My support for NATO's efforts in Yugoslavia and my call for a ground-war has been called hawkish warmongering and worse. The real issue in Yugoslavia is not the NATO bombings but the long-running genocide. Not one critic of NATO intervention ever seems to offer a plan to stop the brutal mass-murder in Kosova at the hands of the armies and paramilitary forces under the control of Belgrade politicians. I read simplistically attractive arguments supporting isolationism, shocking accounts of NATO's horrific blunders in specific bombing strikes and sloppy essays of transparently primitive anti-Americanism. But I do not ever get a sense that the critics have any practical plan to stop Belgrade's institutionalised mass-murder.
Serious criticism involves a suggested practical alternative.
The critics are generally not pro-Milosevic lunatics, and often the points they raise, especially about the growing ineffectiveness of bombing alone, are well worth reading. They are more disturbing, because they are often the same people who, when there is some horrible slaughter abroad, ask why the world isn't doing anything about it. To have the power to stop a heinous crime and yet stand by and do nothing - that seems too much like complicity in my book. You hear blood-curdling screams from your neighbour's house every night. The wife appears in the shops with black eyes and a limp.