An interesting comparison, although I don't know enough about NATO's efforts in Kosovo to say whether it's a fair one. Certainly Israel's assault on the Lebanese people is excessive and it doesn't seem unfair for the article to bring up to Bill Clinton's quote regarding the actions of the Serbs: “Are we, in the last year of the twentieth century, going to look the other way as entire peoples in Europe are forced to abandon their homelands or die, or are we going to impose a price on that kind of conduct and seek to aid it.” The United States should be working to end the slaughter, not encourage it.
http://www.wsws.org/articles/2006/aug2006/koso-a07.shtmlWith hundreds dead, many of them slaughtered in their own homes, hundreds of thousands take flight, terrified of suffering the same fate at the hands of a regime possessed of vastly superior military force, which claims that its ongoing war against a terrorist force gives it a mandate to expel an entire population.. The mass exodus is deliberately encouraged by the propaganda of the regime, which publicizes the atrocities to stampede the population. The ultimate goal: ethnic cleansing, and the replacement of the local population with settlers mobilized by the regime.
That was the scenario in Kosovo in March-April 1999—and that is what is beginning to take place in southern Lebanon in July-August 2006. The difference, of course, is that in the first case the US government used ethnic cleansing as a pretext for war, while in the second case, the ethnic cleansing is a joint US-Israeli project.
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All of these statements apply with equal or greater force to the policies of the Israeli government. Israeli warplanes have dropped hundreds of thousands of leaflets across south Lebanon demanding that the entire population leave or be targeted as part of Hezbollah. Children, the elderly, the mentally ill, the sick, the disabled—all face death from aerial bombardment if they do not abandon their homes and cross the Litani River going north.
Piling war crime upon war crime, the Israelis have then bombed convoys of refugees set into motion by their own demands for mass evacuations—something Milosevic never attempted. And there are reports that leaflets threatening the civilian population have been dropped over the largely Shiite-populated southern suburbs of Beirut.
In other words, the stated goal of the Israeli Defense Forces is the physical removal of the entire population of the south, whether Shiite, Sunni or Christian, as well as the Shiite population of Beirut—all told, about 50 percent of the Lebanese people. If any other government but that of Israel (and the United States) were making this demand, the American media would call it what it is: ethnic cleansing on a monstrous scale.
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