THIS MODERN WORLD

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Exactly the speech she needed to give. A few days late, but that’s not going to matter too much six months from now.

William Blum:

[Carla] Del Ponte remained in her position [as Chief Prosecutor for the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia] until the end of 2007, leaving to become the Swiss ambassador to Argentina; at the same time writing a book about her time with the Tribunal — “The Hunt: Me and War Criminals”, published two months ago but available at the moment only in Italian. It hasn’t been much reported yet what del Ponte has said about NATO, but the book has already created a scandal in Europe, for in it she reveals how the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) abducted hundreds of Serbs in 1999, and took them to Kosovo’s fellow Muslims in Albania where they were killed, their kidneys and other body parts then removed and sold for transplant in other countries…

On February 17 of this year, in a move of highly questionable international legality, the KLA declared the independence of Kosovo from Serbia. The next day the United States recognized this new “nation”, thus affirming the unilateral declaration of independence of a part of another country’s territory. The new country has as its prime minister a gentleman named Hashim Thaci, described in Del Ponte’s book as the brain behind the abductions of Serbs and the sale of their organs.

Some of the relevant parts of del Ponte’s book are here. This is so lurid, and so similar to standard war atrocity rumors, that the evidence del Ponte provides doesn’t seem anywhere near conclusive. (Recall the blockbuster Turkish movie Valley of the Wolves was about US troops doing this with Iraqis.) In any case, it’s unlikely we’ll ever know for sure; given the position of the US, it will never be seriously investigated.

Here’s Hillary Clinton on Kosovo in June, 1999, right when this was purportedly happening:

This has been possible because our nations—our leaders and our citizens—stood up against evil. Now there are some who I know who would quibble with my use of that word, but I think it fully describes the conflict we have been waging these last few months…we will not turn away when human beings are cruelly expelled, or when they are denied basic rights and dignities because of how they look or how they worship. When crimes against humanity rear their ugly heads, we have to send such a message as an international community.

Rick Perlstein has posted some amazing outtakes from his research for his book Nixonland (which is well worth buying). It’s a bunch of constituent letters to Illinois liberal Democratic Senator Paul Douglas before he lost the 1966 election. For instance:

At least fifty square of Chicago is occupied by negroes which means that no part of that area is safe for white people to travel…
It is safe to say that not a single white person has ever moved into a negro neighorhood yet there has been over a million white people dumped, shoved, or pushed out of their homes by expansion of negroes…
NEGROES HAVE BEEN MADE THE BOSS OF THE UNITED STATES.

Read the rest. That is an order from the NEGROES WHO HAVE BEEN MADE THE BOSS OF THE UNITED STATES.

This is a New York Times story from February 18, 2007:

One of the most important decisions that Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton made about her bid for the presidency came late last year when she ended a debate in her camp over whether she should repudiate her 2002 vote authorizing military action in Iraq…antiwar anger has festered, and yesterday morning Mrs. Clinton rolled out a new response to those demanding contrition: She said she was willing to lose support from voters rather than make an apology she did not believe in.

“If the most important thing to any of you is choosing someone who did not cast that vote or has said his vote was a mistake, then there are others to choose from,” Mrs. Clinton told an audience in Dover, N.H., in a veiled reference to two rivals for the nomination, Senator Barack Obama of Illinois and former Senator John Edwards of North Carolina.

Her decision not to apologize is regarded so seriously within her campaign that some advisers believe it will be remembered as a turning point in the race: either ultimately galvanizing voters against her (if she loses the nomination), or highlighting her resolve and her willingness to buck Democratic conventional wisdom (if she wins).

If progressives had power, we’d be able to turn this into unquestioned conventional wisdom about how voting for aggressive war dooms Democrats who want to be president. That wouldn’t be true, but one measure of power is the ability to create non-true but convenient conventional wisdom.