Bomb Iran?

[jeffmann77]

whiplash said:

I think that they were all white in that conflict.

I think the President should take the country to war when there are vital US interests at stake, not when his "feelings" generate sympathy for one side or the other in a civil war.

We had no business being involved.

Its good to see that genocide and ethnic cleansing are not on your list of reasons to intervene in a conflict.

I don't know where you learn your history, but the serbs committed by far the most heinous atrocities.


We had less reason to invade iraq than we did to intervene in bosnia. There are no vital U.S. interests in either place. There were in Afghanistan, but thats already been forgotten.

[whiplash]

www.michaelparenti.org/MediaAtrocities.html

There was no genocide or ethnic cleansing committed by the Serbs. This was a media campaign to justify NATO actions. Give this link a serious read. The real atrocities in this area of the world were the Nazi Croation persecution of the Serbs in WWII.

I also have some little evidence myself. I am trained in aerial photographic topographical interpretation. I noticed in the newspaper were before and after pictures of what were supposed to be mass graves. I KNOW THESE WERE FAKED, and not a very good job of it.

[jeffmann77]

right....

im glad we have such an expert as yourself here so that you can teach us all that there was no genocide.

will you please call the hague and tell them that their documented casualty count of 100,000 and million + refugees is wrong.

[whiplash]

I have decided to expand on the last point.

The photos were published in an AP story. I have been working with aerial photography for many years. The first think I noticed was the that the area purported to be mass graves were too uniform in texture and lightness. Real earth features, natural or man-made, don't look like this. The kicker though were the shadows from two buildings in the photos. Though the story said that the aerial photos were taken several months apart, THE ANGLE AND LENGTH OF THE SHADOWS ON THE GROUND WERE EXACTLY THE SAME IN BOTH PHOTOS. I even enlarged the photos and measured the shadows using drafting tools to verify this.

The shadows being exactly the same means that one photo is a doctored copy of the other. It cannot be two bonafide photos unless they were taken at exactly the same time of day and exactly at a multiple of a whole year apart from one another. The shadows being the same means that the sun was in exactly the same position in both photos.

[whiplash]

jeffmann77 said:

right....

im glad we have such an expert as yourself here so that you can teach us all that there was no genocide.

will you please call the hague and tell them that their documented casualty count of 100,000 and million + refugees is wrong.

You obviously didn't read the article from my link.

Casualty estimates and refugees don't necessarily equate to genocide and atrocities.

Yes, I am an expert in aerial photographic interpretation.

[whiplash]

jeffmann77 said:

right....

im glad we have such an expert as yourself here so that you can teach us all that there was no genocide.

will you please call the hague and tell them that their documented casualty count of 100,000 and million + refugees is wrong.

I challenge you to find a viable source, in The Hague, or anywhere else that has a casualty count of 100,000. Other sources put the count below 10,000. There were a lot of refugees because NATO was bombing Kosova and Albania was a haven just a hop, skip, and a jump away. Within a month virtually all of the refugees returned.

Here is what The Hague said:

“The final number of bodies uncovered will be less than 10,000 and probably more accurately determined as between two and three thousand.” This was the conclusion reached by The Hague tribunal into war crimes in Kosovo as reported by press spokesman Paul Risley last Thursday.

In three months of exhumations this summer, the tribunal's international forensic experts found 680 bodies at 150 sites. This was in addition to the 2,108 bodies found at 195 sites last year. “By October we expect to have enough evidence to end the exhumations by foreign teams and they will not be necessary next year,” Risley said.


Jeff, you are losing credibility!

[Gracchus]

whiplash said:

jeffmann77 said:

right....

im glad we have such an expert as yourself here so that you can teach us all that there was no genocide.

will you please call the hague and tell them that their documented casualty count of 100,000 and million + refugees is wrong.

I challenge you to find a viable source, in The Hague, or anywhere else that has a casualty count of 100,000. Other sources put the count below 10,000. There were a lot of refugees because NATO was bombing Kosova and Albania was a haven just a hop, skip, and a jump away. Within a month virtually all of the refugees returned.

On June 27, 2005, the United States House of Representatives passed resolution 199 (H. Res. 199).

The resolution states that "the policies of aggression and ethnic cleansing as implemented by Serb forces in Bosnia-Herzegovina from 1992 and 1995 with the direct support of Serbian regime of Slobodan Milosevic and its followers ultimately led to the displacement of more than 2,000,000 people, an estimated 200,000 killed, tens of thousands raped or otherwise tortured and abused, and the innocent civilians of Sarajevo and other urban centers repeatedly subjected to shelling and sniper attacks; meet the terms defining the crime of genocide in Article 2 of the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, created in Paris on December 9, 1948, and entered into force on January 12, 1951."

Is official U.S. legal policy a good enough source?

Here is what The Hague said:

“The final number of bodies uncovered will be less than 10,000 and probably more accurately determined as between two and three thousand.” This was the conclusion reached by The Hague tribunal into war crimes in Kosovo as reported by press spokesman Paul Risley last Thursday.

In three months of exhumations this summer, the tribunal's international forensic experts found 680 bodies at 150 sites. This was in addition to the 2,108 bodies found at 195 sites last year. “By October we expect to have enough evidence to end the exhumations by foreign teams and they will not be necessary next year,” Risley said.

This refers specifically to the Srebrenica massacre, and not the the entire war. The Srebrenica massacre was deemed genocide (as per the Geneva Convention) by the ICJ.

(from wiki)

Despite the evidence of widespread killings, the siege of Sarajevo, mass rapes, ethnic cleansing and torture conducted by different Serb forces which also included JNA (VJ), elsewhere in Bosnia, especially in Prijedor, Banja Luka and Foèa, as well as camps and detention centers, the judges ruled that the criteria for genocide with the specific intent (dolus specialis) to destroy Bosnian Muslims were met only in Srebrenica or Eastern Bosnia.[4] The court concluded that the crimes, including mass killings, rapes, detentions, destruction and deportation, committed during the 1992-1995 war, were "acts of genocide" according to the Genocide Convention, but that these acts did not, in themselves, constitute genocide per se.


I guess the real question here is how you can question the reasons we went to Bosnia, but support the Iraq war.

Unlike Bosnia, there was no genocide going on in Iraq.

There was also no international support.

However, there was no oil in Bosnia. As far as I can tell, this is the deciding factor.

[whiplash]

The source I referred to deals only with Kosovo and the casualty figures are for the entire conflict, not Srebrenica which is in Bosnia and that event occurred about 5 years earlier. And the casualty count you drag up from the earlier Bosnia War includes dead Serbs. Research done by Tibeau and Bijak in 2004 determined a number of 102,000 deaths and estimated the following breakdown: 55,261 were civilians and 47,360 were soldiers. Of the civilians: 16,700 were Serbs while 38,000 were Bosniaks and Croats. Of the soldiers, 14,000 were Serbs, 6,000 were Croats, and 28,000 were Bosniaks.

BTW, why is there a House Resolution dealing with this in 2005? Is it to try to justify US actions in Kosovo? Or maybe it had something to do with the trial of Melosovic.

This off-shoot of the thread was about US participation in the Kosovo affair and the bombing of Belgrade, not about the what happened in Bosnia earlier. Perhaps you don't know the difference between the two. The US never "entered Bosnia". The US never fired a shot in that conflict and NATO was not involved either. The US did help Bosnia by providing intelligence.

If we want to talk about atrocities in the Bosnian civil war there is plenty of evidence agains both participants.

My point was, and still is, the US had no business taking military action against Serbia in the Kosovo war and especially bombing the Serb capitol and other civilian targets.

Graccus, in typically lawyerly fashion, is just muddying the waters here.

[jeffmann77]

whiplash said:

The source I referred to deals only with Kosovo and the casualty figures are for the entire conflict, not Srebrenica which is in Bosnia and that event occurred about 5 years earlier. And the casualty count you drag up from the earlier Bosnia War includes dead Serbs. Research done by Tibeau and Bijak in 2004 determined a number of 102,000 deaths and estimated the following breakdown: 55,261 were civilians and 47,360 were soldiers. Of the civilians: 16,700 were Serbs while 38,000 were Bosniaks and Croats. Of the soldiers, 14,000 were Serbs, 6,000 were Croats, and 28,000 were Bosniaks.

BTW, why is there a House Resolution dealing with this in 2005? Is it to try to justify US actions in Kosovo? Or maybe it had something to do with the trial of Melosovic.

This off-shoot of the thread was about US participation in the Kosovo affair and the bombing of Belgrade, not about the what happened in Bosnia earlier. Perhaps you don't know the difference between the two. The US never "entered Bosnia". The US never fired a shot in that conflict and NATO was not involved either. The US did help Bosnia by providing intelligence.

If we want to talk about atrocities in the Bosnian civil war there is plenty of evidence agains both participants.

My point was, and still is, the US had no business taking military action against Serbia in the Kosovo war and especially bombing the Serb capitol and other civilian targets.

Graccus, in typically lawyerly fashion, is just muddying the waters here.

I thought we were talking about bosnia all along, not kosovo. Thats where the 100,000 came from, and you seemed to agree with it above. NATO was involved in bombing campaigns in both instances

it seems we have been arguing about different things. regardless, the serbs in both cases (kozovo and bosnia) were pretty much trying to push out the people they didnt want and take their land for themselves. Thats called ethnic cleansing. Nice practice for you to defend.

What I can't get over is how you keep going on about how the U.S. shouldnt have gotten involved yet you clearly support invading iraq as well as invading iran! So by your standards, a country that was supporting bosnian-serbs in the ethnic cleansing of other groups in Bosnia, and then doing the same thing in Kosovo, should be allowed to do as it likes. Yet its ok to invade and totally occupy other countries under false pretenses and flat out lies (Iraq).

I also think its important to note, that all US miltary action in Kosovo and Bosnia was under the direction of NATO. It's not like Clinton acted alone (like bush has, sans the support of the british), these operations had the full support of NATO countries. Im ok with giving the euros a free hand to settle affairs in their own backyard, the US sure demands the same for the western hemisphere.

[jeffmann77]

whiplash said:

This off-shoot of the thread was about US participation in the Kosovo affair and the bombing of Belgrade, not about the what happened in Bosnia earlier. Perhaps you don't know the difference between the two. The US never "entered Bosnia". The US never fired a shot in that conflict and NATO was not involved either. The US did help Bosnia by providing intelligence.

"The 1995 NATO bombing in Bosnia and Herzegovina (code-named by NATO Operation Deliberate Force) was a sustained air campaign conducted by the North-Atlantic military organization to undermine the military capability of the Bosnian Serb Army who threatened and attacked UN-designated "safe areas" in Bosnia. The operation was carried out between 30 August and 20 September 1995, involving 400 aircraft and 5000 personnel from 15 nations.

It was initiated by NATO in response to a deteriorating situation. Although planned and approved by the North Atlantic Council in July 1995, the operation was triggered in direct response to the second wave of Markale Massacres on 28 August 1995.

During the campaign, a total of 3515 sorties were flown against 338 individual targets. Aircraft involved in the campaign operated out of Italy and from the U.S. aircraft carriers USS Theodore Roosevelt & USS America. 68% of the bombs used in this campaign were precision-guided munitions. The Bosnian Serb integrated air defence network, comprising of aircraft and surface-to-air missiles (SAMs), presented a high-threat environment to the allied air operations. A French Mirage 2000 was shot down by a Serbian SAM on the 30 August 1995. As a counter to the operation some 400 UNPROFOR peacekeepers were seized by the Bosnian Serb Army and used as human shields at key Bosnian Serb sites.

Also in August, Croatian Forces conducted Operation Storm in the Republic of Serbian Krajina in Croatia, which resulted in the expulsion of the Serb population of several hundred thousand from that area.

The air attacks increased the international pressure on (Milošević’s Serbia/Yugoslavia to take part in negotiations that resulted in the Dayton Peace Agreement."


Whip, "you are losing credibility!"

Next you're going to say that Serbia had nothing to do with any of this, it was Bosnian-Serbs acting alone.

[jeffmann77]

whiplash said:

jeffmann77 said:

right....

im glad we have such an expert as yourself here so that you can teach us all that there was no genocide.

will you please call the hague and tell them that their documented casualty count of 100,000 and million + refugees is wrong.

I challenge you to find a viable source, in The Hague, or anywhere else that has a casualty count of 100,000. Other sources put the count below 10,000. There were a lot of refugees because NATO was bombing Kosova and Albania was a haven just a hop, skip, and a jump away. Within a month virtually all of the refugees returned.

Here is what The Hague said:

“The final number of bodies uncovered will be less than 10,000 and probably more accurately determined as between two and three thousand.” This was the conclusion reached by The Hague tribunal into war crimes in Kosovo as reported by press spokesman Paul Risley last Thursday.

In three months of exhumations this summer, the tribunal's international forensic experts found 680 bodies at 150 sites. This was in addition to the 2,108 bodies found at 195 sites last year. “By October we expect to have enough evidence to end the exhumations by foreign teams and they will not be necessary next year,” Risley said.


Jeff, you are losing credibility!

how many people have to die whip before its important enough for you to want to get involved.

or better yet, how many false claims of wmd's and links to al queda do you have to hear before you invade the wrong country?

[Gracchus]

whiplash said:

BTW, why is there a House Resolution dealing with this in 2005? Is it to try to justify US actions in Kosovo? Or maybe it had something to do with the trial of Melosovic.

Your guess is as good as mine...

This off-shoot of the thread was about US participation in the Kosovo affair and the bombing of Belgrade, not about the what happened in Bosnia earlier. Perhaps you don't know the difference between the two.

I was responding to this:

whiplash said:

There was no genocide or ethnic cleansing committed by the Serbs. This was a media campaign to justify NATO actions.

Jeff mentioned Bosnia right before this. I did not realize you were seperating Serb actions in 1995 from serb actions in 1999.

It is a little confusing that you can isolate these two conflicts from each other, but endorse the argument that Saddam's future actions can be judged by something that happened in the mid-1980's (what he was put on trial for and one of the (weaker) arguments for war in Iraq.

The strikes on Kosovo were ostensibly to prevent any future genocide on the scale of what the Serbs had done in the Bosnian war.

This sounds very familar to the basis the Bush Admin used for invading Iraq (after all the other arguments -- WMDs, Al Qaeda connection, etc. -- fell apart.)

The US never "entered Bosnia". The US never fired a shot in that conflict and NATO was not involved either.

This is simply untrue.

NATO became actively involved in in this conflict in 1994, when it shot down 4 Serbian aircraft.

In '95, NATO began massive airstrikes on Bosnian Serb infrastructure.

My point was, and still is, the US had no business taking military action against Serbia in the Kosovo war and especially bombing the Serb capitol and other civilian targets.

I don't necessarily disagree. I just can't understand how you can square this with support of the war in Iraq.

[whiplash]

jeffmann77 said:

whiplash said:

The source I referred to deals only with Kosovo and the casualty figures are for the entire conflict, not Srebrenica which is in Bosnia and that event occurred about 5 years earlier. And the casualty count you drag up from the earlier Bosnia War includes dead Serbs. Research done by Tibeau and Bijak in 2004 determined a number of 102,000 deaths and estimated the following breakdown: 55,261 were civilians and 47,360 were soldiers. Of the civilians: 16,700 were Serbs while 38,000 were Bosniaks and Croats. Of the soldiers, 14,000 were Serbs, 6,000 were Croats, and 28,000 were Bosniaks.

BTW, why is there a House Resolution dealing with this in 2005? Is it to try to justify US actions in Kosovo? Or maybe it had something to do with the trial of Melosovic.

This off-shoot of the thread was about US participation in the Kosovo affair and the bombing of Belgrade, not about the what happened in Bosnia earlier. Perhaps you don't know the difference between the two. The US never "entered Bosnia". The US never fired a shot in that conflict and NATO was not involved either. The US did help Bosnia by providing intelligence.

If we want to talk about atrocities in the Bosnian civil war there is plenty of evidence agains both participants.

My point was, and still is, the US had no business taking military action against Serbia in the Kosovo war and especially bombing the Serb capitol and other civilian targets.

Graccus, in typically lawyerly fashion, is just muddying the waters here.

I thought we were talking about bosnia all along, not kosovo. Thats where the 100,000 came from, and you seemed to agree with it above. NATO was involved in bombing campaigns in both instances

If you check my posts they were all about Kosovo. You are correct about NATO's involvement. The 100,000 includes casualties on all sides; it hardly represents Serbian genocide.

it seems we have been arguing about different things. regardless, the serbs in both cases (kozovo and bosnia) were pretty much trying to push out the people they didnt want and take their land for themselves. Thats called ethnic cleansing. Nice practice for you to defend.

It's not that simple. The country was Yugoslavia. The Croatians and Bosniaks broke away from the Federation and it erupted into a civil war. Serbs were not trying to push anybody anywhere; they were trying to preserve the Union.

The Kosovo situation was different. Kosovo was, and still is, a province of Serbia. What brought about the tension was a huge influx of ethnic Albanian Muslims. Albania was run by a Stalinist regime, and probably still is a wreck of a country. The immagrants swarmed into Kosovo for better living conditions. They soon set up their own local governments and refused to recognize the soverignty of Serbia.

The Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) was formed in 1996 with the goal of attaining an independent Kosovo. Other KLA factions fought with the goal of uniting all the Albanian populated lands and some simply to defend Kosovo Albanians from Milosevic's regime, but they were joined together by the common objective of defeating what they saw as Serb oppressors.

This was seen by Serbs as a revolt by foreigners occupying Serb territory.

What I can't get over is how you keep going on about how the U.S. shouldnt have gotten involved yet you clearly support invading iraq as well as invading iran!

I never posted that I support invading Iran, I merely predicted that it's likely to happen.

So by your standards, a country that was supporting bosnian-serbs in the ethnic cleansing of other groups in Bosnia, and then doing the same thing in Kosovo, should be allowed to do as it likes. Yet its ok to invade and totally occupy other countries under false pretenses and flat out lies (Iraq).

What I am saying is that the US should not get involved in a civil war where no vital US interest exists. There are vital interests for the US and Europe in the Middle East.

I also think its important to note, that all US miltary action in Kosovo and Bosnia was under the direction of NATO. It's not like Clinton acted alone (like bush has, sans the support of the british), these operations had the full support of NATO countries. Im ok with giving the euros a free hand to settle affairs in their own backyard, the US sure demands the same for the western hemisphere.

"Directed" by NATO? Do you think Poland was calling the shots? The power, and hence the influence, resides with the US.

BTW, NATO is supposed to be a DEFENSIVE alliance. Yet, they went to war with a non-NATO country.

[whiplash]

jeffmann77 said:

whiplash said:

This off-shoot of the thread was about US participation in the Kosovo affair and the bombing of Belgrade, not about the what happened in Bosnia earlier. Perhaps you don't know the difference between the two. The US never "entered Bosnia". The US never fired a shot in that conflict and NATO was not involved either. The US did help Bosnia by providing intelligence.

"The 1995 NATO bombing in Bosnia and Herzegovina (code-named by NATO Operation Deliberate Force) was a sustained air campaign conducted by the North-Atlantic military organization to undermine the military capability of the Bosnian Serb Army who threatened and attacked UN-designated "safe areas" in Bosnia. The operation was carried out between 30 August and 20 September 1995, involving 400 aircraft and 5000 personnel from 15 nations.

It was initiated by NATO in response to a deteriorating situation. Although planned and approved by the North Atlantic Council in July 1995, the operation was triggered in direct response to the second wave of Markale Massacres on 28 August 1995.

During the campaign, a total of 3515 sorties were flown against 338 individual targets. Aircraft involved in the campaign operated out of Italy and from the U.S. aircraft carriers USS Theodore Roosevelt & USS America. 68% of the bombs used in this campaign were precision-guided munitions. The Bosnian Serb integrated air defence network, comprising of aircraft and surface-to-air missiles (SAMs), presented a high-threat environment to the allied air operations. A French Mirage 2000 was shot down by a Serbian SAM on the 30 August 1995. As a counter to the operation some 400 UNPROFOR peacekeepers were seized by the Bosnian Serb Army and used as human shields at key Bosnian Serb sites.

Also in August, Croatian Forces conducted Operation Storm in the Republic of Serbian Krajina in Croatia, which resulted in the expulsion of the Serb population of several hundred thousand from that area.

The air attacks increased the international pressure on (Milošević’s Serbia/Yugoslavia to take part in negotiations that resulted in the Dayton Peace Agreement."


Whip, "you are losing credibility!"

Next you're going to say that Serbia had nothing to do with any of this, it was Bosnian-Serbs acting alone.

I guess I missed the 3 week air campaign. OK, I was wrong on that one. But they didn't bomb civilian targets inside of Serbia, did they?

Please don't speculate about what I might say next.

Jeff, should the US go to war with The Sudan? Plenty of genocide going on there.

[BoNeHeD]

1 carrier battle group: no more conflict in Sudan.