Another war, a different situation entirely

Hahaha Rascal Run Away Run Away. Rascal is LIAR, Clinton is a LIAR, Robin Cook is a LIAR. I guess Bush is in very good company!!! Germany has a pre-emptive policy, France has one now America under Bush does too. Clinton acted without UN approval, Germany did, France did, UK did, NATO did Oh dear Bush is in good company again. Too bad that the US will never compare to Germany in terms of nuclear, chemical and missile wmds sold to Iraq. Can you say 50%, incredible hahahahaha!

Fred, you’re reading thw World Socialist Web?

Apparently the war crimes tribunal is not convinced.
UN court will not dismiss Milosevic genocide charges

Nice try Richardm but here is what your article says…

[quote]ISN SECURITY WATCH - The Hague-based International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) has dismissed a motion to acquit Slobodan Milosevic of charges of genocide, ahead of the start of the defense portion of his trial on 5 July. Two of three ICTY judges on Wednesday found that there was enough evidence relating to events in Kosovo, Croatia, and Bosnia and Herzegovina during the 1990s wars to pursue charges of genocide against Milosevic. The judges said they had found sufficient evidence to show that genocide had been committed in the Bosnian municipalities of Brcko, Prijedor, Sanski Most, Srebrenica, Bijeljina, Kljuc, and Bosanski Novi, and that Milosevic had played a role in those events. Appearing in court on Thursday, for an audition on the modalities on his defense, Milosevic said:

Can you count and say how much is 50% of 0? hahahaha!

May I just add that calling a politician on being a liar is like playing basketball with a retarded kid and calling him for double dribble.

Rascal asked fred to supply a link for the following quote

[quote]
In Kosovo, the American people were told by the Clinton administration that the U.S. had to act through NATO because hundreds of thousands of

Here’s a US State Dept. report. Maybe all lies. Who knows?
The Ethnic Cleansing of Kosovo
Fact Sheet based on information from U.S. Government sources,
released June 4, 1999

[quote=“butcher boy”]Also from all of the quotes so far, Clinton seems to have said that many were ethnically cleansed in the Bosnia (and Croatia to a lesser extent) and that this was beginning to happen in Kosovo. I haven

Thanks TM

Now just a few more querries for anyone with the knowledge. Fred’s source claims only 2 - 3000 deaths, but doesn’t mention anything about internaly displaced/those driven from their homes. I’m figureing this figure could easily be much higher and would still count as ethnic cleansing. Could this be a case of apples and oranges in terms of the figures?

(PS a disclaimer, I never said the invasion of Iraq was a bad idea and that telling the SC to fuck off was wrong, my beef with Iraq is mainly the fuck up after the initial success but I am interested in this Kosovan topic as is)

FS and his chums make out Clinton is an evil man. I wouldn’t disagree, just as I wouldn’t disagree with any US president being evil.
If any republican had been in power he would have done the same as clinton - acted on the interests of the people who bankrolled him or belonged to the same secret society. They are the same people who are making gains and awarded contracts (with no tenders) in Iraq.

War is a racket. The excuses they use like freedom and democracy to justify war and terror is almost hilarious. They go in because they benefit.

It’s the same all the time, it doesn’t matter who is in the white house, the money men shysters will welcome war and make profits…

To Fred, Rascal etc.

Here’s a new idea. What about the fact that both presidents lied about their reasons for going to war?

Rascal, Clinton’s reasons were a bit suspect and simplistic - Serbia = bad, everyone else = good. Read any books by the journalist Misha Glenny for a more ambivalent view of the whole Balkans issue. Although I think most people would agree that the situation is better now than before 1999. Although we have the Serbian people to thank for that for overthrowing Milosevic.

Fred, so do you think that America shouldn’t have bombed Yugoslavia? Or is your problem that he didn’t get UN approval? Or that they weren’t a threat? Or is that France and Germany agreed therefore there must be something wrong with it? You don’t say what you think should have happened.

Maybe the point is that both wars are examples of American presidents using suspect intelligence (and I’m being nice here) to jusitify wars that seem to have another hidden context. In Yugoslavia for diverting attention from Lewinsky and/or reasserting American involvement in eastern Europe, and Iraq - oil/Daddy’s work, or maybe just got the whole thing wrong.

BB:

Try again. I clicked on the site and it took me right to the article. Sorry but I think that you are wrong. Look toward the end of the article.

Ah Rascal:

Such a poor loser. So unbecoming of you. That link? Why here it is… How remiss of me to forget to include it…

dod.gov/news/Jun1999/n06031999_9906031.html

Right from the U.S. Dept of Defense which quoted Clinton’s official speech in full. Check it out. Clinton Lied.

What do you have to say now?

Also, Rascal:

You know full well that pretending to be MFGR won’t help you win an argument. The Germans sold Saddam 50% of his chemical weapons equipment, nuclear and missile wmds prior to the First Gulf War. It is all there in black and white at www.iraqwatch.org. Sorry but you already know this so 50% of 0 is not 0 because there was no 0. There were a lot of sales of wmds to Saddam prior to the First Gulf War and there is a record of which countries and companies sold what and when and Germany was by far the biggest offender this is why Iran is suing your country and no one else’s.

Music:

I have never made the argument that you seem to be implying that we have. Rascal has always berated and criticized the US and Bush for the following points. Please reread the entire thread and you will see and understand this.

  1. Bush and the US were wrong for setting a dangerous precedent, i.e. pre-emptive action. Well, once I showed Rascal that Germany and France had committed themselves to pre-emptive action in a treaty that both signed in Luxembourg in June 2003, he didn’t have much to say about that because he only wanted to talk about Bush and the US. Not fair said I.

  2. Then it was that it should have gone through the UN or it was a violation of “international law.” Yet I showed Rascal that France has repeatedly acted in Africa without “the UN’s approval” and that France and Germany had no problems with the lack of UN approval for actions in Bosnia and Kosovo. AND the US was the prime security guarantor in the Persian Gulf. We are ultimately responsible for the body bags of our soldiers. How many of them are going to be UN soldiers in any “real” conflict? Finally, Saddam was obligated to prove he did not have wmds and 17 UN resolutions demanded that he do so. He did not as everyone admits. We now know that he was interested in keeping his programs alive and restarting them as soon as sanctions were over and we also know that he deliberately lied so that people would still think he had them to protect himself from Iran. Okay. All fine and dandy but given that every intelligence agency in the world believed that he had such systems, why give Bush such a hard time about his decision when we are ultimately responsible for anything that happens there not some bureaucrat in Paris or Berlin?

  3. Bush lied and misled the American people. Yet, I have shown that no only did Bush “lie” but then Clinton “lied” and Cook “lied” and it was not a question of “lying” as Tigerman has pointed out in other threads but not having the “true facts” at the time that a decision was required. If this high standard is to be met, then Tigerman has correctly pointed out that even Rascal has “lied.” Yet Rascal is not having any of this. He wants to tar and feather Bush and he will stop at nothing to do so. His claims of a principled stance are therefore clearly nothing but cheap partisan mudslinging.

That is the tenor of the argument and neither Tigerman nor myself are berating Clinton for “lying” in this situation. We are merely pointing out to Rascal and also to Traveller who claimed that Clinton never said he “knew” about atrocities in Kosovo that they are wrong. Clinton said he “knew” that atrocities were taking place and therefore the “lying charge” cannot simply be laid at Bush’s door. You have hit the nail exactly on the head. We are wondering why Bush’s actions alone generate such outrage when there are so many other examples of similar behavior (not necessarily to be blamed) around. Do you understand why Bush should be treated with so much extra contempt and censure? I sure don’t.

Fred, if you are going to summarise a different persons position, then at least have the decency to do it accurately and fairly, otherwise you lay yourself open to a description of contempt. I did not say that Clinton had never said, i asked for proof that he had said such things, quite a difference really wouldn’t you say.

Anyway, for Clinton to have lied would require sunstantiating evidence that ethnic cleansing had not taken place, would it not, otherwise your argument falls a little flat.

Why should people not treat Bush with so much contempt, just because you cannot see what a poor excuse for a human being he is, does not mean that the rest of us cant. :laughing: :laughing:

Traveller:

This is what you wrote.

[quote]And some people never learn to quit. As usual your statement is an oversimplification of the argument and biased in your favour also.

Had Clinton used such terms as WE KNOW and WE CAN PROVE then the comparison you are now trying to draw might be valid, care to prove that comparison. Thought not !!! [/quote]

I supplied the following quote by Clinton…

[quote]We know that by the time our air strikes began, the Serb
campaign of executions and expulsions had already started," he
said. Milosevic was indicted in part because of a massacre of
ethnic Albanians in Kosovo that occurred in January – two
months before NATO bombing started March 24. Using similar
tactics in Croatia and Bosnia earlier this decade, Milosevic
loyalists drove 2.5 million people from their homes and are
believed to have killed about 250,000 of them, Clinton noted.[/quote]

Explain please how my comments are irrelevant or that the tenor of your argument has been mischaracterized. Case Closed.

Fred

This bit [quote] “We know that by the time our air strikes began, the Serb
campaign of executions and expulsions had already started,” he
said. Milosevic was indicted in part because of a massacre of
ethnic Albanians in Kosovo that occurred in January – two
months before NATO bombing started March 24. Using similar
tactics in Croatia and Bosnia earlier this decade, Milosevic
loyalists drove 2.5 million people from their homes and are
believed to have killed about 250,000 of them, Clinton noted.
[/quote] is from dod.gov/news/Jun1999/n06031999_9906031.html

However this bit [quote]In Kosovo, the American people were told by the Clinton administration that the U.S. had to act through NATO because hundreds of thousands of

US troops killed as a result of Clinton’s “lie” - 0
US troops killed as a result of Bush’s “poor intelligence” - 1,200 and counting.

BB:

Sorry, here you go. Thought it was the other one that Rascal was questioning since the “lie” was that Clinton “knew.” The second site merely details the kinds of arguments that Clinton had put forward with great frequency regarding the need to intervene in Kosovo, but the exact quote is from the site below…

aim.org/aim_report/A1478_0_4_0_C/

So can anyone show me how many people died in the genocide that Clinton “lied” about to “justify” American action in Kosovo? Where are the wmds in Iraq we are asked? Well, where are the dead bodies in Kosovo I would like to ask?

Finally, Richardm, if Clinton can “lie” to justify action in Kosovo because of the humanitarian reasons for doing so and no bodies were discovered, then what are the Democrats and Lefties who supported this iniative doing complaining now? So no wmds were discovered though we all “know” now that Saddam fully intended to restart his wmd programs after sanctions collapsed. So given instead that we found the hundreds of thousands of bodies that justified the action in Kosovo, why isn’t the same justification acceptable for Bush in Iraq?

We are not the ones who started this debate. Rascal claimed to be concerned about principles. This is clearly not the case or he would not have let pre-emptive precedents, and acting outside the UN imprimatur fall by the wayside. Now, we are stuck with the “Bush lied” motif, but we have not only proved that Rascal himself “lied” but that Clinton “lied” and Cook, the foreign minister who famously resigned in the lead up to the Iraq War “lied” so we really must ask ourselves if people like Rascal were willing to go to war to save lives in Kosovo that were not even threatened, why were they not willing to do so in Iraq where the proof exists in mass quantities. Forget about wmds and the fact that they were not discovered, I am perfectly willing to forgive Cook and Clinton for their “lies” regarding the need to intervene in Kosovo. But what about the dead bodies in Iraq? Why are these hundreds of thousands of deaths, the numbers of which were used to justify action in Kosovo not acceptable in the case of Iraq? I think that Rascal’s “lies” are having some very difficult questions put to them and I hope that he would start by telling us the “truth” and the “real facts” as to why he is so anti-Bush. And I can guarantee you that it has nothing to do with pre-emptive treaties that Germany and France have signed (Luxembourg 2003) nor weapons to Saddam (Germany sold 50% of Saddam’s chemical, missile and nuclear) nor is it even that Bush “lied” but that Rascal is a rabidly confused Bush basher with nary a principle to buttress his arguments.

Fred

Thanks :notworthy:

Fred, you evidently do not support President Clinton’s decision to join NATO peacekeepers in the former Republic of Yugoslavia. Perhaps you think the US should have sat back and let NATO do all the work.

The slaughter began with the first death in Slovenia in June 1991; it became bloodily entrenched in embryonic Croatia, where the lovely Danube city of Vukovar was levelled by the Serbs into the dust of its own stone. It moved into newly independent Bosnia when, during summer 1992, a hurricane of violence raged across villages, towns, a gulag of concentration camps and the capital, Sarajevo, as Serbs set about the ‘ethnic cleansing’ mainly of Bosnia’s Muslims. Three bloody years and some 200,000 deaths later, the Bosnian chapter culminated in the massacre of 8,000 Muslims in one day at Srebrenica in July 1995. Next came Kosovo, another sweep of violence and, finally, intervention by Nato.

In March 1999 Mr Milosevic ordered the then police chief, Vlajko Stojiljkovic, to “erase any tracks” that could compromise the regime. In Bosnia, Clea Koff dug up bodies that had their hands tied behind their backs, that were blindfolded and that had been shot multiple times. That evidence was presented at the trial of the former leader of Yugoslavia, Slobodan Milosevic, in The Hague. Orders to dig up about a thousand corpses from Kosovo and rebury them on government-owned property near Belgrade came from Milosevic himself, according to Dusan Mihajlovic, Serbia’s new interior minister, who holds recently discovered notes of a secret meeting.

It is an international crime against humanity to kill extra-judiciously and it is also a crime against humanity to bury dead in mass graves. Whether Milosevic will be found guilty of crimes against humanity is still in question. Recently in his trial, an expert commission ‘What we did find, however, was evidence to the contrary. Milosevic was very upset when he learnt about the massacres [in Srebrenica].’ I’d be upset to find 8,000 people cleansed on my watch, too.

News stories on Yugolslavian war crimes seem to be hard to find. Does anyone have a good link about current news and current body counts? Here’s a story from April 1999, just before the NATO invasion in June:

[quote]The butcher’s lorry in the photograph is nondescript and painted white. Still visible on the driver’s cabin is the name of Pec, a town in western Kosovo. Dragged from the river Danube, its front wheels are still in the water. The credit for the photograph reads: “Serbian ministry of interior”.

This is the refrigerator lorry that brought the remains of 86 Kosovan Albanians to Serbia in April 1999. On its way to an undisclosed destination, for the disposal of the bodies, it broke down. Concrete blocks were hurriedly loaded in with the bodies, and the container was sunk in the river. But those responsible underestimated the strength of the river and the insulation material on the inside of the container.

They even forgot to deflate the tyres. The truck soon came bobbing to the surface. Local police hauled it ashore, and in the course of that operation, the back doors burst open, to reveal the gruesome cargo.

These bodies were immediately declared a state secret. Now they have been unearthed from a mass grave beneath a police shooting range in a Belgrade suburb, Batajnica. Hardly a day goes by without new details being published in the Serbian media of this case, and others. [/quote]

Two:

I understand the situation in Croatia very clearly since my brother-in-law is from there and I used to spend many summers on the coast of Dalmatia and still do. BUT we are not talking about Bosnia here. We are talking about Kosovo and 86 is not a genocide. Clinton claimed that there were tens and hundreds of thousands of people affected and this simply was not true. The truth is that a few thousand were killed and several hundred of these were Serbian. In addition, there were signs that the Kosovars were militantly attempting to destabilize the region and using the media as patsies in their quest to detach Kosovo from Serbia.

BUT still the ultimate point to all this is that posters like Rascal cannot stomach that Bush lied about wmds in Iraq while making nary a protest about Clinton’s “lies” Cook’s “lies” and hell even Rascal’s own “lies.” Given that the supposed atrocities being committed in Kosovo (which turned out to NOT be true) were adequate justification for action, why not for Iraq? Forget about the lack of wmds, the hundreds of thousands of bodies being discovered should put paid to that counter argument. What I would like to know from Rascal is why he is only concerned about Bush’s “lies” and given the non-UN approved action in Bosnia and Kosovo and given that the US Congress did not even approve it, what is his real beef with Bush and US foreign policy today? The Germans more than anyone started the whole conflict by forcing the EU to recognize the independence of Croatia and Slovenia in 1992. This sparked the conflict. At the time, the vote would have been 14 against and only Germany for. They managed to get this changed so the EU voted yes. Why is Germany not being hauled before the court of world opinion for starting a conflict which resulted in hundreds of thousands of deaths and millions of refugees and why are Germans like Rascal (after remaining mute about their country selling Saddam most of his chemical, nuclear and missiles) so agitated about Bush’s action in Iraq which stopped a conflict that had killed millions. To date, even with the insurgency and violence only 24,000 Iraqis have lost their lives and the American troops are hardly the ones to blame for the deaths that result from terrorist car bombs. So what really is Rascal’s beef? Really? Do you see it? Or is Rascal just another “liar” like Bush, Clinton, Cook and every intelligence agency in the West?