Weekend Edition
December 17 – 19, 2010
The Myth of Liberal Intervention and the Arrogance of Ignorance
Obama's March to Folly
By FRANKLIN C. SPINNEY, Counterpunch
In a recent opinion piece, “Kosovo and the Myth of Liberal Intervention,” Neil Clark in the Guardian on 15 December gave the reader a good summary of the some of the myths surrounding the Kosovo war, although he helped to perpetuate one myth, namely that the so-called genocide of Kosovar Albanians by the Serbs could be as high as 10,000. While Clark fudged the issue by using a range of 2,000-10,000, the fact remains that examination of mass burial sites by the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY) exhumed 2,788 bodies in Kosovo, some of whom were undoubtably Serbs; nor could the ICTY distinguish how many of these bodies were victims of war crimes or were the unintended detritus of NATO's “precision” bombing. The number of 10,000 was a face-saving, last-ditch, “statistical” estimate produced by the US State Department (its earlier estimates were far higher), which had a vested interest in proving the genocide it claimed Serbia had committed as a justification for NATO's “humanitarian” bombing campaign. The estimate of 10,000 was based on dubious (to put it charitably) statistical methods for estimating the number of bodies the State Department said existed but could not find — once illustrating government's propensity to confuse the a priori with the a posteriori
