4th March 2003, 12:28 AM
I could say more... but its late and I'm tired... maybe tomorrow...
Oh, and length isn't the best measure of the scale of a war... the Gulf War wasn't super long but it was a much bigger war than Kosovo... that 'war' had no American battle casualties and no ground combat... and we only won (with no ground= presence) because of ground resistance troops to put on pressure... sort of like Afghanistan, only with a modern nation, and a populace that finally got so fed up they overthrew their leader...
Its not like I think military force should never be used... its just that in almost all cases there are better options...
Afghanistan. That war (and the whole Taliban issue) would have been avoided if the US had just not abandoned the Afghanis in the mid '80s and let them fight eachother... as we know now (I hope... but given Bush, we never know... I wonder if he'll follow up in Afghanistan. He hasn't done too well on much of anything yet so I wouldn't bet on it...), training them to fight and then leaving just doesn't work... but at least there (and, it turned out, in Serbia) there were legitimate forces that could take over the government once we destroyed the one there... in Iraq there's nothing. No strong resistance group... certainly none that we'd want in power... and there's also Bush's promise not to be an occupying army. I see no way out of that... killing Sadaam will leave a power vacuum that will require SOMETHING. Peacekeepers would be a good idea... but Bush hates peacekeeping, as he proves when he refuses to let the peacekeepers in Afghanistan be in numbers significant enough to make much of a difference, and refuses to let US troops in Afghanistan be peacekeepers...
I'll say something more tomorrow...
Oh, and I wouldn't say the Kosovo war was right either, of course... but Slobodan Milosevich was at the time fighting with the Kosovars... and committing atrocities. We couldn't let that happen again... not after letting it happen before (Rwanda... or Bosnia in the early/mid '90s...)... but I'm not sure offhand what we should have done, really. It ended up well for us, sure... but that was never the issue... Was Slobodan more of a threat than before? Well... no, he wasn't doing anything he hadn't been doing for years (namely killing off minorities)... why then to intervene then? I don't know. They should have done a lot more years earlier to stop him... more peacekeepers, etc... but the UN dropped the ball like in Rwanda...
Oh, and at least in Kosovo NATO agreed that we should fight! We don't even have that this time...
Oh, and length isn't the best measure of the scale of a war... the Gulf War wasn't super long but it was a much bigger war than Kosovo... that 'war' had no American battle casualties and no ground combat... and we only won (with no ground= presence) because of ground resistance troops to put on pressure... sort of like Afghanistan, only with a modern nation, and a populace that finally got so fed up they overthrew their leader...
Its not like I think military force should never be used... its just that in almost all cases there are better options...
Afghanistan. That war (and the whole Taliban issue) would have been avoided if the US had just not abandoned the Afghanis in the mid '80s and let them fight eachother... as we know now (I hope... but given Bush, we never know... I wonder if he'll follow up in Afghanistan. He hasn't done too well on much of anything yet so I wouldn't bet on it...), training them to fight and then leaving just doesn't work... but at least there (and, it turned out, in Serbia) there were legitimate forces that could take over the government once we destroyed the one there... in Iraq there's nothing. No strong resistance group... certainly none that we'd want in power... and there's also Bush's promise not to be an occupying army. I see no way out of that... killing Sadaam will leave a power vacuum that will require SOMETHING. Peacekeepers would be a good idea... but Bush hates peacekeeping, as he proves when he refuses to let the peacekeepers in Afghanistan be in numbers significant enough to make much of a difference, and refuses to let US troops in Afghanistan be peacekeepers...
I'll say something more tomorrow...
Oh, and I wouldn't say the Kosovo war was right either, of course... but Slobodan Milosevich was at the time fighting with the Kosovars... and committing atrocities. We couldn't let that happen again... not after letting it happen before (Rwanda... or Bosnia in the early/mid '90s...)... but I'm not sure offhand what we should have done, really. It ended up well for us, sure... but that was never the issue... Was Slobodan more of a threat than before? Well... no, he wasn't doing anything he hadn't been doing for years (namely killing off minorities)... why then to intervene then? I don't know. They should have done a lot more years earlier to stop him... more peacekeepers, etc... but the UN dropped the ball like in Rwanda...
Oh, and at least in Kosovo NATO agreed that we should fight! We don't even have that this time...
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