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Was NATO's Kosovo Campaign a Success? From Gary Moore (John Eipper, USA, 01/04/19 4:35 am)

Gary Moore writes:

I don't understand why Robert Gard (Jan 3) adds to Brian Blodgett (Jan 2) the points he does in support of his skepticism on Kosovo being a successful NATO mission. There are endless other such points he could have brought up, too, and they have been brought up, by many who wished to leave Kosovo where the Serbs had put it in 1912, under their rule.

I'm surprised General Gard didn't bring up the atrocity argument, since an initial excited report said NATO was responding to 100,000 Kosovo Albanians killed by Serbs in secret massacres--and this had to be quickly scaled down to around 10,000. Moreover, in my quizzical position as investigator for international judges I could look at the individual cases, and I concluded finally that the number was even lower, maybe around 5,000. Kosovo was not Bosnia. And General Gard is right about the provocations made by ethnic Albanian guerrillas, if one needs that tangential argument as well. And he missed the favored argument that the majority of the Serb atrocities occurred only after NATO had started bombing--and so were not a cause of the bombing but a proxy response to it.  (Why do I have to do all this heavy lifting for the skeptics?) And we haven't even gotten to the disastrous pratfall on the Chinese Embassy.

Before the bombing an article by a prominent military man was showcased in the media scoffing that everyone knew you could never win in Kosovo with an air war. Oops. Maybe the writer meant a tidy, textbook air war. The NATO campaign did not make Kosovo a paradise or the Albanians angels, but to say it didn't achieve its goal, and set them free (plus putting a 7,000-strong US base, Bondsteel, into a Muslim cultural redoubt where America will always be loved) is perplexing.

JE comments:  Gary Moore inspires a thought:  Might Kosovo be the one--the only?--Muslim society where the United States is wildly popular?

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