Keeping perspective on Iraq
Thursday, July 13, 2006 at 1:43PM PHOTO: "Memories Of a Massacre," Associated Press, New York Times, 10 July 2006, p. A3.
Hard to remember, as I point out in my upcoming Knoxville News Sentinel column, just how bloody the Balkans were.
By most reasonable accounts, we're approaching 40k deaths in Iraq since the 2003 takedown (still under the UN-estimated 50k we killed each year with sanctions across the 1990s), but the Balkans were a place where the massacres ran into the thousands, not just dozens.
The photo showed a woman touching the inscribed name of a loved one on a new monument in Srebrenica, where over 8300 civilians were slaughtered in one bloody stroke by the Serbians. Most were Muslim men and boys. Most bodies were never recovered/identified.
And yet look where the Balkans are today. Getting past the blood lust took some firm military intervention, followed by a major babysitting job with peacekeepers and development personnel, but now we had--as I witnessed in Dubrovnik this week--these states' diplomats all arguing over who can be a better NATO ally fastest or harmonize their political and economic systems most quickly to become viable candidates to join the EU.
Did you know that Macedonians and Croatians both serve alongside our NATO troops in Afghanistan today? No big numbers, naturally, but a real start.
Can you dream of Iraqi peacekeepers patrolling alongside American and Chinese (already there) peacekeepers in sub-Saharan Africa ten years from now?
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