Re: THE BIG IF

Colin is convincing.  Another wrong doesn't make a right.  NATO is an
imperialist aggressor.   But is it not a difficult question for the Left
about what a good position would have been prior to the bombing campaign in
Kosovo?  (And please, not too long before that, or we go too far down the
road of "what ifs," to the point that the situation wouldn't have arisen if
we could have done x, y, and z.)   Or should we bother to conjecture and
simply stick to what is?

Two observations:
One,  as many seem to think, in view of worse atrocities around the world
that NATO could have become involved in, the organization is simply acting
to legitimate its existence now that the Cold War is over.

Two, this ordeal shows the fantastic weakness of the US vis-a-vis the
periphery.

We first saw the fact of US weakness with Vietnam: the US couldn't even
subdue a very poor peripheral state, though the US state could get away with
the political cost of 50,000 US lives (while many didn't even care about the
millions of Vietnamese lives lost).

Then, the US-Iraqi war showed that the US couldn't even afford the war on
its own: like a Mafioso operation, the US found an enemy against which  the
"core interests" needed protecting, and made them pay up, Japan in
particular.  And politically too, due to the need for financing, the US
couldn't go it alone.  Domestically, the US was even weaker: Americans would
only tolerate the war if they were kept in the dark about what was going on,
and, quite happy in their ignorance, if the war was made entertaining with
smart bombs, etc.  What the US public wouldn't tolerate, is a large number
of casualties, so the war had to be a high-tech orchestration of  missiles
and neat looking stealth bombers.

But now the US can't even have a ground war with  US casualties.  Although
again Americans don't seem to care as much about the loss of lives of the
"enemy," it has been pointed out that abroad and even here there is mounting
pressure to stop the bombing.   Which means that from now on, wars will be
more politically difficult:  even bombing campaigns will be subject to great
scrutiny.  Indeed, this is all the more true in view of the claims by NATO
leaders that this is allegedly a war for a humanitarian cause, in contrast
to the blatant greed behind the Iraqi war and insanity of Vietnam.  What a
contrast!

Now that wars are conducted by coalition, the US has become further
constrained by opposition within these coalitions and from outsiders, like
China which grows in military and economic power quickly these days.



elson
----- Original Message -----
From: colin s. cavell <cscpo@polsci.umass.edu>
To: WORLD SYSTEMS NETWORK <wsn@csf.colorado.edu>
Sent: Thursday, May 27, 1999 3:01 PM
Subject: Re: THE BIG IF


>
> Richard Ragland props up a straw man argument which rests upon conjecture
> of what the US will propagate about Kosovo if its upcoming invasion
of.......