Friday, December 5, 2014
The Stupidest American Interventions?
I'm probably going to have to go with, "getting the country involved in conflicts that have quite literally been running roughshod for longer than the U.S.A. has even been a nation (the Balkans, the Middle-East, Africa, etc.)" - the fact that they normally have nothing to do with our national security, often involve cultures manifestly different from own own, etc.. THOSE I find particularly perplexing.
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Yeah, Clinton did take us to war against Serbia (in the Balkans). The difference between this and Bush in Iraq is that Serbia, unlike Iraq, never attacked us in any way.
However, there were noticable and positive results (Serbia's occupation of and slaughter of slaughter of hundreds of thousands in Kosovo, Bosnia, and Croatia.
I don't recall being attacked by
Iraq? Given that the Croatian
Ustasha out-Nazied the Nazis in
WW2, and the bad blood between
the Catholic Croatians and Orthodox Serbs (with several
thousand Muslims in the middle, as well as the relative calm there now vs the mess in Iraq,
I'd give him a higher grade than
VP Cheney.
The Yugoslavian civil war was a literal bloodbath with atrocities on all sides (the Serbs were the victims of ethnic cleansing by both the Bosnian Muslims and the neo Nazi Croatians) and the art of picking sides is always rather dicey.......Hopefully, that calm will continues there.
And, yes, Clinton was far preferable to Cheney (at least the Cheney 2.0)
Will: Serbia was by far the worst perpetrator of it. It was hardly a "civil war": it was a holocaust visited by Serbia upon Kosovo, Bosnia, and Croatia. Once Serbia retreated to its own national boundaries, it was over.
And "the calm continues".
BB: Saddam Hussein, in an aggressive violation of the cease-fire agreements, attacked UK and US peacekeepers hundreds of times, after the cease fire, during the peace.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fNqHfIugmaU - there are always two side, dmarks, and, as they say, truth is always the first casualty.
There is a long convoluted squalid history in that area.
I remember these claims, and they didn't hold up. They come from the same fringe conspiracy theories that claim that Saddam was great hero in Iraq who never killed anyone.
I remember talking to Serbs at the time, and the language they used was quite fanatical.
Now Serbia is inside its own borders (as it should be), and things HAVE rather quieted down.
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As for stupidest American interventions, how about Somalia, and Haiti (any of them)? Perhaps not as costly in lives and treasure as some, but still...
"This organized anti-Serb and pro-Muslim propaganda should cause anyone believing in democracy and free speech serious concern. It recalls Adolf Hitler's propaganda against the Allies in World War II. Facts are twisted and, when inconvenient, disregarded. The selectivity in reporting and comment is far too blatant to be accidental." Yohanan Ramati, director of the Jerusalem Institute for Western Defense - Remember that report/picture about a Muslim being starved in a Serb concentration camp. The dude was actually a Serb who had been arrested by the Serbs for looting and he was emaciated not from a lack of food but because he was suffering with advanced tuberculosis. Couple that with the bogus bread line massacre, the bogus 60,000 rapes story and, yeah, this whole good guys versus bad guys narrative really loses me.
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