Chomsky/Hitchens/Milosevic/Bush

[Otto]

I haven't been there and was really worried about Germans going to war
again back then (decided by a "left" coalition of Social-Democrats and
Greens) until I saw those Bosnian and Albanian refugees, until I had
those children with those sorrowful dark eyes on their way to the
refugee-camp in my cab. "Ethnic cleansing" became the word of the day
and to put an end to this, at least in Europe, even the pacifist
Greens agreed to the war against Serbia.

Having said this, I did not believe for a second that the "we" went
there purely for humanitarian reasons, of course there was the wish to
put away Milosevic, after the fall of the Berlin Wall we had no use
for dictatorships on European soil anymore, there was the wish that
those refugees might better had stayed at home instead of letting
their children go begging in our streets...that's why we recognised
"Kosova" so quickly. If all the other ethnic groups of former
Yugoslavia had got their territory, why should the Kosovo-Albanians be
the ones to pay for all of them? There was no use for another
"Palestinian question".

Comparing that ethnic cleansing to other atrocities in Africa and
South America (as Chomsky did, and he was right in doing so, but for
other reasons) wouldn't have delivered a solution to the problem that
these refugees were on our streets and German ethnophobia was on the
rise. Chomsky was wrong, (as he was wrong about ground troops) there
was a humanitarian catastrophe before the NATO began the bombings, and
looking back to the Vietnam-War wouldn't have stopped that.

And can there be any doubt about it that the Yugoslavian War had paved
the way for Bush after 9/11, that it had become easier to go to war
again, that war wasn't the "last resort" of politics anymore but
increasingly became a normal action in politics again, at Afghanistan,
Iraq, Chechnya, Palestine, Lebanon, Georgia, Gaza and so on.

Why Mugabe is still in power I don't know. In this I agree to Chomsky.
The decision which dictator to stop in producing humanitarian
catastrophes isn't based upon humanitarian reasons but on the
"interests" of the USA and the wealthy European nations.