Srebrenica: 10 years since.

Fire of Liberty

Christopher Hitchens has written a wonderful article over a Slate on the tenth anniversary of Srebrenica, where Serbian soldiers under the command of Gen. Mladic entered this Muslim town in Bosnia, which was being guarded by a contingent of Dutch soldiers, and ordered the people to give their guns, males between the age of 12 and 77 to be turned over for questioning and the rest of the population be deported to the Muslim areas. Within some two days the Dutch forces turned over some 5,000 Muslim males from Srebrenica and another 2,200 others to the Serb forces resulting in the mass slaughter of some 7,200 people. This tenth anniversary of this horror once again reminds you why the governments of Europe under the banner of the UN always have to call 1-800-HELPUSA when problems erupt. One can only imagine how Iraq would be under the Blue Helmets of the UN. In his typical fashion, Hitchens whacks a mean homerun by noting:

Stepping lightly over easy-listening moral cretinism like that of the Times' editorialist, one ought nonetheless to accept the implied challenge about Afghanistan and Iraq. Those of us who have supported the rescue of both countries have had to put up with a great deal of slander lately. We have been accused of being thoughtless war-mongers, sinister neoconservative cabalists, slaves to Halliburton, agents of Zionism, enemies of innocent Muslims, laptop bombardiers, armchair warriors, and much else besides. I generally find that these loud insults conceal a surreptitious note of queasy unease. We were right about Bosnia.

The European Union utterly failed Bosnia, which was in its very own "back yard." So did the United Nations. So did the Clinton-Gore administration, for as long as it regarded Milosevic as "containable" by the use of sanctions. Bosnia did not cease to be a killing field, and Serbia did not cease to be an aggressive dictatorship until the United States armed forces took a hand. The neoconservatives, to their great honor, mostly supported an effort to prevent genocide being inflicted on Muslims: an enterprise in which Israeli interests were not involved. Many liberal and socialist humanitarians took the same view. The argument about intervention and force changed forever as a result, except that many people did not notice. Just go and look up what the leaders of today's "anti-war" movement were saying then … too many civilian casualties (of all things!); the threat of a Vietnam-style "quagmire"; the lasting enmity of the Christian Orthodox world; above all the risk of a "longer war."

Here, here Mr. Hitchens, couldn't have said it better.