The imperialism of conquest and genocide is different from the imperialism of free trade. Our programmatic support for national self-determination clashes directly and frontally with the imperialism of conquest and genocide, but not directly with the imperialism of free trade. T o recognise that fact is not to weaken our battle against the dominant imperialism of free trade. The whole episode has probably made it harder, not easier, for the US and British ruling classes to get political support for military intervention against liberation struggles. The only part of it which has increased the big powers' scope for conquest and repression in future is that a large section of the left has been agitating and polemicising in favour of neglecting or ignoring the rights of small nations.
War is the continuation of politics by other means.
Marxism knows many attitudes to bourgeois policies other than going all out to smash and thwart them at any cost, or contrariwise energetically promoting them and seeking to organise the workers as the leading force for those policies in place of the unreliable bourgeois. Our attitude to a war should be fundamentally a continuation of our attitude to the politics underlying the war. We recognised that Rambouillet autonomy would be an improvement for the Albanian Kosovars compared to unrestrained Serbian oppression, but criticised and proposed an alternative. Our stance in the war was a continuation of our stance over Rambouillet. And that is as it should have been.