13 thoughts on “Does Gerard Henderson own a dictionary ?”

1. Henderson certainly has his definitions wrong, but Pr Q has his fact wrong about the causal conditions of the Kosovo war.

   The NATO Kosovo invasion actually triggered the Serbian ethnic cleansing, not vice-vera. The liberal-left construction of the Kosovo war is, as Steve Sailer says, exactly back-to-front to actual history:

   The reality is that we started the war, and the Serbs, with nothing left to lose (they were being pounded by NATO, the most powerful military alliance in history), responded by beginning the massive ethnic cleansing that everyone remembers so vividly. I don’t know how many times starting about a year after the actual events have I read that our attack was a response to their big ethnic cleansing. Bollocks. That’s exactly backwards.
   Before we pulled our international observers out so that we could start the bombing, there had been anti-rebel fighting in Kosovo, of course, but of the kind we’re engaged in in Iraq at present — not full scale ethnic cleansing. Of course, Kosovo was internationally recognized as belonging to Serbian-dominated Yugoslavia, giving Belgrade the presumptive legal right to put down a rebellion, as Abraham Lincoln had, or as NATO-member Turkey had just finished doing in Turkish Kurdistan at a cost of 37,000 lives.
   The war briefly satiated a lot of the blood-lust that had been building up in elite Washington circles (but nowhere else in the country) for some time. The outcome of Clark’s War on the ground, however, was that the ethnic cleansing was simply reversed and the Albanians cleansed most of the Serbs, and the Gypsies as well, from Kosovo, except for a some well-armed pockets. The whole pointless, bloody mess could have been peacefully resolved with some creativity, as I outlined in this essay of mine in Toronto’s National Post.

   The right time to pre-emptively, or contemptively, invade Yugoslavia would have been during the ethnic cleansing phase of the war, in the mid-nineties. But nothing was done because the internet boom was starting and people had other things on their minds. Only later on did liberal sentiment start to express guilt about not doing enough in Rwanda and Bosnia.

   By that time plenty of aging Baby Boomers with a frustrated will to righteous power had seen “Saving Private Ryan”, read “The Greatest Generation” and were feeling a little guilty that they had not participated in a “Good War”. Hence the strong neo-liberal support for the war-too-late in Kosovo. and then Iraq.

   To make matters worse, the neo-liberal war in Kosovo had exactly the same amount of UN authorisation as the neo-conservative war in Iraq: Nil.

2. There was also a strong case for doing something about Saddam’s crimes against humanity in the 1990s, post-Gulf War and while being inspected by UN inspectors and patrolled by the US and UK in the no-fly-zones. i.e. the genocide campaign against 200,000 Marsh Arabs. Strange how this one never even made an agenda item.

3. Gerard is building an entire army of straw people out of Latham’s speech. He is actually going backwards and forwards on the old forward defence pendulum, neither side of which affects the US alliance unless Washington demands forward defence. And in rejecting the doctrine of pre-emption he is affirming the bipartisan position of political generations. After all, we were “invited into Vietnam..” after the Tonkin “incident” for that very reason.

   A point of information on Rwanda, which I picked up on RN a few days ago. There was a significant period of time when the UN was being warned big time that the massacre was coming, and no-one would intervene. There was a time for pre-emption which ethically we should have taken, but didn’t.

   I wouldn’t have thought that baby boomer obsession with our new internet toys kept us distracted from the destruction of the former Yugloslavia. I remember a kind of awful fascination on our part with the siege of Sarajevo – in 1994, for instance, it was a significant theme of the Australian International Documentary Conference in Melbourne, with films run and internet contact made. The AFC funded the documentary “Exile in Sarajevo” in 95 and it was a known catastrophe then.

   Throughout the war in Bosnia, there was a disgusting sense that no-one did anything. That NATO needed to take out the Serbian guns over Sarajevo, and defend the UN safe havens – and they didn’t. And by the way, just as an aside, when the original Dutch documentary “Srebrenica: A Cry from the Grave” was run at the Rotterdam Film Festival, members of the audience apparently threw up in the aisles.

4. Congrats and well said Jack (and Steve). I have often found it frustrating how people hold up Kosovo as an example of the good that the US can do. The Al-Qaeda backed KLA was fighting for the independence of Kosovo, and the government of the day was fighting back. Innocent people were dying, as happens in war – but the real trouble started after the NATO bombing. And importantly, you also mentioned the genocide that has occured against non-Albanians.

   I should add that Abraham Lincoln’s war was less legitimate – as the union of the states in America always included the ability of states to leave the union. When a group of states decided to leave the union and form a new country – this new country was invaded by the US. The war is called ‘civil’ only because the north won. Had the south won it would have been called the second war of independence (and if the english had won the independence war, it would have been called ‘civil unrest’).

   Finally, while the killing of the marsh arabs isn’t a good thing – it needs to be remembered that Saddam was fighting to put down a rebellion of his own. Being encouraged by the Americans, the strongly religious shi’ites (including the marsh arabs) rose up against Saddam. Saddam put down the revolution. One wonders what the US would do if they were facing a similar uprising in their own country, by a group from a different religion? Given what they did at Waco, it’s hard for me to imagine that they would handle the situation with dialogue.

5. John Humphries

   That’s moral relativism that is. You’d better watch yourself with that or else every right-wing blogger in the universe will accuse you, your dog, your employer and your country of being not only morally equivalent to the Nazis, but in fact directly responsible for the Holocaust (unless they are Mel Gibson and denying it ever happened).

   You have been warned 😡

6. Sorry that should be John Humphreys.

7. The Left and Right wing of the anti-war blogosphere have been having a good run.

   Steve Sailer seems to be approaching some kind of intellectual epiphany, his theories are being validated with a vengenance these days. It appears that the US has succeeded in it’s aim of creating a united Iraq, through indsriminate use of firepower by Marines against civilians in the battle for Fallujah. He makes the point that the US invasion has united the Suunis and Shiites, in opposition to the US.

   Giving Iraqis somebody else to hate: The fastest way to nation-building psychologically is to have an outside enemy to unite people in shared fear and loathing.
   In recent days, some degree of nationalism (as opposed to ethnocentrism) has emerged in Iraq in opposition to the U.S. I don’t know how far this will go (probably not far), but it does suggest one danger: that we are midwifing a new nation-state built around anti-Americanism.

   Talk about the unintended social consequences of well-intended political action.

   This article in the Washington Post give some idea of the mythic status that the Fallujah battle has attained in Iraqi popular consciousness:

   “What is striking is how much has changed in a week — a week,” said Wamid Nadhmi, a political science professor at Baghdad University. “No one can talk about the Sunni Triangle anymore. No one can seriously talk about Sunni-Shiite fragmentation or civil war. The occupation cannot talk about small bands of resistance. Now it is a popular rebellion and it has spread.”
   “The exact image I want to give you is the young men heading to fight in Fallujah are more than the refugees coming out of Fallujah,” Ali said. “We cannot control the feelings of the young.”
   The fighters, he added, reject the label
   “fedayeen,” the name for deposed president Saddam Hussein’s most zealous fighters, who, like the new insurgents, favor black attire. “We say ‘mujaheddin,’ ” he said, Arabic for sacred combatants.

   Score a point for Pr Q’s prescience, when he predicted that the US would be regarded as a conqueror if it attempted to impose it’s favoured parties or institutions on post-war Iraq.

   Nation-building is a mugs game, no more so than in the ME, where the only kind of nationalism that can prosper is the destructive kind.

8. It is always refreshing to hear kindred spirits on the Kosovo myth. The fictitious “genocide” of the Albanians apparently numbered 100,000 (the actual number was closer to 2000) as we were told before the bombs dropped.

   As happened after the bombing campaign began, some 800,000 Kosovars were forced to flee. Strike that up to NATO. Ever since Kosovo was “liberated”, we’ve seen over 200,000 Serbs expelled from Kosovo, and at least 150 Serbian churches destroyed.

   Virtually no one can continue to bandy around the previously ridiculously high “genocide” figures with a straight face, although, predictably, Al Jazeera are pathetically and ideologically doing their best.

   The number of Serbs killed by Albanian mobs since the NATO bombing is a little hard to find. We do know what the roving mobs are capable of, however. Over 500 homes were destroyed in just two days of “clashes” (i.e. anti-Serb pogroms). It’s reasonable to suggest that on top of the hundreds killed by NATO, several hundred in 1999 alone according to the Serbian Orthodox church and several hundred since is a reasonable (but probably conservative) guess.

   But that’s alright. This is politically correct violence against an ethnicity (Serbs) who must be violent and rapacious by nature. All Serb nationalism is bad, but pogroms by al-Qaeda clones are perfectly acceptable. The best the left-liberals could do when hundreds of thousands of people were being slaughtered (and sold into slavery) in Sudan was send tens of millions of dollars of aid indirectly to the rebels. Oh but we can’t regime change Sudan (even though arguably the US could have carved up the oil reserves for itself at the expense of it’s western competitors – a good realpolitik motive for humanitarian action). That’s too much action for us, and it would upset too many Muslims. Only bombing Christians can be defined as “humanitarian”.

   Besides, we’ve got pharmaceutical factories to “liberate” – a far more worthwhile pursuit for a limp-wristed left-liberal administration with no morals whatsoever.

9. Footnote: My link to the “several hundred in 1999 alone” should have added on the end… “by Albanian mobs”. The bombing itself is generally believed to have killed at least 600 Serbs.

   And the 2,000 figure at the beginning of my post included Serb deaths. I’d like to add that the Iraq War was more likely to be legal than the division and conquer of Yugoslavia. In the former there were a dozen and a half or so UN Security Council resolutions awaiting enforcement, and at least the US made a crude effort to get the UN to authorise it. In the latter, there was hardly any attempt at “multilateralism” at all.

   And in the latter instance, the rhetoric was far more hysterical, historically false, and demonstrably inaccurate than the former.

   But, in case you all get the wrong idea… Kosovo was a humanitarian intervention!

10. limp-wristed left-liberal

    Steve

    Are you implying that all “left-liberals” are pooftas? Would it bother you if we were?

    Reminds me of a North Queensland politician who said “slant-eyed idealogues” when he claimed he meant to say “slit-eyed”. Those old Freudian slips are a real bugger (if that expression doesn’t fill you with a gut-churning irrational horror).

11. You’re right, I despise Freud with a passion. But no, limp-wristed is an attack on their resolve and conviction, not their sexuality. I couldn’t give a rat’s ass about Clinton’s sexuality, as putrid as I find the man.

12. Despise Freud with a passion? Denying the unconcious mind then? Surely not.

    And if you wish to convey indecisive or pusillanimous then “limp-wristed” is a very awkward term to use. Like it or not it has overtones that swamp any other meaning.

    And I dislike Clinton too though I imagine for different reasons.

13. The wolf at the bay
    Back Pages had a cut-down bluesfest. In the star’s absence, we refocused around Steve Earle’s second show, grabbing the last two days. It wasn’t enough for full levitation, which usually only kicks in at some stage around day three. But…

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