“We all become Serbs in wartime…”is so shockingly racist, I’m still numbed that an intelligent person could write something so unintelligent as that.

I then realized, it just underscored the complete and total demonization of an entire people – the result of the same kind of propagandistic and biased saturation media coverge the author accuses Belgrade of.

Sorry to confuse you, but there are thousands of Serb victims of the Balkan wars, the most recent in Kosovo, that shining light of Clintonesque “humanitarian intervention”.

Those Serbs remaining in Kosovo live in terror each day, guarded and protected by NATO troops. You and Hedges remain silent and ignore their plight. Or maybe being so throughly demonized, they illicit no pity and support. Hey they maybe deserve it.

Serb churches, centuris old, continue to be demolished and razed by Albanians, entire Serb communities destroye and attacks continue unabated, and all under the watchful eye of NATO.

Your statement implies that Serbs had no victims, were the sole perpetrators of crimes and as such must bear all the blame.

The fact that all responses to this horrid and unfair statement did not even pick up on it and accepted it as a statement of fact, is very distressing indeed.

P.P.S. ‘Liberated by war’ was not a good choice of words as a description of post World War II Europe.

But nevertheless war was the only viable moral choice in that circumstance to stop Adolph Hitler.

And the subsequent debacle of Vietnam doesn’t erase the fact that the choice for military action must be still be taken at times.

For moral and not merely geopolitical reasons.

Phil

P.S. It may seem that I must be anti-Lydon in my points about the Left and Iraq but I am not.

I am still a big fan of Chris Lydon and greatly appreciate his work on the radio and also here.

**But Chris, you also opposed the War in Kosovo to stop Milosevich.

Chris I’m sorry, but I think a lot of people of your generation are so scarred by the Vietnam experience that you lose perspective when it comes to military action.

I have my own scars from the Vietnam era, having seen my father off to War at age 9 and having lost my Uncle in that war.

But I also lived in cold War Europe in the 1960’s and saw the late stages of the rebuilding of a land liberated by war.

Sorry, but in the 21st century (and perhaps although I hope not the 22nd century) there will still be a moral and just place for war in the human experience.

It just simply ain’t all Vietnam.

Respectfully from one generation to another,

Phil Murray

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I’m a bit dissapointed with the American and European Left on the Iraq issue.

I don’t expect all Leftists to support the war (although 50% of American Leftists did end up supporting it– not that NPR would ever acknowledge it– although MSNBC has).

But I am dissapointed in the kind of muddled and opportunistic logic that so stridently opposed the removal of a monster like Hussein ‘on moral grounds’.

Not to mention the patheticly manipulative ploy of blaming the U.S. for allowing looting to occur after the fall of a totalitarian regime in Iraq.

There was looting in Afghanistan too, not to metion Russia when the Soviet Empire collapsed.

Such manipulative ploys to find some kind of dark lining in the silver cloud of victory in Iraq (any dark lining, no matter how absurd) make the Left look trivial and foolish.

What concerns me even more, however, is that this segment of the anti-war Left has, in it’s myopia over Iraq, succeeded in marginalizing the Left in general in the U.S.

And this is a real tragedy. The Left has much to offer the American political debate, but having marginalized itself in Congress over Iraq and further, as it threatens to further marginalize itself by taking the low road on the post-war period in Iraq, the Left risks a great deal on matters of education, the environment, social security and health care in the U.S.A.

I hate to say it, especially since my own father was a Vietnam veteran and my adopted Uncle was killed in Vietnam, but Vietnam, folks, was a long time ago and we are no longer living in the same world.

Thats not to say that the lessons of Vietnam should be forgotten. But neither does it mean that the Vietnam paradigm should be forced over every foreign policiy issue from now to infinity either.

The Left is in a time of peril that it does not fully recognize. It must choose carefully between rigid orthodoxy on the one hand and a flexible pragmatism on the other in a post 9/11 world.

If it fails to make the right choice, so much that is precious and vital in the American Left agenda will be sidelined for decades to come.

Phil Murray

Mary from Waltham.
“I agree that many artifacts may have been removed from the museum early in the war, if not before, by insiders. But that’s irrelevant. The question is: should the military have ATTEMPTED to protect the museum? ”

So the military, committed to an ongoing series of battles, should have made a GESTURE? I think you confuse Waltham with Baghdad.

adamsj
“If someone came to Atlanta and completely disabled the police department here, wouldn’t that someone be responsible for the foreseeable consequences of their actions?”

Disabling the police? Do you mean the sort of thing like blocking streets (ambulances, fire and police vehicles) by lying down and locking to each other and shutting down downtowns with masses of demonstrators? Granted the police are not “completely disabled,” by civil disobedience but the principle should stand in measure, don’t you think?

I agree that many artifacts may have been removed from the museum early in the war, if not before, by insiders. But that’s irrelevant. The question is: should the military have ATTEMPTED to protect the museum? I think any sensible battle plan would have incorporated such protection when it became clear that we had won, very much sooner than it eventually happened. But while there may at first have been a US battle plan for Baghdad, I think it was abandoned.

The New Yorker this week has a “Letter from Baghdad” with a first-hand account of the city’s fall. He recounts seeing Baghdad’s only working hospital pillaged by looters. He did not just watch, however – he and others collared a small group of Marines and without much effort convinced them to throw a cordon around the place. The soldiers had no idea where the hospital was, and were so confused by the situation that they initially set up with guns pointing AT the hospital, as if they were attacking it.

Such accounts indicate that the fall of Baghdad was executed in an ad-hoc, unplanned way. Who knows, somewhere there may have been a military plan that laid out hospitals, museums, etc. for protection, but it looks like this was junked in favor of speed when resistance turned out to be minimal. I’m betting that there was no overall coordination specifying that oil ministries were to be protected and hospitals were not; I wouldn’t be surprised to hear that field commanders were empowered to make these decisions, and very few of them had great locale intelligence.

Was it right take over swiftly (necessitating much chaos), as opposed to the Brits’ more deliberate pace in Basra? I have no clue, but I do know that Basra has 1.3M inhabitants, as opposed to Baghdad’s 5M. That may have been a factor.

You’re stretching on a couple of points.

1) There was very little internal displacement in this war. The “flight of Iraqi vermin to Syria” is just that. We are only concerned with the upper-echelon regime thugs. On the face of it, you appear to be sympathizing with murderers and torturers.

2) The Baghdad museum was closed to the public for some years prior to the war and all of the most precious antiquities were locked away in vaults. Now, who do you suppose got into those vaults? Was it the people with the keys or looters with pipes and chairs and the like?

Now, the invasion has not been without its flaws, but can you honestly hold the US military to the standard of perfection. I submit to you that saving thousands and thousands of Iraqis from murder, starvation and torture counts for a hell of a lot more to them than does saving a stone tablet, even if it does happen to be the oldest recording of Hammurabi’s Code. To opine otherwise puts you in the camp of those who view Iraqis as “sub-human, a played-out people.”

The incoherence of this post should be an alert to the Medical School that it is possible for human beings to live with completely interchangeable brains and colons.

What’s better, Richard, is protecting vital resources in a nation we’ve made helpless.

As to those clay pots–it’s always painless to trash and mock what belongs to someone else. Perhaps if people were smashing up your culture, you’d keep the same detached attitude.