brings positive outcomes for the people on the ground stay with us. you can. stand. alone and welcome to cross talk on people of all western liberal interventionism is it ever justified for such military interventions within the confines of international law or is there a case where western inspired forced regime change has worked as it's planned and can such interventions generate positive outcomes for people on the ground. and you

can. start. to cross-talk liberal interventions i'm joined by name my leach in washington he's a historian and columnist for antiwar dot com in new york we have ian williams he's a journalist and author and in geneva we cross the esau bloomy he is a professor of middle eastern balkan history at georgia state university all right gentlemen this is crosstalk that means you can jump in anytime you want to have different points of view and i want my viewers to see it all right now bush if i can go to you and i know you're an expert on the balkans so let's go all the way back to like kosovo to the present and looking at libya why events are playing out in countries like libya but not bahrain not in yemen not in somalia etc etc what is the track record in your opinion of western military intervention since the end of the cold war. abysmal i think the first in terms of the first and only intervention that actually followed the rules was the desert storm or does rather desert shield

in iraq in one thousand nine hundred ninety one everything after that has been just a total mockery of international law from the gradual escalation of bosnia to the outrage the illegal war in kosovo to the outright illegal invasion in iraq and now libya which has completely dispensed with even the figure leaf of u.n. authorization and simply went to got the resolution to establish a no fly zone and then proceeded with regime change right away ok what do you think about very and i mean an abysmal track record abysmal history since the end of the second and the cold war. well look the intervention in iraq was nothing to do with liberal interventionism nothing to do with the international community it was a unilateral blair bush and surprise. so it's an equivocally a bad thing is now being revealed but the intervention in bosnia was too late because. if the international community apart a division of paratroopers on the river dream at the beginning that milosevic would

have a regime would have collapsed two hundred thousand people would still be alive stripper needs or would not have happened the intervention in kosovo you might remember followed a whole string of un resolutions telling the milosevic regime in belgrade to stop killing the albanians in kosovo he ignored it the intervention when it eventually came and i just refresh my memory about the resolution was voted for by the security council including russia and china provided for un military intervention for nato military intervention and occupation in effect of kosovo it set out the terms of it all and incidentally it riffraff runs the runway accords which provided for a conference to discuss self-determination within three years stop the killing in kosovo it allowed most of the cost of us to go back home when they've been thrown across the border so i think kosovo was successful but carried out in the wrong way it shouldn't have been done by bombing they should have actually threatened ground

troops at the beginning and milosevic would have surrendered ok bush i know you know i know you don't agree on the whole i think resolution one thousand seven hundred three very clear nine hundred seventy three and i don't want you to know when i am there until you saw him go go ahead anyway go ahead. yes i would suggest to all your listeners and to the other two participants in this debate that things do evolve and transform over time and that i would suggest that we don't have any evidence of. a going to straight trajectory to try and be in the case of intervention in these conflicts in the box. or north africa or anywhere else in the world and for that matter indeed the international players as they constantly are doctoring to the conditions on the ground are forced their hands are forced often by events with the case of interventions in the balkans for instance i suspect there's been a great deal of collusion between certain players and so-called members member

nations and the nato alliance with some of the key players on the ground including the most of his regime we often forget that there are some strong indications and very strong opinions voiced by various players in both the united states and in western europe in regards to protecting the sovereignty of their sovereign claims that serbia had an intervention intervening first in northern balkans in one thousand nine hundred ninety one ninety two and then later on ninety seven ninety eight ninety nine and similarly in north africa i suspect that there was a great deal of hedging there was and waiting it out and see how things were turned out i don't think i don't think the international players actually appreciated what was happening on the ground they were caught by surprise ok and indeed intervention in libya let me go back to and it is part of my part of my introduction here i mean this is the law of unintended consequences i mean if the decision is made to

depending on how legal it is and in many cases it is the most you pointed out is just completely illegal without any legal foundation at all the fact of the matter is when you have an intervention like this you never know where it can go and people are cheering something might have happened ok in libya but it's far from over far far from over go ahead ian. well resolution one thousand nine hundred seventy three is not completely illegal the russian how are we safer always interpreted when saddam was interpreted is this is the is the issue at hand here ok i mean you go from my no fly zone to the interrogation is that the head there's a lot of game playing here the russian the russian delegation is making the protest but. gadhafi was the most unpopular person in the neighborhood that was one of the reasons why this intervention was a toll possible in the security council he had very few friends apart from those he is talking to her and i visited libya six times i think he was a very popular. you know. what do you want

a letter to rise to do with danny what are you going to school let me go and let me go let me go to negotiate because i think the root of the saudi royal family are very popular either ok go ahead and voice. well i mean popularity oughtn't have anything to do with this one way or another but we're talking apples and oranges first of all i'd like to correct ian about the whole brigade on the dream and nonsense and two hundred thousand dead when it's been known for at least six years that the final tally of the war was one hundred thousand people in all three sides i'm not trying to minimize anybody's suffering but let's show my hands with the propaganda nonsense but secondly but secondly. the international community so-called was involved in bosnia from the get go i have eyewitness testimonies from people who were there when the american ambassador told muslim leaders that bag of h. if you don't like it don't sign it this was march one thousand nine hundred two this was before the war started so let's just not mix things up here again popularity has nothing to do with this i personally think russia made

a mistake in approving one nine hundred seventy three because in one thousand nine hundred seventy three he said let's establish a no fly zone by any means necessary so the u.s. and nato to it by any means necessary toss the wrestler solution like they did with twelve forty four b. which they selectively apply because when they have to apply something that obligates them to part of the reservation for example doesn't exist. i had jump and this was crosstalk. there are. no defense of the civilian population that bill i know said. this did not go past unnoticed they used the consequences the hope was that gadhafi would collapse a lot sooner than he did and we know one of the reasons he didn't collapse was because anyone who tried to does that was shot some out early i'm not saying the rebels are angels but gaddafi was a bad guy unpopular with his own people not just the regimes and i think that's now been vindicated he is gone and nobody should think that is it ok let's go to geneva

go ahead do some go ahead how about how about this to kind of fit with the theme of this of this discussion about the kind of relationships that very strong relationships that meter around for instance had with milosevic and richard holbrooke which we have some very interesting connections between holbrooke as a banker and milosevic in his the one nine hundred seventy s. that continue on into the one nine hundred eighty s. and one nine hundred ninety s. kind of these mis messages or a misinterpreted message is that often that often evolved into the point where it got to the point of no return where do the abuse of the perception that i should i have a green light to deal with my problems in a violent way or i have been encouraged in libya to deal with with my our opponents and we recall that could aafia was caught reading with the cia for until couple of months before the uprisings and then ghazi in the east so there is some complicity

there are some serious problems we have to raise about about how the international community and this includes russia and china how they how they interact with with many of these regimes that cause common cause events on the ground to transform very rapidly we're talking about human beings who resist tyranny whether it's in western china whether it's in north africa whether it's in detroit in michigan united states and if we continue. play his game that it's you know that we have a very hard hard break between what is right and wrong are you how internet for i see understood i see devotion trying to jump in here go right ahead of bush go ahead go ahead comment well i actually agree i'm actually agreeing with this line of reasoning as you want to ask a couple of questions are you implying that holbrooke and milosevic were somehow in cahoots because this is the first time i've heard distances and in twelve years i've been writing about the balkans i have not seen more implacable enemies. well how you might know when you use relations although they had very strong and

grand grand yes you just if you if you if you trace back that kind of interaction they go on that before even the conflicts explodes and listen to the language of the international community often of course is bush war bush number one swore in the beginning and they were very conservative in dealing with the breakup of the eastern bloc and they kind of gave mismatched mixed messages there and i was taken advantage of by all sides and then of course once the clinton administration comes into power a very influential figure like holbrooke who has long term relations with all kinds of players in the east which you know you can you just have to look at the backgrounds and. skin very very closely what some of the statements that holbrooke is making both privately and publicly as a representative of the state department you can find out there's a there's a very distinctive break between early attempts to work with most of it in the

ninety one ninety two and then of course after dayton accord so there is this kind of law and then indeed in ninety seven ninety eight ninety nine there is going back and forth and i would i don't i've i've written about this and and i even find parallels in many other so-called crises around the world are you going to jump in here we're going to a short break we're going to just break down after that short break we'll continue our discussion and western intervention stay with r.t. . if you. still. want to.

very first verses of the bible that all human beings are created but sentimental came in god's image and it doesn't say just jews or non jews. sixty to seventy percent of what i did as a combat soldier in the occupied territories was to do with the turds doing what we call making our presence felt to go out should some bozo they hear a knock on some doors run to the other corner and they don't know how religion the nationalism not just judaism have been a part of the problem they've been part of what leads to. bloodshed if you want to bomb guys are and kill. a thousand four hundred people in a month and you want to expect that this will have no effect until a feat you have to be either extremely naive or extremely stupid we don't need to hear a religious jew calling another joe i'm not cut out of the way they really didn't.

mind. to be soo much brighter than a few nibbles soon from feinstein christians. nice clean start on t.v. dot com. and. welcome back to cross talk computor labelle true mind you were talking about western backed interventions. and.

ok and i'd like to go back to you is i think it's quite curious because a lot of this program has been discussing international law but when western powers go into countries like libya i found that the discussion is they think about the feasibility of the intervention the cost the risks and possible backlash of arab public opinion but there's very little discussion if it's legal or not and outside of the beltway that's a lot of people do talk about that we're looking at a resolution one thousand nine hundred three was brought up yeah yeah it was the what he said was to to say have a no fly zone and to use whatever means to protect civilians but that that entails really bombing the country to hell that's what i'm getting at about the the the legal end of it because in western media they get along to go along support their governments most of the time but there's never really discussion of the legality of things and i think that's what outside of the security council that's what other people think about go ahead. i think nine hundred seventy three was legal and they stretched the legality props but it was within that look the other party's

restaurants are not sophisticated players i've been watching them in the security council for twenty years they knew of the implications and what i think everyone agreed was that gadhafi had to be dealt with but russia and china wanted to keep clean hands in the international arena so they played this double game and i think well i don't i don't i don't think it would i don't think it's a double game going saying this is that hard and why wouldn't they this would have destroyed by support for the but you know but and also that is the whole issue of sovereignty and if the entire purpose of having a united nations in the first place is to protect the legal rights of sovereign states the bush what do you think about that because look. if you look at the resolution we've job. we've both agreed it was a slippery slope what do you think about the basha about that were well that i mean we're not leading the way things are functioning today it's almost as if we're living in the world that george lucas envisioned there's this because there's a quote from one of the extra ball because the star wars is this legal i will make

it legal it doesn't matter what is it matters which can be created on the ground this is no way to run the world let alone you can't run a dog catching operation like this without it backfiring what happened in libya what we saw happening in libya was basically the entire cycle of balkans interventions accelerated to hyper speed within weeks instead of years and you ran through the whole gamut of excuses from refugees to mistreatment of minorities to this and that in the other to install in power a shadowy movement that we don't really know much about except that it's composed of al qaeda veterans which you are supposed to which isn't supposed to bother us at all but there's sort of a no not the point we're not it doesn't matter how this ended the outcome of it is frankly irrelevant it's the principle of the thing and the principle of the thing was wrong going on because we're going to die. because of your principles that that's just when people have died because the only logical principles that's the

problem only they have the principles you're going to build of that you don't let dictators kill people if you can possibly be killing people in terms of you gentlemen we'll talk about good dictators and bad dictators in a second but. we're going to know now what i mean by my implication. when i get listening to you i think there are ok and then there is that's how it's practiced in the west there are good dictators or bad was he so what do you think about this whole discussion i don't know spokesman i can assure you to take your seat at my record on the air you need to we need to we need to just step back a little bit and consider to scale that we actually adopt in talking about the world again i insist what is happening with regular human beings has significance to how we talk about in abstract terms international relations international law whether or not states intervene in other people other states affairs whether or not could office regime interferes in local local politics the main guys here and

elsewhere and so this is where we are now at a time where libyans are going to find out very quickly that the people who are representing me and speaking on their behalf in new york are not the same ones who that many of them believe they were fighting for and this is going to be very interesting is the same thing that happened in the balkans the same things happened in central asia and eastern europe throughout the one nine hundred ninety s. and people are going to not going to react very poorly to a new regime that is very exploitive and of course disrespectful of international law you're going to see a pillaging of natural resources of libya very much like the illusion of natural resources and saw in central asia and indeed in in other ways what's happening in the arabian peninsula whether there's there's no discussion of intervention on behalf of suffering human beings for many years now and since. southern arabia let alone behind which is considered to be students usually important for some countries to even contemplate intervening on behalf of human beings who are

suffering very very harsh tactics by not only the regime in bahrain by by some of the neighbors who have actually intervened on behalf of the regime and how are we going to know interpret these events i think requires us to go back to looking at events on the ground and listening to people talking and responding to sometimes very difficult conditions if we refuse to take this perspective that we're playing the game of the richard holbrooke's of the world of the bill clinton. and obama it's a very good point and i want to go back and hear about good dictators and bad dictators ok bahrain was mentioned the saudi royal family was mentioned these are not very nice people on the saudi royal family as a matter of fact they show no i mean well i mean then then how do you say that they did an ally of the u.s. they're now ally of the west so he's turning a blind eye just like they do there what they do in bahrain which is completely blacked out right now not a peep coming out and western media criticizing are very very little i mean if you

play city. it's duplicity on the part of the government certainly but on the part of those of us that support intervention to stop these things there's no duplicity all of us you are read the guardian i write for the guardian quite often and many a writer there has condemned the inactivity over bahrain many people have condemned the saudi's behavior the point is that you can't intervene everywhere that there are particular conjunctions and you are so in this way and so if you intervene and you intervene if you and your injuries are so you intervene because there's an oil next to me intervene because there's zero zero for example is not a good reason to intervene because of a had no oil cost of i have to take i have to take accept the wrath of iran over. its major problems with libya so i think major years already or should i mean knows why you a lot of insurance or reality was even on the interior by the gadhafi regime ok ok i'm going to end this we're not going to christine nationalist or is going to geneva go ahead ahead go. well the guards of the balkans who are one has to really

think why why so much investment on the part of both sides if there is such a thing in sustaining and containing events in kosovo for instance of course kosovo is a very mineral rich country and there's potentially hundreds of billions of dollars worth of mineral wealth that has been exported throughout the twentieth century and there are of course many western companies invested in partnership with the most of its regime prior to the war and much of that has to do with you know control of a potential gas line. pathways but also the minerals themselves in the ground so let's not be naive about that there is not or any other places where there is indeed international events and of course there's x. osho economic dynamics going on but there's also the financial world that has an interest ghana's than iraq you can take a very clear example of there are multiple interest why intervention was necessary according to various different players and they don't necessarily meet either i and

all things but they certainly agree on one thing that the regimes that they are attacking and have to have to be removed for one reason or another again you bush or you want to jump in go ahead. i don't necessarily disagree with what he said just said i but i do have a problem with that with the reasoning that this is going towards so you're saying that because the western world had good relationships with milosevic they intervened against him then that doesn't make any sense i'm sorry and as far as the end you know he actually respect your position milosevic and khadafi and saddam hussein have failed to convey contain some of their own domestic continues that they created because of of domestic politics i mean most of its kind of joint jumped into bed with the devil in many ways and he became very unpopular in serbia he got involved with these militias the governor of over the smuggling organizations he got involved with and indeed the military in serbia became very disgruntled with him and he had to go and he held on the power by often just firing

generals and firing officers and i don't i didn't i did some of your i mean the people he fired the people he fired in ninety eight the people he for the head to head of his security service and the chief of his general staff were later proven to be cia agents so i'm thinking that had something to do with their firing as opposed to some sort of popularity contest that i could be had i want to i want to be is that all right do you think i'm going to want to address the endo go ahead and jump in. that milosevic was a power hungry person he wasn't a nationalist he was an expedient nationalist he realised that he could harness the power of resurgence of nationalism to maintain his own power first of all in europe just love it then when it disintegrated then what was left and that's been his main aim i mean he swapped between the prime minister and the presidency he wanted to hang on to power and he used people and that became clear even to the serbs and if you look it was indeed true holbrooke was dealing with him because he was that guy

who could deal with we're talking close rates here the final cause of the present mess in bosnia is due to a deal cooked up between holbrooke and milosevic the republican was given territories to think had previously included lots of positive acts and croats and that was a cynical deal done by holbrooke they felt this was a guy they could deal with gadhafi duffey was. very unfair and everybody else this was not western intervention to get hold of natural resources they already had the natural resources they were buying that oil duffy was investing that money in london his sons and investing in geneva and in london with the money they stole not to let me jump in here we're almost out of time zones we're almost out of time here you say in geneva go ahead you have the last word go ahead. it is this is exactly my point that even with the case of khadafi they if you just go back a little bit they waited a month and a half before they actually decided to cooperate to start intervening with an air

war campaign in support of what they would call the rebels if the events in libya evolved over time it took about a month and a half for the international community decide well again i guess because of the has to go because he cannot contain the river the events in eastern libya it's spreading to his within his military it's spreading in the western part of the country now he has to go he made the fatal mistake of not being able to contain his problems within. a format that it can actually then he can continue on business as usual with the western powers and that's the danger for any degree general john to be here for take you with their job i thank you very much for a fascinating discussion many thanks to my guest today in washington new york and in geneva and thanks to our viewers for watching us here r.t. see you next time and remember cross talk rules. and you can. still.

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this is not she coming to you live from moscow the headlines. more angry protests in greece as the parliament in athens approves a new property time with more council in the way next month to meeting you and i left demands that the country continues to teeter on database of default on its massive debt. who runs western proposes a fresh sanctions against syria irresponsible and calls on the regime and its opponents to talk as government forces still making opposition town in the country with heavy weaponry. and violence flares at the border between serbia and breakaway cos of us have a local subs are injured in clashes when a nato peacekeepers opened fire with live rounds despite alliance claims only rubber bullets and tear gas were used by troops. up next the kind.