[PEN-L:6591] Re: Was it a mistake?

[Eugene Coyle <eugenecoyle@xxxxxxx>]

I, too, wonder if it was a mistake.  A couple of ideas crossed my mind:  First, that the US had the idea that Milosevic was sheltering at the Chinese embassy and wanted to, if not kill him, at least terrify him.  My second idea is worse, that the Pentagon deliberately did this provocation in carrying out a Beltway power struggle.

Gene Coyle

Robert Naiman wrote:

> One does have to wonder if the bombing of the Chinese Embassy was a mistake. It it quite a coincidence.
> We'll probably never know, and the accusation that they did it on purpose is hard to prove.
> But there is a pattern of U.S. hits on certain civilian targets that were claimed to be mistakes at the time, which were accepted to be mistakes in the United States, but were not interpreted as mistakes by the target country.
>
> For example, there was the downing of the Iranian Airbus. The U.S. claimed it was a mistake. If memory serves, the Iranians thought it was intentional, and this was a key factor in Khomeini's decision to make peace with Iraq (which he described as drinking poison) on the grounds that the U.S. had signaled that it was ready to intervene massively and brutally on the Iraqi side.
>
> Again, if memory serves, in a bombing of Libya the U.S. hit an embassy of a country that had been critical of U.S. policy. It was France or the S.U., I think.
>
> Considering the pattern of recent bombings, U.S./NATO seems to have thrown aside the pretense of avoiding civilian targets. We seem to be witnessing "total war" with the idea that it is perfectly acceptable and strategic to target the civilian population as a way of pressuring the regime, as in Iraq, combined perhaps with a sort of Nixonian "mad dog" approach that the target regime should be convinced that the U.S./NATO is totally nuts, ready to kill anyone.
>
> I hadn't been following reports from China, but the things that I have read and heard in the last couple of days suggest that government, media, and public opinion have been very anti-NATO for some time. And that the Chinese government was prepared to oppose the U.S. in the Security Council on the war. The Chinese government and the Chinese public seem to believe that the bombing was intentional, perhaps to send a signal to China that the U.S. is prepared to punish them for resisting U.S. policy.
>
> The current story is that they bombed the building on purpose (hence the 3 missiles), based on "intelligence" that it was something else, intelligence that was "several years old."
>
> Is this really credible, that they would be so sloppy? We always knew that "pinpoint" bombing was a fraud, but how hard is it to avoid bombing the embassies of other countries? Surely they have a list of buildings to avoid. When Israel was bombing Lebanon in 1996, they had a list from the UN of UN sites, in order not to bomb them (a key reason that UN personnel were suspicious when Israel bombed Qana "by mistake" -Qana was on the list).
>
> Either it was intentional, or they are totally incompetent, or totally callous. Or some combination thereof.
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> Robert Naiman <naimanr@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
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