the. mind. or a sense feeds with the palm of your. comb . three thirty pm in moscow these are your eyes you have light the grim presidential fate of greece under scrutiny from european and i am after officials they're due in athens to assess the scale of the country's progress in reducing that this after thousands of greeks united in protest against the government's latest round of austerity measures. nato peacekeepers in kosovo what injured seven serbs in the clashes of the border area the alliance says it used rubber bullets but a local news agency claims live rounds were fired as released x. rays it says show the gunshot wounds of victims and the international community

condemns israel's decision to build new settlements on occupied territory palestinians say the israeli moves rule out any chance of bilateral he stops. up next year lavelle asks his crossed our guest whether western intervention in other countries could be justified and if the action ever brings about positive outcomes for the people on the ground state with us. can. follow in welcome to cross talk on peter about western liberal interventionism is it ever justified for such military interventions within the confines of international law 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.

to cross-talk liberal interventions i'm joined by new botia my leech 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 east gloomy he is a professor of middle eastern balkan history at georgia state university hard gentlemen this is crosstalk i mean 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 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 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 submission or fly zone and then proceeded with regime change right away ok what do you think about very and i mean an abysmal record track record in dismal history since the end of the start of 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 push and surprise. so it's unequivocal a bad thing now being revealed but the intervention imposed the it was true late. because. if the international community approach a division of paratroopers on the river train at the beginning then the loss of each one of the 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 them a loss of which 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's riffraff runs the round here cause 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 threaten ground troops at the beginning of the last of which would have surrendered ok moshe no you

know you know granulate resolution one thousand seven hundred three old horse very clear nine hundred seventy three i want you to know when i am in there into legal 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 i would suggest that we don't have any evidence of a client a going to straits trajectory to try and be in the case of intervention in these conflicts in the balkans 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 has been created 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 the sovereign claims that serbia had in 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 in kosovo 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 on i don't think i don't think the international players actually appreciated what was happening on the ground they were caught by surprise and indeed intervention in libya let me go back and then and it is part of my point my part of my introduction here i mean this is the law of unintended consequences i mean if the decision is made in depending on how legal it is and in many cases it isn't

a bush appointee that 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 going. well resolution one thousand nine hundred seventy three is not completely illegal the russian however we see from always interpreted went along with this interpretation is this is the is the issue at hand here ok i mean you go from i'm no fly zone to the interrogation is there but then there's a lot of the game playing here the russian the russian delegation is making the protest but. their feet was the most unpopular person in the neighborhood that was one of the reasons why this intervention was at all possible in the security council he had very few friends apart from those he'd call it is sort of the heart and visited libya six times i think he was a very unpopular exactly you know. what do you formularies your eyes are you with

me what are you going to school in me going to let me go let me go to negotiate because i think the road the saudi royal family are very popular either ok go ahead the voice or. well i mean popularity oughtn't have anything to do with this one way or another but wars we're talking apples and oranges first of all i'd like to correct ian about the whole brigade on the trina 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 you know man's was rough and given the incident but secondly but secondly if the international community so-called was involved in bosnia from that gets co i have eyewitness testimonies from people who were there when the american ambassador told muslim leaders of beg 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 it's just not makes 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 the night nine

hundred seventy three said let's establish a no fly zone by any means necessary so the u.s. and nato to go 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 produce resolution relation to those and so doesn't even see a stock relation to the end go ahead jump in this is crosstalk. there is no defensive possible in population number i know say you don't say this did not go past unnoticed they use the consequences and 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 please that was shot so not only i'm not saying the rebels are angels but gaddafi was a bad guy unpopular with his own people not just in great britain regimes and i think that's now been vindicated he is gone and nobody is shedding tears in their heads they're not going to geneva go ahead some go ahead how about how about this

to kind of fit with the theme of this of this discussion how about the kind of relationships that scary strong lation choose not meet 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 in one nine hundred seventy s. continue on in 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 did the abuse of the perception that i should i have a green light to deal with my problems in a violent way or i you know i have been encouraged him in libya to deal with with my our opponents and we called it could our feet 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 british eams that cars can 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. played his game but it's you know that we have a very hard hard break between what is right and wrong right how it's going to be all the way forward i see it understood i see devotion trying to jump in here go right ahead comic well i actually agree i'm actually agreeing with this line of reasoning as you want to ask a couple questions are you implying that a whole group can milosevic were somehow in cahoots because this is the first time i've heard this thesis in twelve years i've been writing about the balkans i have not seen more implacable enemy. well you might know when you use relations although they had very strong and. yes you just if you if

you if you trace back that kind of interaction they go on to before it even the conflict explodes and listen to the language of the international community often of course this is bush war bush number one swore in the beginning and they were very conservative in dealing with the breakup of eastern bloc and they kind of gave mr met mixed messages there they were 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 and skin very well read 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 that there's there's a very distinctive break between earlier times 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 all of it and then indeed in ninety seven ninety eight ninety nine there is just going back and forth and i would i don't i think i've i've written about this thing and i even find parallels in many other so-called crises around the world are you going to jump in here you go to a short break we're going to break them after that short break we'll continue our discussion and western intervention stay r.t. . if you still. think it's going to. remain you believe just in science and technology from the realms. we'll go to the future covering. nature and discover its beauty.

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after all stock on your lapel to remind you we're talking about western backed interventions. and you can see. ok and i'd like to go back to you as i think is 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 i 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 illegal or not and outside of the beltway that's a lot of people do talk about it we're looking at resolution one thousand seventy three was brought up yeah yeah it was it was the what he said was to juice the ammo no flies. and to use whatever means to protect civilians because that entails really bombing the country 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 let other people think about go ahead. i think nine hundred seventy three was legal and they stretched the legality props but it was within the terms and look the other parties rutter and china are 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 we're i don't think it's a double game olcott is saying this is the part and why do you think this would have destroyed my support for that but you know but and also that is the whole issue of sovereignty in this the entire purpose of having 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 i think it's below he can't speak if you look at the

resolution we've job here with everything re-arranging we've both agreed it was a slippery slope what do you think about the basha about that. well there were not really the way things are functioning today it's almost as if we're living in the world of george lucas envisioned there's this because there's a quote from one of the extra ball people 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 your refugees to mistreatment of minorities to this and that you know other to install in power a shadowy movement that we don't really know much about except that it's composed of al qaida veterans which you are supposed to which isn't supposed to bother us at all but then that sort of the not the point we're not eat 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 you're going to die because of your principles but that's just where people died because the only logical principles that's the problem you're doing ok you have the principles you're going to build that you don't let dictators kill people if you can possibly be killing people in terms of if you will talk about good dictators and bad dictators in a second but. you're going to go now but i mean by yes by implication. when i listen to you i think there are ok and then there is that's how it's practiced in the west there are good dictators and if i was you so what you think about this whole discussion i don't know spokesman i think i can assure you to take my record on there you do we need to we need to just step back a little bit and consider to scale that we actually adopted in talking about the

world again i insist what is happening with regular human beings highest hearts. 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 regime interferes in local local politics the main guys 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 react very poorly to a new regime that is very exploitive and of course this respectful of international law you're going to see a pillaging of natural resources of libya very much like the pollution of natural

resources and so on in central asia and indeed in in in other ways what's happening in the arabian peninsula whether there is there is no discussion of intervention on behalf of suffering human beings for many years now and in southern arabia let alone behind which is considered to be students whose equally important for some countries leaving contemplate intervening on behalf of human beings who are suffering very very harsh tactics by not only the regime in bahrain but 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 refused to take this perspective that we're playing the game of the richard holbrooke's of the world of the bill clinton call i mean obama it's a very good way to be when you go to see and hear about good dictators and bad dictators ok bahrain was mentioned the saudi royal family was mentioned these are

not very nice people in the saudi royal family as a matter of fact they show no i must really. well i mean then then how do you suggest they do an ally of the us or now lie of the west so just turn a blind eye to what 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 means to play city it's to play city 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 there are particular conjunctions of you who are so in this way and so if you intervene you intervene and you intervene users or you intervene because there's employer extreme intervene because there's all for examples are a good reason to intervene possible had no well cost of i have to take to take

accept the wrath of iran of. the six major problems libya so it andre the u.s. already oracle dominos i why you see a chance or a reality which is being on duty here by the gadhafi regime ok ok he's ok this week it's going to christine nationalist or is he going to geneva go ahead ahead go. guards of the balkans you 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 because it was a very mineral rich country of it 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 which regime prior to the war and much of that has to do with the necessity control of a potential gas line. pathways but also the minerals themselves in the ground so let's not be naive about that living the council is not or any other places where

it is indeed international dimension of course there's economic dynamics going on but there's also the financial world that has an interest in ghana stan 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 idea and all things but they certainly agree on one thing that the regimes that they are attacking and have to have to agree move for one reason or another ok you push or you want to jump in go ahead. but i don't necessarily disagree with what he said just said i. i do have a problem 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 he and he may actually respect your position milosevic and khadafi and saddam hussein have failed to convey contain some of their own the mass they continue to use that they created

because of of domestic politics i mean most of it's kind of try to jump into bed with the parable in many ways and he became very unpopular in serbia he got involved with these militias are gone or both of the smuggling organizations he got involved with and indeed the military inserted became very disgruntled with him and he had to go and he said he held on to power by often just firing generals and firing officers and i don't i don't i didn't really the people he fired the people he fired in ninety eight the people he for the 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 . and i want to i want to be is that all right and he do you think the letter or the 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 realized that he could harness the power of resurgence of nationalism to maintain his own power first of all in your

case love you then when it disintegrated in 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 the guy who could deal with we're talking klaus bits here the final cover the present mess in person is due to a deal cooked up between holbrooke and the loss of h. the republican scare was given territories the thing had previously included lots of calls and acts and croats and that was a cynical deal done by holbrooke they thought this was a guy they could deal with their feet hit their feet was. on the ropes there and everybody else this was not western intervention to get hold of natural resources they already have the natural resources they were buying that oil get up he was investing that money in london his sons and investing in geneva and in london with

the money they stole right enough to let me jump in here almost on a trials we're almost out of time here in geneva go ahead you have the last word go ahead. because this is exactly my point that even with the case of khadafi they say if you just go back a little bit they waited a month and a half before the actual decided collaborates to start intervening with an air war campaign in support of what they would call the rebels if the events in the libya evolved over time it took about a month and a half for the international community to decide well again i guess cannot be has to go because he cannot contain the rift 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 can actually then he can continue as business as usual with the western powers and that's the danger for any degree general you have to just be here for thank you and they're going to 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 are deep seated next time and remember crosstime please. continue to stay.

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