And beyond that position being absurd, it doesn’t even contradict what goofy said about capital-serving or cynical explanation. The authors point is that the real reason was Europe trending towards freedom and not murdering people based on ethnicities, and casts doubt on the west actually caring about Albanians. That isn’t exactly self-serving capital interest micro.
i haven’t read the full foreword, but i did read your excerpt. i think it’s plausible that if milosevic was causing conflict in the balkans, it was obviously more expensive (for the lack of a better word) for nato members in the region to sit back and watch it engulf more of yugoslavia and possibly spill to other countries. a crumbling soviet bloc caused millions to be displaced and such catastrophes continue to be make matters worse in all of europe.
so, let’s say that stopping genocide wasn’t the primary or even the long-term reason for nato frustration and involvement, but that’s kind of not the point, right? that one time that purely self-absorbed west’s actions coincided with stopping a genocide is still maybe good?
not to mention that ultimately resolution to yugoslavian crisis was not a capitulation of anyone’s army, but rather a diplomatic effort (read just about anything on Holbroke), followed by a very thorough ICC process that did bring milosevic and others to justice.
I’m seeing some"The Confederacy seceded over states rights" energy ITT.
Like, ok, NATO didn’t intervene directly out of concern over the plight of Kosovar Albanians but the reasoning for the intervention was related directly to the behavior of Milosevic that inevitably led to such crises.
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it’s too late. microbet will be back in three months. maybe
I suppose one could say that one concern with Kosovo was not the people who were killed by genocide but the people who survived and became refugees, putting pressure on the region.
The West can live with Putin slicing off Donbas because that leaves a Ukraine for all the current refugees to return to. The war becomes more problematic if it goes on for a long time or if Russia engulfs all of Ukraine, leaving all of those refugees homeless.
Please stop with these type of pedantic belittling posts. If you want to argue with the point being made - feel free. But don’t try to declare that somehow a fairly senior official in the state department is a nobody because people haven’t heard of him (I doubt most of us could name a person in state other than Blinken but that doesn’t mean we can just dismiss the rest of them as nobodies).
Microbet offered a valid point of view from someone who likely had direct knowledge of the situation - if you want to rebut it go ahead, but please make more substantive posts if you’re going to do it.
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JonnyA for mod.
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Director of communications isn’t really a senior role. It’s the title held by Mike McClintock on Veep, or Sean Spicer and Anthony Scarramucci in real life.
To clarify, he was communications director for the deputy secretary of state, not the secretary of state. So even further down.
Fair enough - I guess we can debate what constitutes a senior (hence my qualification with fairly). I guess I’d still view the communication director as someone who should have first hand knowledge of the situation, even if they weren’t involved in the decision making process and thus not a person who should just be dismissed out of hand.
Not trying to derail - but I would consider Pasaki a senior WH official.
The White House communications director is Kate Bedingfield.
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Koch Industries, the conglomerate run by right-wing billionaire Charles Koch, has numerous ongoing business operations in Russia. Since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Koch Industries has given no indications that those business operations have been suspended. On the contrary, the limited public comments made by Koch subsidiaries operating in Russia indicate that their business activities have continued.
Because liberty.
There’s no pedantry here. The point made by the author isn’t applicable to the post it responded to, it doesn’t make sense on its own, and is made by someone who maybe had direct knowledge of the situation. It was exactly the type of thing you’d say if you googled a contrarian position to take and then found something vaguely contrarian, then pushing it hard anyways as making some sort of deep point even though it clearly didn’t apply to the discussion.
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That passage is interpreted by some as saying that NATO intervened because Milosevic would not get in line with neoliberal economic “reforms” of the time. I didn’t really think that was hard to figure out.
On the other hand, the people who say that have been accused of misinterpreting or selectively citing only part of that passage.
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I’m shocked
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It’s not a senior role, but he could easily have extensive first hand knowledge of the matter. Like if Mike McClintock were to have written a book about Meyer’s diplomacy with China and Tibet, that would probably be worth paying attention to.
Like her song Unwritten. Catchy little ditty.
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