Hi Soda,
Originally posted by soda72
If you were President during that time how would you have handled Kosovo?
I'll be honest with you, there are many reasons I'm glad I'm not and never will be president, dealing with questions like this is one of them.
First off, I believe that the power of wielding the sword is an awesome responsibility, and that it is only given into the hands of civil magistrates in order that they might fulfill their primary duty in protecting their own citizens from evildoers within the state, and those who are an imminent threat to them without it. In other words, I believe that the magistrate has the power to legitimately use the power of the sword in suppressing crime and in defensive wars.
There are any number of conflicts worldwide currently raging that the United States could intervene in for humanitarian reasons. For instance, for decades now the Arab Muslim government in Khartoum has been waging a genocidal war against the Black Christian and Animist peoples of Southern Sudan and Darfur, literally hundreds of thousands, if not millions of Africans have died or been enslaved as a result. Even as we speak the Janjaweed militias and Sudanese military are continuing their genocidal campaign. To date, the USA has not expressed any interest in intervening to stop this war.
For 400 years since the forced Islamicization of large portions of the Balkans by the Turks, the Serbian orthodox and the Albanian Muslims have been in a state of fairly constant conflict. The memory of battles and attrocities in that region is still fresh and sadly the rule of revenge continues. However, in 1999 after 4 years of guerilla attacks by the KLA a Serbian reprisal in which 45 ethnic Albanians were massacred triggered an American response involving a huge NATO air campaign which gutted the Serbian military and destroyed substantial portions of the transportation network and infrastructure of Belgrade. The American media placed the black hats squarely on the Serbs and the White hats on the Kosovars and America made a decision to intervene although there was no plausible argument that Serbs constitued an imminent threat to America or that American interests were at stake. Since the Serbian defeat, Kosovo has become a haven for Jihadis and organized crime and it has been the ethnic Serbs who have seen their houses and churches burned, and who have become the refugees. But the world no longer cares, "they are getting their come-uppance" and any revision of the previous script might be too disquieting. That is why, for instance, we don't hear much about the foreign Jihadis who fought/are fighting in Kosovo, the Al-Qaeda/Muslim brotherhood links and so on. In this fight, the simple truth is that the fight isn't between good and evil, its between bad and worse and a lot of poor civilians are dying as a result.
Was Milosovec a murderer of women and children? Undoubtedly. Is it wrong to massacre civilians in reprisals? Absolutely. But what made Kosovo a situation
we had to intervene in and not one of the countless other abominable conflicts like Rwanda, Liberia, Sudan, or if we feel compelled to support Islamic insurgents in Europe why not Chechnya where the death tolls make Kosovo seem mild by comparison? I could go on but I'm sure you get the point. Why Kosovo and not a hundred other far more horrific conflicts?
In any event, my conscience is captive to the Word, and as awful as this may sound, had I been president I doubt I would have thought a coherent application of Just War theory involved bombing Belgrade. If somehow my estimation is wrong, and
we had to intervene there then
we must intervene in Sudan and scores of other places ASAP.
- SEAGOON
