[PEN-L:7725] war's end?

[Jim Devine <jdevine@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Yoshie writes: >with the Yugo acceptance of the NATO terms of peace, the
terrains of struggle, real and ideological, have already changed.<

Assuming that this peace deal does work out, I am a bit surprised that
Milosevic caved. Maybe the air war was much more effective at weakening the
Serbian government than I (and many other critics) have been saying. Or
maybe Milosevic really didn't have that many differences with US/NATO in
the first place.

If the deal does go through, it looks as if both sides lost to some degree:
Milosevic obviously lost, while the US/NATO wasted a lot of equipment and
(more importantly prestige, in that more and more treat the US as a rogue
elephant). The officially stated US/NATO goals of avoiding ethnic cleansing
and preventing the wider spread of the conflict were not achieved. In fact,
the war made both of those worse. (I forget what the other official
rationalizations of the attack on Yugoslavia were.)

Now the US/NATO have to handle the KLA. Perhaps Milosevic is glad to get
the KLA off his hands and is glad to pass it onto the US/NATO. I guess that
can be thought of as a victory for him. Barkley was right that the refugee
situation breeds the KLA the way that it did the PLO and its related
organizations. Now the KLA will be striving for independence (and merger
with Albania) against the US/NATO. Are we to soon see the US/NATO
"peace-keepers" suppressing the KLA "terrorists" the way that Milosevic's
army did before? (Hmmm... does that mean that the US/NATO will start
bombing itself, because of its mistreatement of the ethnic Albanian
Kosovars?)

The big winners are arms companies like Raytheon who will sell new cruise
missiles (etc.) to replace the old ones and should expect the demand for
such weapons to persist in the future. The Pentagon got its budget boosted
without loss of any troops in actual action. Even though the US/NATO has
lost a bunch of respect (especially from China and Russia) and suffered
from internal stresses (dissent from Greece, Italy) that will be hard to
deal with, it seems that the idea of the US/NATO being the "world cop," the
emerging _de facto_ world state, has won. So the US will continue to "make
the world safe for democracy and human rights," using its own definitions
of democracy and human rights, of course.

Jim Devine jdevine@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx &
http://clawww.lmu.edu/Faculty/JDevine/jdevine.html
Bombing DESTROYS human rights. Ground troops make things worse. US/NATO out
of Serbia!