Re: Re: Re: Of Nationalist Thugs (and those who enthronedthem)

[Brad DeLong <delong@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

> Hi again, Brad.
>
> > I think that Srebenica had little to do with "war."
>
> Well, you'd be eliminating most wars of the twentieth century from the
> category of 'war' if you stood by this, Brad.  But I see your point.  Let's
> see; eight thousand unarmed men - sons, lovers, dads and brothers all - were
> taken away and coldly slaughtered, some, no doubt, brutally tortured, too
> ...
>
> Well, I admit it ain't quite the carpet bombing of Cambodia, but it's pretty
> much of the order of the sort of thing US troops got up to, say, in the
> Philippines a century ago or in the villages of Vietnam thirty years ago -
> perhaps Mladic's mob don't quite qualify for a chapter in the annals of the
> western-authored notion of total war because they let some of the kids and
> most of the women go ...
>
> War ain't shiny bandoleers at Waterloo any more, Brad - hasn't been for a
> long time.  War is as bad as it gets.  Including the ones you lot make -
> from Panama to Belgrade, civilians have represented far and away the
> majority of casualties.  And at Dresden, Cologne, Hiroshima, Tokyo, Nagasaki
> and Hanoi they were the express target.

Are these reasons to be depressed at the fall of Milosevic? They are
reasons to be depressed. But I think that the fall of Milosevic does
open up the possibility of a (slightly) better world in the future.

And I would agree with you that one *big* reason the U.S. should be
very cautious about intervening *anywhere* is its typical way of
fighting a war: Dropping a lot of bombs on an area from a great
height to pulverize it, all the while telling the attacked government
to behave. The underlying calculation seems to be that the death of
100 civilians is worthwhile if it avoids the death of one American
soldier.

I remember one of my high school history teachers, a man who had
been, IIRC, a tank platoon commander in the Third Army in France in
1944. He told us once about how he had, without warning, bombarded a
French village they came upon not because they were fired upon, not
because they were about to be fired upon, but just because if he were
a German commander he would have set up an ambush in that village.

The long twentieth century was very dark, especially in its middle
third. But the fall of Milosevic has not made prospects for the
twenty-first century any darker.


Gloomily yours,


Brtad DeLong