i agree with you that 9/10 historical precedents have been that. but for completeness, i like to bring up counter examples. Yugoslavia came to mind. if you talked to a “reasonable” republican, they’d probably say kuwait, although i’d place it in totally other category.
Yugoslavia?. Go on.
This could be its own thread, but pretty hard to argue imo that Operation Deliberate Force was not justified, it was opposing an imperialist land-grab being conducted by ethnic cleansing. You could argue that it wasn’t an American-led operation, I guess. The bombing of Yugoslavia during the Kosovo War is a lot more dubious and it would be hard even for supporters to argue it wasn’t an imperial action.
The Serb military commander was literally convicted of genocide at the Hague.
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Holy shit dude. Don’t paste shit like this when you have no idea what you’re talking about. You are in Holocaust denial territory here. Here is the opening to a Jacobin piece advancing a more modern leftist argument that the Bosnian intervention was a bad idea:
Ethnic Serbs feared that Muslim-Croat dominance in Bosnia would undermine their interests, and these fears set the stage for war. When Bosnia officially became independent in April 1992, the Serbs seceded from Bosnia, taking their superior weapons with them, and began forming militias. In a bid to expand their landholdings, Serb forces engaged in mass ethnic cleansing, using killings, rapes, and other crimes to drive out members of competing ethnic groups, especially Muslims.
The Serb military attacked Srebrenica in 1992, but Bosnian government forces and (later) a small United Nations (UN) peacekeeping contingent were protecting the mainly Muslim inhabitants. In July 1995 Serb forces again assaulted Srebrenica. In the interim, the Muslims had removed the main body of their defense forces, and encountering little resistance, Serb forces easily overran the city.
The horrific events that followed are well documented: Serb militias expelled the town’s women and children and rounded up all military-age males, executing some eight thousand people, mostly males over the age of sixteen, over several days.
The Bosnian War entailed numerous massacres and atrocities (most of which were committed by Serb forces), but none approached the scale of Srebrenica — surely the largest mass killing in Europe since the 1940s. According to an investigation of Srebrenica authorized by the Dutch government, “Muslims were slaughtered like beasts.”
Denying that ethnic cleansing was carried out in Bosnia and that the vast majority of its perpetrators were Bosnian Serbs, with the assistance of Serbian militias, is no longer acceptable in polite society. Back in 2001, when your book was written, it was still possible for ya boy to write “just asking questions” shit like this about Srebrenica:
WHERE ARE THE MASS GRAVES??? Media lies!
A list of missing or killed people during the massacre compiled by the Bosnian Federal Commission of Missing Persons contains 8,373 names. As of July 2012, 6,838 genocide victims [of Srebrenica] have been identified through DNA analysis of body parts recovered from mass graves
Oh, there they are I guess.
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I agree. Would make a good thread. Ive split it out.
I think Yugoslavia is fairly instructive. Almost as the exception that proves the rule.
It was mid 90s. The height of pro democracy, end of cold war idealism and the closest we got to a justified war was sending in troops and failing to prevent a genocide…
There were lots of classic realpolitik reasons why a destructive civil war 400 miles from the Italian border was worth intervention and peacekeepers. Those reasons definitely didnt extend to stopping the massacre.
i just meant that US (and nato obv) went in but didn’t aspire to nation-build or colonize.
Yugoslavia took a great price. i believe that was more displaced people in Europe than any time since WW2. and yet the states split and stabilized afterwards.
i saw a documentary on richard holbrooke. just pondering that after ethnic cleansing and nato bombings, what diplomacy achieved was kinda a miracle.
There’s a big asterisk on this too, because in early 1992 (after a referendum declaring Bosnia independent which had been boycotted by ethnic Serbs) an agreement to ethnically partition the country was signed by the leaders of the three factions (Bosniak, Croat, Serb). But the Bosniak Izetbegović, who was an opponent of partition and had only signed under pressure, withdrew his signature after a conversation with US Ambassador Warren Zimmerman. NYT article from 1993:
Immediately after Mr. Izetbegovic returned from Lisbon, Mr. Zimmermann called on him in Sarajevo. The Bosnian leader complained bitterly that the European Community and Bosnian Serbs and Croats had pressured him to accept partition.
“He said he didn’t like it,” Mr. Zimmermann recalled. “I told him, if he didn’t like it, why sign it?”
Although some of the architects of American policy in the region defend their actions, a number of major figures now acknowledge errors.
“Our view was that we might be able to head off a Serbian power grab by internationalizing the problem,” said Warren Zimmermann, who was then the American Ambassador to Yugoslavia. “Our hope was the Serbs would hold off if it was clear Bosnia had the recognition of Western countries. It turned out we were wrong.”
In retrospect, Mr. Zimmermann said in a recent interview, “the Lisbon agreement wasn’t bad at all.”
Whoops! But to be fair, the US position was that ethnically partitioning countries is bad (like, “to solve racial tension in the US, why don’t we just partition it into a Black bit, a Hispanic bit and a white bit?” is not exactly a left-wing proposal) and that partitioning a country rather than respecting the existing borders of the constituent republics of Yugoslavia was going to provide a bad precedent as the Iron Curtain was rolled back, in terms of ethnic insurgencies asserting themselves. Like what has happened in Ukraine in the last few years, for example. Also have to remember that this was taking place in a climate of rising Serb nationalism and wars already being fought by Serbia to try to retain control over Yugoslav territory, so the US may have regarded the plan as an unworkable mess which was more certain, in the long term, to lead to Serbia trying to annex Bosnia in its entirety. Like if you look at the proposed map:
Serb areas in red, and Serbia itself is off to the right. You can see how people might look at that and be like “cmon, they are eventually just going to chomp all that space in between”.
So while they should have given the peace deal a go, my impression is that this was just bad decisionmaking from the US rather than an imperial desire to squeeze every drop of land they could out of Belgrade.
I have no interest in the semantic debate over whether Srebrenica by itself was or wasn’t “genocide”, or even whether Serb actions in the Bosnian War writ large constitute “genocide”, but what you said was that Bosnian Serb forces weren’t conducting “ethnic cleansing”. Which they totally were.
Icecream kid works too, I guess.
What is the point in linking the book when you haven’t read it though, it’s just like “here is a guy who holds a heterodox opinion, I can’t confirm whether it makes any sense, but this guy definitely exists”. OK.
If anyone wants to see the extent to which elements of the left have debased themselves around the “genocide” argument, here’s a Counterpunch interview with Diane Johnstone, a self-described “proud genocide denier”:
Note that denying “genocide” means denying an interpretation, not the facts, whatever they are. There was a massacre of prisoners, whose proportions are disputed. That was a war crime. But it was not genocide. When your victims are military age men and you spare women and children, that cannot be genocide by any sensible definition. The International Criminal Tribunal for Yugoslavia was set up to blame the Serbs for genocide, and they did so by a far-fetched sociological explanation, claiming that because the Bosnian Muslims had a patriarchal society, killing the men would be a sort of genocide in one town. But that is not what people understand by genocide.
The facts, “whatever they are”, are that Bosnian Serb forces drove all the women and children in Srebrenica from the town and then slaughtered every man or boy aged 16 or over. The argument “well is it really genocide if you just kill the breadwinners and then drive women off their lands? I mean you’re not KILLING the women” is, uh, missing the point a little bit, I feel.
I haven’t used “genocide” myself, it was in a quote I used from Wikipedia because it’s the accepted word for what happened. As I said, ethnic cleansing happened. Legalistic debate over whether this technically constituted “genocide” or not IDGAF about.
This is just noise and goalpost-moving to distract from the fact that you accidentally posted a 20 year old book containing totally indefensible takes, in light of the later trials and proceedings unearthing the truth of what took place. You can instead just be like “whoops guess I fucked up posting that book” and read the Jacobin piece I linked, which lays out the more modern leftist position.
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Who’s the bigger edgelord? NotBruce or Vict0ar?
Victor telling people to read a book he hasn’t and learning while posting is some look.
Genocide has an actual definition and meaning. Pretending that word means something else is just trolling or childish stupidity.
Dude. What are you doing?
Why not say “ethnic cleansing is a loaded term intended to draw a false moral distinction between types of civilian deaths”? Not many would disageee.
Or even “no matter the claim. The war in Yugoslavia wasnt justified” and we could have a good debate.
Why lead with “there was no ethnic cleansing” ? And why double down on it?
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Obviously not. They don’t give out a Nobel prize for attempted chemistry either.
Not that I know much here, but I’ve been reading stuff on it for a couple hours and this seems like a good take. Operation Deliberate Force was a UN led mission and it killed 27 Serbian civilians. The NATO bombing of Kosovo (a few years later) was rejected by the UN, but NATO went ahead anyway and it may have killed a couple thousand civilians.
(I looked to check out the Parenti book, but it’s not in the LA County Library system.)
The Swedish intervention in the 30 year war was justified imo.
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Every war against that upstart Napoleon was obviously justified.
Allow me to indulge myself and use the fallacious argument known as argumentum ab auctoritate.
To which Sanders replied: “When President Clinton said, ‘let’s stop ethnic cleansing in Kosovo,’ I voted for that. I voted to make sure that Osama bin Laden was held accountable in Afghanistan. When our country is threatened, or when our allies are threatened, I believe that we need coalitions to come together to address the major crises of this country. I do not support the United States getting involved in unilateral action.”
can you at least be consistent within this thread?
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