The primary criticism of the Kosovo operation is that, having failed to get UN approval, we went "forum shopping" and ended up getting NATO approval instead. But if we can do that for Kosovo, what's to stop any future invasion that we feel like undertaking?

Well, NATO's to stop us. Leaving aside Yglesias' argument, NATO would likely not have approved the IRAQ misadventure. Also, in terms of forum shopping, there's a difference between NATO approving action in Europe (Kosovo) and NATO approving action in Asia (Iraq, which they almost certainly wouldn't have done).

Big, big difference: We didn't commit ground troops in Kosovo. That was almost strictly an air war. I think you definitely have to take into account the strategy of the operation.

What is this pervasive idiocy that intellectuals pursue, wherein they feel they must first adopt a titled position, then try to figure out how the real world fits into their egghead view?

All conflicts are inherently one-offs. They're not sterile or reasoned or belonging to any category except, perhaps, long after the fact. Anybody who cracks open a book in order to figure out how to deal with a real-world crisis is not simply an academic, he's a fool. Yglesias could do with some time on the ground in Iraq.

I think the discussion has merit even though it doesn't fit into our 'candidates should make a choice and stick with it' formula of political discourse.

Look it is valuable, very valuable, to the U.S. to look very with real suspicion on any action that does not have the support of the UN.

However it should not be the be all and end all.
Unfortunatly in the binary world of politics today, that view is not tenable. The former point is used for a type of isolationism and UN gridlock the latter to ignore the worlds concerns.

Personally I have taken, on this and many other subjects, to aurguing to my representatives whatever view is in decline.

It is an unfortunate world we live in which these discusions cannot be viewed through adult eyes and become only fodder for one side or the other.

The fact that there are five countries that have a veto in the Security Council means that it might sometimes be necessary for a broad coalition of countries to bypass the UN. But that step should be reserved for extreme cases. Maybe Kosovo was such a case, in the sense that something had to be done.

However, if the proposed Rambouillet Agreement hadn't been so blatantly one-sided, it might have been possible to protect the Albanian Kosovars without resort to war. The proposal actually demanded that Serbia accept the billeting of NATO troops anywhere in Yugoslavia! It was basically a demand that the Serbs surrender to the military occupation of the whole country, or be bombed.

I'm not normally one to agree with Kissinger, but he correctly said "The Rambouillet text, which called on Serbia to admit NATO troops throughout Yugoslavia, was a provocation, an excuse to start bombing. Rambouillet is not a document that an angelic Serb could have accepted. It was a terrible diplomatic document that should never have been presented in that form".

Exactly right. Allowing Russia or China to dictate policy will usually mean a terrible policy. That means that condemning a policy as bad, illegal, or immoral on the grounds that Russia and/or China alone vetoed in the UN security council is generally likely to be a horrifically bad and immoral position to take. That's very different from saying that anything goes as long as, say, there is signoff (without popular support at that) from a few cherry-picked governments and back-pocket allies like England, Spain, Italy, Poland and Australia.

I'm not sure any rigid decision tree protects you if you elect an idiot. And if you elect a decent president who's competent and cares about the nation and the world I'm not sure you want to spell out such simplified constraints.

That said I think the next President will be too hog-tied by our economy and the Bush legacy to really do much for peace and human rights in the world.

To be honest, I'm not opposed to completely unilateral action...IF there's a REALLY REALLY REALLY good reason and the costs of acting unilaterally are worth it. I think the world is too complicated for there ever to be some simple rule to govern all foreign policy situations, unless that rule is "Don't be stupid" or "Don't be an asshole".

We need leaders with common sense, wisdom, transparent decision-making, and good intentions. We certainly have a dearth of those in our current White House.

I understand that making Kevin, Matt, and all Americans happy is very important and is indeed the main goal of American policy, but you can't seriously expect other countries to agree to a rule that says the United States can do anything it wants if it gets some pre-existing organization, any organization, to sign off first. So this proposed rule will always be illegal, if by international law you refer to rules that other countries have agreed to. Now if international law just means rules that Kevin and Matt agreed to, it's much easier.

I don't think obeying international law should be America's number one foreign policy goal. I think building and strengthening international law should be America's number one foreign policy goal, and that obeying the law is valuable insofar as obeying it strengthens it. Building a better world government that could enforce international law more consistently than the current UN is another way to strengthen the law. It's at least arguable that the Kosovo intervention helped to strengthen international law, whereas the Iraq intervention weakened international law. But I doubt it. Bad cases make bad law.

I pretty much agree completely with your analysis Kevin. The one thing that stuck in my craw then (and I thought we did indeed need to take action in Kosovo) and still does to some extent, is that the NATO authorization was fine cover and all that, but said authorization was not particularly within the parameters of their charter at the time. Good cover, but some question as to whether it was legal cover.

Serb nationalists engaged in the war typically upheld two contradictory theses: that they themselves were innocent victims of Croats, Albanians, Bosnian Muslims, et al., and that all sides were guilty and no one innocent! Since they never uttered these sentences sequentially, the blatant absurdity of this belief system was never, as far as I am aware, exposed by the media of any nation. Even the demonization of Germany for its alleged responsibility in plotting the dismantlement of socialist Yugoslavia and for its alleged culpability in starting the war in the first place through its advocacy of the recognition of Slovenia and Croatia (after the outbreak of hostilities) played a useful role in Serbian war propaganda. As Voltaire later Serbian claim that the tensions between Croats and Croatian Serbs began only after the election of Franjo Tudjman to the Croatian presidency is therefore contrary to fact. once said, �Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities.�
We know that the process of moral disengagement was still far from complete at
the time the war broke out (it was, in fact, never complete as such), because many of the JNA soldiers expressed confusion as to why they were suddenly fighting their fellow �Yugoslavs�, while many others went AWOL, even fleeing the country, rather than serve in the subsequent war against the Zagreb government. But several processes contributed to further stilling the stirrings of the Super-Ego.
First, as the violence continued, it became part of the daily routine, it became unsurprising and many people ceased to be as shocked and outraged as they were when the fighting first broke out.
Second, the role of some of the hierarchy of the Serbian Orthodox Church in sanctioning the violence first in Croatia and later in Bosnia-Herzegovina made a significant contribution toward moral desensitization. After all, if some of the official guardians of spirituality and morality have no qualms about supporting the war, why should ordinary Serbs worry about it? Moreover, insofar as the Church placed itself, thus, in alliance first with the Milo�evi regime and then with Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karad�i�, the classic syndrome of the agentic state came into play. Experiments conducted by S. Milgram more than 30 years ago demonstrated that the desire of individuals to obey and please authorities is often sufficient to override moral reservations, even in the absence of any feelings of having been victimized by those on whom the experimental subject was prepared to inflict harm.
In the agentic state, individuals do not abandon their moral principles. Rather, they engage in moral rationalization, thereby convincing themselves that their actions are, in spite of appearances to the contrary, consistent with their core moral standards.
Other processes used to dull the moral sense include(d) the use of euphemistic
language (in which mass murder and the forcible expulsion of non-Serbs were
prettified by the term �ethnic cleansing�), advantageous comparison (in which
Muslims and Croats were said to have behaved far worse than the Serbs: for example, Patriarch Pavle joined Karad�i� in claiming that there had been no rape camps operated by Serbs and no systematic rapes carried out by Serbs, even while accusing Croats and Muslims of having done precisely those things), diffusion or displacement of responsibility, and instances of blaming the victim. The last mentioned tactic was employed not only in the obvious sense of claiming that, for example, Tudjman�s firing of Serbs from positions in the police justified an insurrection against Zagreb, but also in the more brazen sense of actually blaming the victims for the atrocities which they suffered. Thus, in Serbian propaganda, it was the Croats themselves who had rocketed Tudjman�s presidential palace in 1991, it was the Croats themselves who had laid siege to the port city of Dubrovnik and were shelling the Croatian seaside town of �ibenik, it was the Muslims themselves who had fired upon their own co-ethnics in the Pirkala marketplace in 1994, and it was the Muslims themselves who had carried out the massacre at Srebrenica with the help of German and American operatives.
The Serbs even had an explanation for the alleged, consistent idiocy of
their antagonists: they did these things in order to make the Serbs look bad.
These various methods of moral rationalization and disengagement had some
unintended side-effects.
The first was that the habituation to violence led to an
escalation of violence within the family, with husbands beating wives and fathers
beating children.
Second, moral disengagement made it impossible to return to
the behaviors and patterns of the pre-war days. As Jo-Ann Tsang explains, in an
article published in the Review of General Psychology, ��the commission of immoral behavior makes it more costly [in terms of self-image] to act morally in the future, increasing the likelihood of further evil.�
After all, to take pride in subscribing to an ethic of, let us say, non-violence, is virtually impossible for someone who has established a persona based on killing large numbers of �enemies of the nation.�

Why do we worry about such issues? I am told that if we just had more women in charge, we would only have sweet smelling peace. All of this is the fault of men.

My desire is simply for the United States of America to stop acting as judge, jury, and executioner in world affairs, and somehow find a way to restrain others from filling the vacuum. Evey country on the planet deserves the right to self-determination. If they request help, that's fine, but the UN should be the place they go to seek help.

I understand that sounds like a recipe for one-world government to many, but let's face it - the current system cannot endure. The current system is only going to collapse further as the oil spigots run dry. It's either one-world government or a return to feudalism in the long run, and a question of how many millions will have to die before we reach our destination.

Kosovo certainly can be distinguished on the grounds that NATO can police its backyard. Though if that is true, then it seems to me that we have no ground to object to, say, the Commonwealth of Independent States authorizing a Russian police action in Eastern Europe or the Caucusus.

Alternatively, we can simply say that Kosovo may have been a good result, but it wasn't worth the cost of providing an argument for the Iraq War. Really, I don't see why liberals have to be so invested in Kosovo. It may have been a good thing to do, but in the scheme of things, it had nothing to do with American interests.

Finally, Matt's absolutely right-- and Kevin doesn't refute-- that the Kosovo experience did influence the Iraq debate in a very negative manner.

One does always wonder if those who insist the UN must have the final word are also prepared to abide by the (non-binding) general assembly resolution to create the Israeli and Palestinian states. Just askin'.

One likewise wonders if the international community is ready for these responsibilities after the Hague's grotesque incompetence in prosecuting Milosevic and in failing even to make a finding of genocide--a result that was overwhelmingly worse than if no case had been brought at all, and doubly perverse in being held in the very state that had such culpability in the massacre at Srebrenica.

Laws are not always justly written, or justly enforced. Generally within a given country the benefits of having rule of law do outweigh the occasional bad-apple laws and precedents. It's not at all obvious that this is so at the international level, at least not without certain kinds of consensus being reached first (such as, say, that torture, genocide and prisoner organ-harvesting are bad things.)

Are these bodies (one where Putin or Bush has an absolute veto) really ready to be called arbiters of a "rule of law"?

Case-by-case on the merits gets my vote.

Bingo. This is why legalisms are stupid in the context of international relations.

Of course, it's always 10,000 times worse to fight a war you can't win than to not fight a war you could have won. So, all other things being equal, I'd rather have my government err on the side of not invading.

Of course, elect a Democrat and you don't have to make that kind of choice. We do tend to win our wars (except those run by Texans, which are always an exception).

Really, I don't see why liberals have to be so invested in Kosovo.

Hmm. Maybe because it very likely saved hundreds of thousands of people from being raped and murdered and even more from becoming ethnically cleansed refugees.

If the quoted attitude is what they call internationalism, count me out.

But if you're somewhere in between — neither a believer in sanctifying the UN as the sole arbiter of international action nor a believer that unfettered unilateralism is good for America — then you'll look for some middle course.

The powers of rationalization are strong in this one, Obi Wan Kenobi.

Kevin, do you really not realize how this post paints you as an elitist who has nothing better to worry about? Kosovo, factions in Iraq... tens of millions of Americans can't even afford health insurance, have no access to the health care system, have no retirement funds. We don't all have a nice house in Orange County. Who are you writing for, exactly -- just to impress your superiors in DC? That's how it appears.

Lately your posts have less and less connection to the real world. The average American doesn't care at all about Iraq, let alone Kosovo. Wise up and try to get with the zeitgeist.

Actually, the average American might have a friend or loved one who's in Iraq. Might wonder how their grandchildren are going to pay for Iraq. Might wonder why we can pay for Iraq but not for health insurance for American children. So it might be very important for them to understand what went into deciding to intervene in Iraq. It would, incidentally, also be useful if they understood that Iraq wasn't responsible for 9/11, which scads of them don't. Could even be useful to them to know that 99% of them have zero chance of ever being affected in the slightest way by a terrorist bomb, so they might wonder why we have to spend all this money on security in Wyoming and give up all protections against wiretap and search and seizure, but we're still not checking containers at our ports.

You know, things like that might be useful for them to ponder.

Also, since hundreds of thousands are right now being murdered in Darfur, they might wonder whether the next president should try to get something done about it.

Wait, I forgot - China has interests in Darfur so they'll veto any Security Council resolution that tries to meddle in their internal affairs. Guess it's probably illegal to try to help those hundreds of thousands of genocide victims. Oh well. Have to obey international law or it's all darkness.

The difference in Kosovo was the apparent imminence of genocide (like Bosnia and Rwanda). Taking action was the equivalent of defense of a third party against violence in the criminal law.

If you shoot someone about to kill another person, you have a valid defense. If you shoot someone because you think he might kill someone because he has killed people in the past, it is not a valid defense.

Kosovo can't stand alone, it has to be part of the whole Yugoslavian conflagration of the 1990s. NATO/the UN was ineffective at stopping genocide and war for about 4 years (leading to Srebrenica and its massacare). Finally, some NATO bombs started dropping, and we got a peace deal (flawed, but still resulting in peace).
A few years later, Serbia under Milosovic starts again, but this time with Kosovo (which does have an armed insurrectionist element in the KLA). Having already bombed once in Bosnia, it was easier to bomb again. NATO decided it wasn't going to let things go to pieces in its backyard again.
Practically all of Europe was on board to prevent acts of ethnic cleansing (a "mild" form of genocide, brutal and evil, but not the Holocaust or Armenian genocide). Lots of talk of ground troops, but it was only arial bombardment with limited aims (stop the cleansing), with full support of the states of Europe. A limited, action to prevent further humanitarain suffering of the (ethnic albanian) Kosovars.

Iraq...support of no neighboring states (expect Kuwait, which has a bit of a grudge). No international approval, either from NATO, the UN, or any Middle Eastern organization. No active acts of genocide (mild or otherwise) currently ongoing. The goal: revolutionary transformation of an autocratic society by destroying and disenfranchising the elite of the country (Ba'ath Party). Only a "coalition of the willing." No peace or stabalization plan after our foreign imposed revolution (people want to be free, so I'm sure it will all work out with candy and flowers). One of the main justifications for war (WMD) based on fabrications/refusal to believe the weapons inspectors.

Pretty clearly, the buildup to the two conflicts differ massively. So you can still favor a muscular international intervention (be it with NATO, the UN, or some other body) if
1- the neighbors, who have to deal with refugees and blowback, are generally for it
2- The regime you oppose is engaged in large scale military action against its minority factions of its own people (like Kosovo or Darfur)
3- You are trying to fulfill your duties as a signatory to the UN Charter to stop genocide
4- You have international support and are prepared for stabilization operations.

Kosovo had all those things (hell, we even had Russian peacekeepers). Iraq had none. For any intervention or war, all circumstances will be different. But generally, stopping ongoing ethnic cleansing/genocide = good. Revolutionary wars of choice launched to remake an entire society in a foreign land that has a longstanding religious principle of expelling foreigners = bad idea.

Don't have to be against all wars, just dumb wars...

Almost no country chooses offensive military action against a stronger foe. The US attacked Serbia and Iraq because they were too weak to defend themselves against our overwhelming power. The US did not defend Czekoslovakia in 1968 because its adversary was too strong. The US occupied Vietnam because it could do so without starting a war with either the USSR or China.

When attacked, almost all countries attempt to defend themselves, regardless of how weak they might be or how futile resistance will be.

The only reason Americans ponder questions about when to use non-defensive military action is because we maintain the largest military in the world. I may think the US should have used that power to prevent the slaughter of the Bosnians and others think the US should use that power to save the people of Darfur, but only because we already have a powerful arsenal available to so and have been raised with an attitude that America can use its military power for good.

The US rarely has used its military power for good, though. It did not use it to save the Bosnians and will not to save the Darfurians. It should not have occupied Vietnam and it should not have invaded Iraq. Since the US has virtually no possible invaders to defend against, its huge military is maintained strictly for the purpose of offensive military action, not for non-defensive military action, whenever the political or economic gain warrants its use by the powers that have usurped our representative democracy.

The world does need to find a way to protect Bosnians, Darfurians, Kurds, African Americans (pre-Civil Rights era), etc. from the murderous discrimination of their native countries. The US has done a terrible job in that role and cannot be expected to ever do it any better than it already has. The power of the UN, like our own representative democracy, has been usurped to serve the interests of the strong over the weak. If the UN is ever going to become a world political body capable of protecting all oppressed peoples, it must first eliminate the military power, veto power, and permanency of the permanent members of the Security Council, and especially of the US, Russia and China. I do not think it will happen, which is why I think all other countries should resign from the UN and form a new world union without the US, Russia and China to create a better way to use non-defensive military power to protect the weak.

I think this is an excellent post, but fails to offer the concrete organization when it comes to the U.S. that must be satisfied if military action without an attack on the U.S. or others is to be justified.

That organization is NATO. Kosovo was an easier case than Africa, as Kosovo is in NATO's member state's backyard. But NATO is still the best concrete alliance/roadblock to insanity that exists. The fact that NATO allies were with us in Kosovo, and against us (politically speaking, of course) in Iraq should have given the U.S. (its government, its people) a lot more pause.

When your military allies are unconvinced of the military agenda, it is a good time to stop and think, REALLY HARD, about what you are about to do. The fact that the U.S. CAN do whatever it wants (while other NATO nations basically would have to abandon any plans of their own to invade a country without U.S. support) is, in my opinion, a strong argument for the U.S. to at least "artificially" allow itself to be constrained by it fundamental military allies.

I think Kosovo and Iraq provide a very pointed commentary on why we need to listen to the governments of NATO. They certainly, at this point, have a much greater track record communally than the U.S. does unilaterally.

And one last point. When trauma (suck as 9/11) strikes, it is abundantly clear that the U.S. is unable to keep its wits (unlike Britain after the July attacks). Remember Freedom Fries, remember the disdain of the French, remember our hatred of Spain for their elections post-train-bombings? We surround ourselves with allies to help us make sense and operate rationally. This does not work when we decide that we only get to offer advice, not listen to it. It is simply daft for anyone patriotic and smart to think that the U.S., by itself, is capable of thinking and doing what is good and right in all circumstances. We have proven our inability to do so over, and over, and over.

NATO should be treated more like a family and less as a zone of U.S. influence that can be discarded when we feel like it.

At the time we intervened in Kosovo, the situation that existed was actually similar to the situation in Iraq in one respect. There were an estimated 200,000 IDPs in Kosovo, and another estimated 135,000 who had sought refuge in other countries. In terms of percentage of population, roughly equal to the current refugee situation in Iraq. The big difference, of course, is that the current situation in Iraq is a direct result of our intervention and the situation in Kosovo was the impetus for our intervention.

So, what does it all mean? How about this simple rule; less than full UN approval is OK if there is a clear humanitarian crisis unfolding.

By that rule Iraq was not justifiable in 2003, but was in 1991 when Bush I encouraged Iraqis to rise up against Saddam, but left the Shia to hang out to dry. If Poppy had decided to intervene instead of sitting back and watching Saddam slaughter hundreds of thousands of people, I would have, reluctantly, supported that. Illegal and, in certain respects, immoral, but less so than the alternative...which is what we were left with.

Support multilateral, but not full UN, intervention in Sudan? Sure, why wait for the UN when you know that China will nix any serious action. We should have intervened in Rwanda and Burundi.

To put it simply, we intervene to avert complex humanitarian disasters that we know are in the process of happening, but not suspected crimes that might happen some time in the future, or to avenge humanitarian crimes that are over a decade in the past. Can we all live with that?

Following up on Abject Funk's point, there's a legal argument as well as a common-sense one to be made.

Thomas Franck, a highly regarded international law scholar, has suggested that the Kosovo intervention provides a different model for international military action - a reputable multilateral institution (NATO) acted in the absence of direct UN approval, but that approval was later implicitly granted by Security Council authorization of existing forces in the region and a peace settlement.

Kosovo is rightly considered "legitimate" and the NATO involvement is the core element. If all the developed democracies in the world can decide it's time to go kick ass together to right an international wrong, that is a pretty reasonable bar for action. More reasonable, to me, than one that permits a veto from either one of two thuggish authoritarian regimes - Russia and China.

I can't believe nobody has addressed the much more important problem with the Kosovo campaign: Clinton didn't even have authorization from Congress. He started an undeclared war against a nation that was not a security threat. Seriously, fuck the UN, fuck NATO - if the president can't even be constrained by our own government, for the purposes of formulating US foreign policy over the next 4+ years it doesn't really matter whether trans-national institutions sign off on anything we do. We cannot (and absolutely should not) rely on the UN to put a lid on the Imperial Presidency.

(Aside from that, I'm increasingly inclined to believe that any military action that we feel compelled to seek international approval for is almost certainly something we simply shouldn't be involved in. If it's truly self-defense, we don't need anyone's permission. If it isn't self-defense, well, sorry, but I think it's time we took a break from invading other nations and cut the DoD's budget down to something less insane.)

Hmm. Maybe because it very likely saved hundreds of thousands of people from being raped and murdered and even more from becoming ethnically cleansed refugees.

Just like in Darfur, and Rawanda, and Cambodia, and many other places.

We have enough to worry about protecting our interests. If you can get a UN mandate for humanitarian missions, fine, but I see no reason to upturn the international system and make the world riskier over something that doesn't affect our interests.

We have enough to worry about protecting our interests.

I think there's a plausible, but deeply wrong, right-wing argument to be made for this kind of isolationism. Pre-neocon, that was a time-honored approach of the far-right.

But there is no progressive politics that can support this view. Progressive politics that puts Americans wholly above other human beings is oxymoronic.

We are among the wealthiest people in the world, and we are doing the greatest consumption-driven damage to the world. Just sitting still we have much to answer for, and no particular right to any of the prerogatives we enjoy. We are the last people in the world any progressive should be worried about, and we have the resources to help enormous numbers of people who are less well off. We can't ask Americans to think only of others, and in relative terms (such as income inequality) there are plenty of injustices at home, but to suggest we should withdraw entirely into our own selfish concerns should be anathema to anyone remotely left of center.

It never ceases to amaze me how certain isolationist-pacifist splinters of the "left" have convinced themselves that the model foreign policy was that of Kissinger, a war criminal (that's one of the splinters that tends to make this kind of argument).

It's also wrong on its merits. If we did more, and something close to our fair share, to help the third world, this would do much to further our self-interest as well. Pushing international organizations to oppose or stop the most egregious human rights violations is only one small part of the spectrum of such actions--but it's absolutely vital. The other kinds of aid can begin to flow only when genocidal regimes have been dealt with and the killing stopped. We can't save everyone, but most of the people in Rwanda were killed with machetes! To say that the West could not have stopped it, or had no responsibility to do so, is a desperately sick lie. To say it would have been wrong to do so, from a left point of view, is simply psychotic.

Yes, it obviously would've been good to do something to stop Rwandan genocide, whether the UN went along or no.
It seems like, as a general rule, we should try to strengthen international law. However, international law has survived a lot of flouting of it by the major powers in the past, and if the price of (potentially) millions of lives is to ignore international law one more time, I am willing to pay it.
Of course, if we could get approval from NATO, all the better.
Then again, if China gets the support of some 'multilateral' organization-perhaps consisting of Russia, and a few other intimidated Central and Southeast Asian countries-what is to stop them from intervening somewhere according to the 'NATO approval is sufficient' model of international law?

Speaking in terms of international support, there was much more for Kosovo than for Iraq, despite Bush's blather about the "coalition of the willing".

Nor were the aims of the U.S. and NATO in Kosovo nearly as pie-in-the-sky as Bush's (and the neo-cons) in Iraq.

The international system can survive events like Kosovo, just as it could if say the African Union decided to intervene in Zimbabwe without U.N. backing should a civil war break out there. But Iraq really was a terrible blow to the international regime that came to be after WWII, because now wars for fun and profit are back on the table.

Kevin, you just summed up the thinking of a majority of the democratic party, including our two presidential candidates.

Russia stood in the way of UN blessings, but it was just to save face and avoid political difficulties for Russia's leadership.

Kosovo was a good cause. It's terrible for the world to stand by and allow mass murder. There was widespread de facto consensus for U.S. action.

If you read the contemporaneous speeches given by John Kerry and Hillary Clinton as they voted for the Iraq AUMF, you will see the identical points that Kevin makes here. They favored no military action prior to UN inspectors finishing their job and reaching a consensus that allegations regarding WMD were true. The difference was that there was no de facto consensus among the international community that there was a real WMD threat.

President Clinton forged ahead with broad international support except for silence on the part of Russia.

President Bush forged ahead in despite the lack of the lack of international support and despite the outright objections of some of our closest allies.

But there is no progressive politics that can support this view. Progressive politics that puts Americans wholly above other human beings is oxymoronic.

I think you miss the point about realism (not isolationism, thank you). First, all foreign policy has to put our interests above others'. Or do you advocate that if we could save 400,000 Darfuris by killing 399,000 Americans, it would be worth it and we should do it?

Second, it isn't that I don't think saving Kosovar Albanians was worthwhile. But you have a combination of the fact that (1) the US and the rest of the world benefits from clear limitations on the right to use non-UN authorized force; and (2) the US pays the costs of being the world's policeman (including terrorist blowback). So, bombing Kosovo saved Kosovar Albanians at a tremendous long-term cost which we are paying now, including the war in Iraq (which has killed perhaps as many Iraqis as the number of Albanians we saved in Kosovo), rules which may result in additional aggression in the future, and the increase in anti-American terrorism that results from us being targeted as the world's policeman.

Finally, not every humanitarian mission goes as well as Kosovo did. You could have more Somalias (and Iraqs) instead of more Kosovos in the future.

It isn't that the lives of those Kosovar Albanians aren't important. It's that we can't afford to throw out the rules for them.

How can there be a relevant discussion of US intervention in Kosovo when the entire basis for that discussion is misinformation.

Read: http://commentisfree.guardian.co.uk/robert_skidelsky/2008/04/the_kosovo_effect

There was not mass murder before the bombing of Kosovo. There was a military action against an armed enemy in which approximately 5,000 total were killed (official reports put that at 2,000 ethnic Serbs and 3,000 ethnic Albanians). There was no massive displacement of people...that only happened AFTER the bombing happened and was the anticpated reaction to the bombing, according to the NATO estimations.

Now...do some research on Camp Bonsteel, the US installation in Kosovo. Find out who has profited from its construction. Find out when the plans were drawn up (I'll give you this one...a year before the bombing started). It's hard to determine what's in our interest if we're not being given all of the information. We could justify Iraq on WMD and the support of terrorism...but we now know that those things weren't true. How do you feel now? The only difference is most don't know the truth about Kosovo....and the intellectuals among you don't want to know because it begs the question...how do we believe our leaders?

How do others believe the US? Even when we signed UN 1244, which recognizes the territorial integrity of Yugoslavia (now Serbia), we break our word and recognize Kosovo as an independent state? And, a predominantly muslim one at that? Ask yourselves why of all of the rest of the muslim nations only Turkey (a NATO member) is the only one to recognize Kosovo? Because they realize it's only a US puppet state. Is that what we really want?

Finally....albiqete...what a rant! Of course, only give the Croatian side of things. Don't bring up the fact that the Tudjman wrote a book that says the Holocaust never happened. Or that he turned Jasenovac - the largest concentration camp in Croatia during WWII - into a bird sanctuary. Or that the Catholic clergy not only supported the Nazi Ustasha in Croatia during WWII, but smuggled out its leaders after the war. Or...most importantly...that the first instance of ethnic cleansing was Serbs from Kosovo in the 1980's (as reported in the NY Times) and the second was the 200,000 Serbs displaced from Dalmatia (with the Croatian Generals currently on trial at the Hague). The rape camps that you speak of were a PR ploy, with one "victim" giving 10 different names - BTW where are all of the children that would have resulted from these thousands of rapes? You just can't find them.

Bottom line is that our government manipulates what we know so that they can do justify what they want to do. And that's a dangerous place for us to be...and I for one am outraged.

Is there such thing as non-defensive military action? A non-offensive use of military action might be to protect the victimization of some group or country, which is an indictment of how the US uses its military might. The US has not used its military might to protect populations being slaughtered in many, many examples. The US did not intervene in Cambodia, Bosnia, Darfur and probably many other places in the past sixty years. The US did occupy Vietnam, invade Iraq, wage a guerilla war in Central America, make some kind of incursion into Somalia and probably many other offensive military actions in the past sixty years. It is my contention that these military actions were driven by either political or economic gain and never for any altruistic purpose of protecting some weak group from suffering murderous oppression. The UN should have exercised its world political authority to prevent the US from using its military might in all of those offensive military action examples, and that it has not, and will not, is an indictment of its reason for being.

The issue is how can the world organize itself to provide protection for populations of victims from war-like or genocidal slaughter? Relying on the US will never work. The UN was in Rwanda and did nothing except observe. The charter of the UN should either be changed or the institution abandoned for a new more egalitarian organized world union without veto power by the internationalist hegemons. That still does not address the issue of such an organization's military make up and control. One reason the UN's military power does not work well now is the national coalitions of existing armies to staff it. The issue of control and the almost absolute policy to avoid violent conflict prevents the UN from protecting anyone.

What is needed is something like a UN Foreign Legion filled with ex-pats who have no allegiance and are funded by a world wide tax. It should not be under the control of any permanent members and its charter should be to protect weak victims in imminent peril. I would like such a group to become robust and strong enough to protect against invasions. There was no world body available to protect Iran when the US backed Iraq invaded it, none to protect Afghanistan from the Soviets and none to protect Iraq form the US. This type of international protection was the vision people had for the UN at the end of WW II, but the strongest and most powerful country in the world betrayed that dream with a lot of help from various other players.

Six pivotal themes in Serbian propaganda are:

1. Victimization, in which Serbs were constructed as collective victims first of the NDH, then of Tito�s Yugoslavia, and more specifically of Croats, Albanians, Bosnians, and other non-Serbs.

2. Dehumanization of designated �others�, in which Croats were depicted as �genocidal� and as �Usta�e�, Bosnians were portrayed as �fanatical fundamentalists�, and Albanians were represented as not fully human. These processes of dehumanization effectively removed these designated �others� from the moral field, sanctifying their murder or expulsion.

3. Belittlement, in which Serbia�s enemies were represented as
beneath contempt.

4. Conspiracy, in which Croats, Slovenes, Albanians, the Vatican,
Germany, Austria, and sometimes also the Bosnians as well as the U.S. and other foreign states, were seen as united in a conspiracy to break up the SFRY and hurt Serbia. In this way, the Belgrade regime�s obstinate disregard for the fundamental standards of international law was dressed up as heroic defiance of an anti-Serb conspiracy.

5. Entitlement, in which the Serbs were constructed as �entitled� to create a Greater
Serbian state to which parts of Croatia and Bosnia would be attached, under the motto,� All Serbs should live in one state.�

6. Superhuman powers and divine sanction. The Serbs were told that they were, in some sense, �super�. They were the best fighters on the planet, they could stand up to the entire world, and they were sanctioned by God himself, because of Tsar Lazar and the fact that Lazar had chosen the heavenly kingdom. Moreover, since Lazar had chosen the heavenly kingdom, the Serbs, encouraged to view themselves as Lazar�s heirs, were entitled to the earthly kingdom which Lazar had repudiated, as their patrimony.

Serbian society began to stray down the path to war more or less unwittingly.
Already in the years 1981—86, long before the other republics experienced anything
like a ‘national awakening’, Serbia (and here one may include Kosovo too) was
already sliding into a syndrome in which myths, threats, the allure of victory, and
belligerent rhetoric filled the public discourse, giving Serbs a sense of common
destiny but also separating them, psychologically, from the other peoples of socialist
Yugoslavia. That this was an unhealthy state of collective mind is clear from the
prominence of the themes of victimization, conspiracy, national entitlement, and
divine sanction of the Serbian national project, as well as from the insistent campaigns of dehumanization, demonization, and belittlement of Croats, Bosnian Muslims, and Albanians, as well as other peoples and states, which began at this time. This syndrome, in an individual, would be considered psychotic; to the extent that it permeated much of Serbian society, perhaps especially in the countryside, one may speak of Serbia having been sucked into a kind of collective psychosis. And to the extent that Serbian war propaganda aimed at reinforcing and stimulating this state of mind, we may say that it aimed at inculcating and reinforcing neurotic and
psychotic syndromes in Serbian society. This psychosis had its cultic saints – portraitsof Miloševiæ and Chetnik leader Draža Mihailoviæ were often displayed alongside those of saints canonized by the Church – had its bards (such as Simonida Stankoviæ and Ceca Ražnjatoviæ), and even had its official music – “turbo-folk�, a pop mixtureof folk-ethnic style with a rhythmic pounding beat. Moreover, this psychosis could even transport those infected to a state of consciousness which they mistook for a better world. Miloševi, for example, arriving dramatically at Kosovo polje in a helicopter on 28 June 1989, told those gathered for the six hundredth anniversary of Serbia’s mythic confrontation with its national destiny, that in that
the - century battle, Serbia had defended not just herself but all of European culture and civilization. Fine oratory might even be called the elixir of national psychosis.