Cyrus Vance and David Owen had the three leaders agree to a plan that, in the end, looked very much like Dayton. This was BEFORE 100,000 had died in Bosnia.

The ethnic cleansing campaign by the Serbs post-bombing became a matter of controversy when it was revealed that the publicized campaign, Operation Horseshoe, was concocted by German intelligence as propaganda.

The whole war was a farce from start to finish, playing games with people's lives, and in the end accomplishing absolutely nothing.

When the true history of 1990s ex-Yugo is written, it will only be seen as a colossal debacle of diplomacy, and a cowardly war conducted by ALL sides against innocent civilians.

Then there's the fact that various Western(TM) powers were arming the KLA. And that Milosevic's proposals for a resolution that would have granted some measure of autonomy to Kosova without compromising Yugoslavian territorial integrity (such as it was and what remained of it at the time...).

For that matter, if intervention was necessary, it should have been possible to get Russian approval by granting them concessions elsewhere - they had a laundry list of legitimate grievances with The West(TM) at the time (and still have, although it's gotten markedly shorter since Putin started pruning back some of Yeltsin's most obvious mistakes).

So I don't entirely buy the notion that it was Very Urgently Necessary to intervene over the head of the lawful UN bureaucracy.

And as for the CNN's war... the CNN publishes precisely what it's told to publish. Independent and investigative reporting isn't a part of the CNN concept. Nor, for that matter, is basic fact-checking.

- Jake

Friends come and go. Enemies accumulate.

The KLA was armed to the teeth in 1999 (by Germany and the US) and had NATO air support. Just how many Serb troops would be required to expulse 800 000 people from their homes (while at the same time engaging in a systematic campaign of rape and torture of Albanian girls - young and old...). I say Serb troops because their heavy weapons were out of commission given the NATO air campaign.

Any military experts willing to give estimates?