Reply #4: Five Strawmen and Two Apologies for Murder [View All]

[JackRiddler]

Five of your points are strawmen. No problems there, knock'em down as you like.

No one should blame Clark for Waco - he merely signed over equipment to the besieging authorities (FBI, ATF). As for what happened then, well let's leave it out here. (If you only want to defend Clark, you have no need to defend what the FBI and ATF then did to the Branch Davidians.)

However, I certainly hope you don't expect to get away with this:

Churches in Bosnia are old and make great bunkers for enemy soldiers. Schools also held enemy soldiers. The broadcasting is part of the state run communications systems. Taking out the communications system prevents the enemy from organizing attacks and killing Allied soldiers and more civilians.

Uh huh. Those evil, evil enemies! When someone starts bombing them, they go and HIDE - in schools and churches, no less! No one in Wyoming would ever do that, if the Serbian air force were to start bombing there.

So by the same logic, would you agree the Nazis had a right to bomb Russian churches and round up villages where partisans hid out?

Even more insidious is that these Serbian churches were OLD churches, famous for their ability to resist our peacemaking missiles.

And those TV station employees! Showing up to work every day to broadcast propaganda. So unlike CNN! And this propaganda enables "the enemy" (who never attacked us, but who was chosen by us as a target) to launch attacks on Allied soldiers (of whom, officially, zero died), and "more civilians."

Gotcha. Thanks.

Hmm, why does the following "rumor" seem more plausible to me?

Unlike CNN, the Belgrade TV was showing pictures of the civilian casualties caused by NATO bombing. This was making NATO look bad, and this is why NATO warned them that they would be hit. And then NATO hit them, killing 10 station employees. After this, the Western media had a monopoly on how the war was spun, at least on TV.

Soon after, the Chinese criticized the U.S.-led attack on Yugoslavia and presented a peace plan to the UN. Within 48 hours, their embassy was bombed. The presented excuse is patently ridiculous, or else indicative of how "well targeted" and humane the whole campaign was ("Old maps." But that's okay, those churches where the enemy is holed up are old, too.)

The message of the embassy bombing was clear: Do not screw with us. We will bomb you, and we can even play the injured party after that as we beat our chests in a mea culpa. And there's nothing you can do about it: Fuck you.

Everyone in the world can read that message, except those who are blinded by their own national apologia. (Don't worry, it's not an exclusively American disease. Most people are very perceptive about the crimes of others, and have a blind spot for their own country's crimes.) The Kosovo war was logically followed by a renewed arms race among all potential targets: Pakistan, Iran, China, India...

But let's not blame any of this on Clark. He was just following orders, right? As other Clark supporters love to point out, if he had been given a free hand, he would have liberated the Albanians by sending in a few thousand American troops, which would have obviously minimized the casualties. As we see in Iraq every day.