Medhat,

The KLA, and individual Albanians, are not a legitimate government. Serbia/Yugoslavia and Nazi Germany and Stalanist Russia were and are are legitimate established governments.  All atrocities are, by definition, wrong, but the crimes of a recognized legitimate government are enormously more heinous than that of individuals.

    The US, NATO, and the regrettably pathetic UN, do not intervene everywhere because there are limits to what  good people can do.  A true World Government would have the armed police power to do so universally. Let us all work to that end.

    Next, I fear, must I hear arguments that the American Revolution was not a just war?  Did the phony Boston Tea Party protest negate the real struggle of Americans against  against the British tyranny of taxation without representation,?  Did the Colonial atrocity of tarring and feathering Royal officials automatically negate the Cause of Freedom?  Does an IRA misplaced bomb negate the struggle for the Independence of the Erin of my persecuted ancestors?  Do the unspeakable atrocities of the PLA against children (I'm sorry, Medhat) justify total Israeli rejection of the just, not excessive, claims of the Arab people?

    Generalizing, does the autonomous atrocity of individuals engaged in a just war, or even of governments so engaged (Dresden and Hiroshima), negate the circumstances that made such a war just?  I think not.  A just war once engaged upon must be won, hopefully using moral restraint, but a just war, by definition righteous,  must be won.  (Vietnam was not a just war.)  Far more than the careful limited Kosovo air war would not only have been justified, but morally required.   Spare me platitudes -- we had to win WWII, no matter what.  The consequences for letting political beasts loose to wreak their evil in the middle of our precious motherland Europe are too terrible to even consider.

    As a corollary, I do not excuse Serbian civilians, nor Iraqi's nor Germans in Nazi times, from resistance against their dictatorial governments.  Don't tell me that the people have no weapons; the Jews of the Warsaw Ghetto late in the War, the Hungarians in 1958, the Irish always, had no weapons -- until they took them from the dead bodies of their oppressors or made Molotov cocktails.  The cowardly Iraqi people, not the Kurds, deserve the sanctions because they do not fight against Saddam Hussein, and don't give me any Sophist balogna about American Big Oil and our greedy Capitalist Consumer Society.

    No nation in history, despite my often criticism of those very attributes, has ever acted for the cause of World Peace  as selflessly and high-minded as the United States of America , the idealistic child of the most advanced and noble civilization ever to have arisen, Western European Christianity.  The child now leads the parent, the USA leading NATO, toward a new order of Peace and Justice.  Begone, cynics!

Steve
June 25, 1999