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Date: 20 Aug 1995 22:49:13
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From: doctorb@ix.netcom.com
Subject: Re: http://mediafilter.org/SJ/Pages/sympathy
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From: doctorb@ix.netcom.com (. )
Subject: Re: http://mediafilter.org/SJ/Pages/sympathy

You wrote: 
>
>From: PeaceNet Balkans Desk 
>Subject: Re: http://mediafilter.org/SJ/Pages/sympathy

>a chance to reply to Charles Naef, who says, . .
> >
>The analysis gets really haywire when you say, 

> > Only by punishing
> > all the parties to this bloody conflict might the international 
> >community be able to bring them to the insight that nothing is to be
> >gained by military action.

>Oh good, spank the victims along with the perpetrators, I guess on the 
>grounds that both have interfered with our view of an orderly world.

    The only "orderly view" of the world interfered with is your simple 
viewpoint. Conditions on the ground in Yugoslavia are local and there 
are very few eyes on them. 
    The idea of "letting the Bosnians defend themselves" is 
contradictory. Where are they going to get the armaments to defend 
themselves with? From outside assumedly. So are "they" defending 
"themselves"? Which was the point of the arms embargo: Cut them both 
off so they're reduced to fighting with stones. 
    It didn't work because the US unilaterally broke it 8 months ago 
and started supplying the Croats.         

>Then again, how is the "international community" supposed to punish if
>not by war, or something just as bad (e.g., the starving of the Iraqi
>population in pusuit of the US's lofty international aims? 

    The US embargo of Iraq is producing 500-1000 deaths by starvation 
or disease due to malnutrition per week. It is a gutless, immoral 
strategy. It should be stopped. Enough is enough: they suffered 300,000 
casualties in that "war".
    Now, of the 147,000 Bosniac casualties in the war to call various 
pieces of ground 'Bosnia-Herzegovina" or 'Serpska Republica' how many 
of those were to death by starvation in "concentration" i.e. prison 
camps or from the elements, before the UN stopped this aspect of war? 
And how did the embargo of the former Yugoslavia effect the availabilty 
of foodstuff for Bosniac prisoners? Duuh.

>The Western attempt to weasel out of the recognition that sometimes
>people will go to war to defend themselves is a result of the 
>convenient inability to distinguish aggressors from victims, and an 
>unwilligness to accept that there is a factual, real-world obligation 
>to come to treat victims and agressors differently. IMO, of course. 
>Heaven forbid there might be moral grounds for the necessity to fight 
>in order to protect someone who is being savaged.  -- ed agro (posting 
>from Boston)

    Look, I don't know if you were born yesterday but war is savage. I 
don't think the "international community" has any obligation to win the 
war for the Bosniacs just because they voted a country in to existence 
with the temporary collusion of the Bosnian Croats who, within a year 
of this vote were themselves at war with the Bosnian Muslims.