01/21/2004: 
Criminally Absurd
Clark VS. Bush, Jr., or a Tale of Two Kosovos
I have been going around lately trying to remind everbody about what Ret. Gen. Wesley Clark did when he was Supreme Allied Commander of NATO in Bosnia and Kosovo. In early 1999, President Bill Clinton acted unilaterally by ordering the bombing of Kosovo. Over the course of 90 days or so, US aircraft bombed the shit out of a small country because a larger multinational body was unable to bring themselves to do something about the genocide that was occurring there. We bombed the civilian population of Kosovo with depleted uranium artillery shells and then we stopped. No American lives were lost. You go General Wesley Clark.
Then I realized something: NATO. North Atlantic Treaty Organization. A remnant of the time when the United States occupied half of Europe. We split a country led by a genocidal facist dictator in half and created a new one- West Germany. And don't forget about Japan and all those Pacific Islands.
At least this time we are only trying to occupy two countries at once. It's not like we haven't done this bomb and colonize thing many times before. Of course it didn't work in Vietnam, but Mexico, Germany, Japan, South Korea, The Phillipines and the European Union to name a few seem to be doing just fine. So what's going to happen in Iraq?
2 Annotations Submitted
Thursday the 22nd of January, prof_booty noted:
i think unilateral is a subjective term to santo26. old europe begged us for years to take out ol' slobodan.
Thursday the 22nd of January, rafuzo noted:
Actually, it's the "North Atlantic Treaty Organization". The only reason we "split" Germany is because the Russians had the other half and Truman was too chickenshit to take Stalin to task. But many of the military installations (including the base at Rammstein) are still there, and NATO now comprises a large number of former Soviet-bloc countries.
It didn't work in Vietnam because even the Presidents didn't want to go war. (Incidentally, we went there in the first place to protect someone else's colony - France.)
And about unilateralism, we had more nations go into Iraq with us than Kosovo. Old Europe didn't want us going in because they didn't want us jeopardizing their old oil contracts. Who cares if Saddam kills 12 million Iraqis? They're brown people.
