GgCrtz 🇳🇬 retweetet
Every time NATO bombs a country, the conversation immediately becomes about how terrible that country's leader was.
Milošević. Saddam. Gaddafi. Assad.
The monster is always pre-positioned. Always ready. So you never have to discuss the 78 days of missiles falling on Belgrade.
On bridges. On hospitals. On water treatment plants. On the Chinese embassy. On a television station.
Sixteen journalists killed at their desks. Called "collateral damage" from 15,000 feet.
"Failed communist state."
Yugoslavia had a higher standard of living than most of Eastern Europe. Free movement. Free healthcare. Free education. Western trade relationships. Its own independent foreign policy that defied Moscow.
Not exactly the profile of a failed state.
"Made up of different cultures."
So is Switzerland. So is Belgium. So is the United States, spectacularly so.
Diversity didn't kill Yugoslavia. Western interference, IMF structural adjustment gutting its economy through the 1980s did. And a very deliberate Western strategy of recognizing breakaway republics before any political settlement existed.
Germany recognized Croatia in December 1991. Unilaterally. Against the advice of the UN Secretary General. That recognition was gasoline.
And since we're doing the full history:
Operation Storm, 1995. Croatia ethnically cleansed over 200,000 Serbs from Krajina in days. The largest single ethnic cleansing in Europe since World War II. U.S. operational support. General Wesley Clark helped plan it.
You didn't hear much about it because it was the right kind of ethnic cleansing, conducted by the right kind of people.
NATO didn't bomb Serbia to stop Milosevic. They had cozy relationships with far worse leaders that same decade, in Saudi Arabia, in Egypt, in Indonesia, where the bodies were still warm.
They bombed Serbia because a European country was resisting the architecture of the post-Cold War order, and that required an example.
Same logic as Vietnam. Different accent.
My point was never about whether Yugoslavia was a paradise. It was about power and the ability to respond to power.
Yugoslavia had none. It absorbed 78 days and surrendered.
Iran absorbed 48 hours and made Trump publicly beg China for help.
That's the only comparison I was making.
You can despise Milošević and still recognize that NATO had no UN mandate, no legal authority, and no right to bomb a European capital while calling it "humanitarianism."
Those two things are not in conflict.
SunnyAnderson@SunnyCAnderson
@nxt888 Your posts are always very smart, and to the point, this is the first complete miss. Yu was a failed communist state, made up out of 6 republis,different in culture,religion,and development. Milosevic was a mass murderer. Serbia attacked and killed thousands of Croats and others!
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