INTERVENTIONIST POLICY SAVES LIVES, STOPS WARS

Another excellent column by Roger Cohen, entitled "Score One for Interventionism," appeared in the New York Times. Cohen is a journalist of exceptional integrity and has been covering events in Bosnia since early 1990s. Here is a short excerpt and a link to his latest column:

"Like many of my generation, I became an interventionist in Bosnia. Sickened by carnage, and by the lies and ignorance of Western politicians who prolonged the carnage, I understood that caution — or more accurately hypocrisy masquerading as prudence — can be as criminal as recklessness.

A war with very specific reasons and equally specific crimes committed overwhelmingly by Serbian forces was dressed up as a millennial conflict beset by Balkan fog and moral equivalency in order for craven Western leaders to justify an inaction that killed.

So I sat in Sarajevo and fumed and tried to pierce the fog with words. I tried to say who was killing whom beneath the gaze of blue-helmeted United Nations “peacekeepers” and below the fatuous flights of NATO planes patrolling empty skies. Was Sarajevo to be another Munich?

We had been morally numbed by the Cold War. It seemed as inevitable as the earth’s rotation. Mutual assured destruction was ugly; it was also comforting in its limitation of choice. Now, with the demise of the Soviet Union, an ascendant West was faced with barbarism on European soil and had the disquieting latitude to act. It prevaricated. People died.

NATO finally bombed Serbian positions in 1995. The war ended soon after. The alliance bombed again in Kosovo in 1999. Soon after, Slobodan Milosevic’s murderous dominion ended. Western intervention in a cruel war in Sierra Leone led to the end of that conflict. Liberal interventionist had become the proud badge of a generation discovering the good war." Continue Reading by Visiting the New York Times >>>