What a lot of Jesuitical reasoning. This is why nobody listened to the decent lefties when you guys opposed the Iraq war.

Care to elaborate, Eric? Both Kosovo and Iraq are heavily muslim areas-- yet Islamic nations supported our intervention in Kosovo and opposed it in Iraq. Don't need to be a Jesuit to see a difference there.

It should be noted that Clinton's administration also used Haliburton in Kosovo, out of their contract, thorough a no-bid process.

Funny that. I guess Bill was out to fatten Dick Cheney's pockets as well, and to make it worse, this was during the time where Dick was actually making money working there!

Yes, Dick Cheney was a good bipartisan defense contractor whore, getting deals under Clinton then as well. No one would argue that this kind of corruption of international affairs hasn't been a bipartisan affair. But at least Halliburton was sitting directly on both sides of the contracting negotiations under Clinton.

i sent an earlier post about this but somehow it did not register.
no, the kosovo war was not "legitimate". it set an awful precedent for that horrific oxymoron "humanitarian war", which e.g. tony blair
was later to use to rally "liberal" opinion around bush's iraq adventure. the kosovo war occurred because the clintonoids had neglected the situation after the bosnian settlement, when kosovo had been a core issue in the yugoslavia crisis from the very beginning- milosovic began his rise to power by rescinding autonomous home rule for the territory in 1989 and the other republics of yugoslavia took notice of this in fearing serbian intentions. at the rambouillet conference the clintonoids deliberately set unacceptable conditions in order to provoke serbian rejection and thereby justify their war plans. then after an extended bombing campaign which did not have the quick decisive effect that they had arrogantly assumed, and led to its expansion into large scale attacks on beograd civilians and the substantial destruction of the civilian economic infrastructure of serbia, the war ended with a negotiated compromise with concessions to the original serbian position. and the clintonoids were crowing about the new revolutionary war of autonomous air power. needless to say, serbia has yet to recover, zoran djindjic has been assassinated and kosovo remains under a tense occupation in a tense region (e.g. macedonia). much of this was motivated by a compensatory over-reaction to the feckless policy in bosnia, with its high-minded arms embargo that effected only the bosnian moslems and its u.n. protection forces that did no protecting (remember srebenica?). personally, after the fall of the berlin wall, i thought, oh' well the next big problem is going to be yugoslavia." it was quite forseeable. i thought what they should have done was, with the help of a quick bribe, put a nato armoured corps on the hungarian border- (it would have pinned done the serbian dominated yugoslav national army) and begun using concerted diplomatic/political/economic pressure to bring about a peaceful negotiated solution, but of course, there was no such proactive and coordinated effort by western "statesmen". so i am not necessarily opposed to combining real politik with decent honorable intentions, but it requires careful and shrewd calibrations of policy means and ends if it is to be efficacious in the sense that anything "honorable" were to result, as well as a sustained attentive and durable political will. otherwise it is best not attempted.
of course, the yugoslav fiasco/tragedy pales in comparison to ruanda, where despite, or rather because of, clear warnings from the u.n. forces on the ground- ( the canadian general in charge later had a nervous breakdown)- the clintonoids obstructed any u.n. action , while later, during his tour of africa, our fearless leader had the gall to apologize for u.s inaction. kofi annan was the u.n. official in charge, and he was subsequently duly reqarded, since we need someone in the u.n. who will do our bidding.
one last point about yugoslavia before i go off to work. it was the first country that the west imposed post-communist economic "shock therapy" on, during the term of its last prime minister, anton markovic. not exactly the brightest of ideas.
at any rate, i don't think you can say that aspects of bush's iraq adventure are without precedence in all this.

Did Kosovo set a precedent for Bush? That acts as if Bush needed one. Bush was willing to go to war without UN, NATO or any other multilateral support.

And yes, it would have been better if Clinton acted earlier, but that's hardly an argument that he should not have acted at all when the crisis hit-- and frankly the Europeans were even more to blame for the problems in the Balkans.

No one expects perfect action, but I find the attempt to paint the picture of either post-war Kosovo or Servia as so dire. In both places, dictatorships have given way to democracy, even if it's rough around the edges.

And it's worth remembering that Rugovo was as close to an elected head of state as Kosovo had and he supported the intervention.

no, no one expects perfectly conceived and executed policy actions. but the basic point i was making was that there are clear continuities in the exercise of american hegemony between the clinton and bush administrations and the differences are more ones of degree than of kind.
bush is clearly much more extreme as well as more stunningly incompetent, but to imagine that his policies came out of nowhere, as a sheer imposition of will, is begging the question, to say the least. clinton was a weak and inconstant statesman and left a legacy of ruthless failure.
(to my mind, the imposition of economic shock therapy on the former soviet union was an immense historical crime, one entirely superintended by the clinton administration. i don't know the total figures, but i recently came across the figure that in the ukraine gdp declined by 59%, compared to e.g. in the u.s.a. at the bottom of the great depression, 27%. see your subsequent post about gaidar and tell me there are absolutely no continuities.) to say that the europeans are more to blame is to miss the point that with the sudden end of the cold war the u.s.a. was overwhelmingly predominant in nato and wished it to remain that way (and still wishes it so, though i suspect that that is another thing bush may have blown.) as for mr. rugova, he was admirably a determinedly non-violent leader and,
though in the midst of the crisis he may have supported action to defend his people, he had not been aiming for such an action all along. this was perhaps the aim of the kla, which formerly had been viewed as a terrorist group. at any rate,
i think the matter is best stated by paraphrasing
a financial times editorial from the time; "yes, we asked you to do something, but not that!"
the main point is that the exercise of massive hegemonic violence in the name of a humanitarian cause or of human rights is virtually a contradiction in terms and is always to be viewed with suspicion. only the most rigorous tests can grant it any legitimacy. remember the claims of genocide that were use to rally international support? yes, there were a few thousand heinous murders, but not of the order of magnitude proclaimed at the time. and what of all the serbian "collateral damage"? it must have been at least as great. is there no parallel here with the iraq adventure? and as for ruanda, about as clear a test case as one would not wish for, it was cited by the bush administration and supporting journalists, mirabile dictu, as evidence of the ineffectiveness
of the u.n. yes, clinton was a more supple and simply more competent leader than george w. bush, but that is saying very little, indeed. the extent of the catastrophic failure of bush's iraq
policy has yet to play itself out and we do not know how far it will go, at what cost, and with what disruptions. but it is foolish, in one's quite reasonable desire to see bush receive his well deserved comeupance, to obscure the broader dynamics of power involved by trumpeting in contrast the most dubious of successes with the most mixed of motives. in taking stock of the situation, now and later, i think it is most important to attempt to convey to people, especially in the u.s.a., the sharp limits and large costs of a purely and unquestioningly hegemonic approach to the world if foreign intervention, which may yet be urgently needed in future situations, is to yield any salutary results. it must be impressed upon people that the outside world has a density and texture, a force of cultural and historical reality, that can not simply be manipulated and displaced in accordance with our rather self-idealizing wishes.
and this is all the more the case, as the economic position of the u.s.a. in the world begins to erode, due, in part, to some of the bush
administration's other choice policies.

John-- All military intervention has some similarities, but it matters the goals and outcome. I doubt that the lack of a Kosovo precedent would have stopped Bush. Remember, Reagan unilaterally invaded Grenada and Bush Senior went into Panama. So Bush Junior didn't need Kosovo as some kind of precedent.

And Kosovo was a people facing imminent ethnic clensing and the suppression of a clear democratic will to end Serbian oppression.

With Iraq, there may have been resistance to Hussein-- although no clear united vehicle for democratic alternatives as in Kosovo-- but what was most lacking was an imminent threat justifying military intervention rather than slower non-violent alternatives.

i doubt if we have any large disagreement about iraq. the issue is about the larger context in which this all occurred, with respect to how things move forward from here, in "cleaning up" the mess and establishing future frameworks from an international/multilateral perspective for dealing with these issues of "democratic" legitimacy/humanitarian concerns/maintenance
of international and regional stability and order/ the use of military force. iraq will have large precedence here and i don't think it's looking good. with respect to the domestic u.s.a., it looks as if the "moderate opposition" to bush's iraq "policy" is going to insist that we can not, must not, "lose" iraq, even as the bushite true believers begin to peel away.
historical arguments are necessarily analogical; they involve comparisons between incommensurable situations with respect to "lessons" that can be adduced from them. this is not an illegitimate exercise, for the point is to in-form contemporary political judgment. and criticizing bad analogies (e.g. hitler/munich) is very much to the point. such bad analogies have been flying fast and loose with the bushite arguments for their iraq policy. (as for bush's precedents, you forgot central america and vietman as significantly informing ones.) but the judgments in question concern not just goals and outcomes, but, intricated with them, consideration of adequate means, especially since outcomes are just as much susceptible to tawdry propoganda. enforcing "democratic" legitimacy in a world of sovereign states is a ticklish issue (wto, anyone?) and recourse to military means very dicey, since "legitimacy" can not be produced by force alone. the point about the clinton era foreign policy as a precedent is that the united states emerged from the end of the cold war with a massive overhang of military power, even as russia declined into irrelevancy (not without malice aforethought, i should think)
and yet continued to spend massively on its military and to insist on its primacy in all international arrangements, as the world's sole "hyperpower". that clinton did not push this to its limit, that he continued to seek "multilateral" guises for the exercise of american power, that he attended to the outside world fitfully and opportunistically is faint praise, when one considers that the "victory" in the cold war was actually a rare historical opportunity to work toward re-ordering international relations in a more balanced, responsive and equitable way, which would also have been a disemburdening of the u.s.a. of its outsized obligations, which it simply does not have the historical experience and cultural resources to manage adequately. ( though perhaps bush, with his repudiation of even the normal institutional mechanisms of policy formation, may yet bring this about, backhandedly.) with respect to kosovo, it is possible to read it less as a use of force for legitimate human purposes than as a use of human purposes to legitimate the use of force, especially as the military means had been excrescently accumulated and could be perceived as a functionally equivalent substitute for the much more laborious task of building collective political will, which is to be distained anyway by the prevailing economistic mentality. a sufficient reserve of military force and the potential of its use as a last resort is a necessary deterent in the effective conduct of international relations, but it is far less effective in directly coercing desired outcomes and carries high and uncontrollable costs. the belief that the excrescent accumulation of military means together with their limited use for demonstrative purposes at tangential points can substitute for the task of difficult political communication is another hangover of the cold war. and as for the cause of kosovo being "democratic", here that would mean ethnic, as a part of the larger insoluble yugoslav puzzle. (john austin:"'democracy' is one of those words, which, when a person uses it, we are not exactly sure what he means".)
i know that i can perfectly well be accused by rational intelligent people of wishful thinking in all this. but simply accepting the narrow options forced upon us by the powers that be, the "lesser of two evils", is no purge of wishful thinking. i have no wish for game/set/match here. i have simply spoken my peace.

sorry, it occurred to me that i forgot an intended sentence in my peroration just after the point about "no purge of wishful thinking": if when faced with the fiats of plebescitary mass democracy, no viable alternatives remain to us, then if there is no other freedom left to us, there remains the freedom fo judgment, the last refuge of "legitimacy".

"As the cheers Clinton is receiving in Kosovo during his visit show, they applaud not only the removal of Milosevic but the followup." -- Nathan

Why shouldn't the Albanian citizens of Pristina cheer Clinton, since he helped ethnically cleanse their enemies. (Even your article makes clear what happened: "About 200,000 Kosovo Serbs and other minorities fled Kosovo after the war...)"

"Did Kosovo set a precedent for Bush? That acts as if Bush needed one." -- Nathan

That's disingenuous. The precedent for humanitarian intervention was crucial for Tony Blair, and Blair's support has been important for Bush. Look how Bush is willing to humiliate himself by going back to the UN, in order to try to get 10,000 foreign troops -- about half the # the British gov't provided with no questions asked. This bloody adventure would either not have started or would end a lot earlier without British support, and the Kosovo precedent was an important factor in gaining that support.

And what of the other costs? Was it worth cooperating with Al-Qaeda to stop a potential ethnic cleansing? Was it worth lying to the American people, placing Psyops officers in our media institutions, and poisoning the Kosovo countryside with depleted uranium?

And this doesn't count the collateral damage. If you want to have humanitarian interventions, you're going to have a huge military-industrial complex, because no one will support humantiarian interventions if they result in a large # of casualties for our side, and to keep the casualties down costs money. And having a huge death industry distorts our political process, increases proliferation, and takes money out of the budget for everything else we care about.

I've never made up my mind on the Kosovo intervention, but it's always struck me that its liberal and leftwing supporters see the whole thing through rose-colored glasses.
My impression is that the large-scale ethnic cleansing by Serbs against Muslims occurred during the war, and that when the war was over ethnic cleansing continued, only this time it was the Serbs who were ejected. A great victory for the cause of human rights, I'm sure.

Maybe war was the only option, or the least bad option, but if so I'd like to see that case made by someone who seriously faced up to the fact that the Serbs weren't the only war criminals in the Balkans.

I like how NATO can be multilateral but the "coalition of the willing" is not. You can only say that NATO is truly multilateral while the c.o.t.w. is not by defining true multilateralism as composed of rich, white European nations, whereas Japan, the Rep. of Korea, etc. don't count as real nations.
Those who are willing to praise the Kosovo war alliance whilst criticising the c.o.t.w. as not a truly multilateral group, display a true underlying eurocentric and racist view of the world.