community bigger secondary is easier as approval of new plans to build another part of it is in east jerusalem. actually an arsehole coastal debate and his guest discuss whether foreign intervention can be fruitful for the people whose countries are of the run. away 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.

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 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 to 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 abysmal track record in business 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 bush and surprise. so it's an equivocal thing now being revealed but the intervention in bosnia it was too late. because. if the international community apart a division of paratroopers on the river dream at the beginning then milosevich what a regime would have collapsed two hundred thousand people would still be alive

through bernita 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 the loss of it would have surrendered no you know i know you don't agree on the whole resolution one thousand seven hundred three will

cause very clear nine hundred seventy three and i don't want you to know when i am there until anybody you saw him go go ahead in any we're going to head. 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 planned a going to straight trajectory to plan b. 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 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 the 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 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 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 then 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 an emotion 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 i can go and people are cheering something might have happened ok in libya but it's far from over far far from over going any and. well resolution one thousand nine hundred seventy three is not completely illegal the russian city fellow was interpreted when salami was interpreted is this is the is the issue at hand here ok i mean you go from a no fly zone to the interrogation is there and then 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 talks to her and i visited libya six times i think he was a very popular. you know. what does your letter to rise to do with any what are you going to school let me go let me go let me go to negotiate here

because i think the road to 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 and beg of 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 us and nato to it by any means necessary toss the wrestler solution like they did with twelve forty four b. we should selectively apply because when they have to apply something that obligates them to produce a resolution to the nation for the example doesn't exist. i had jump and this was crosstalk. there rather than there is no defense of the civilian population number that i know say you don't say this did not go past unnoticed they use 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 do 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 great britain regimes and i think that's now been vindicated he is gone and nobody is sure what is the case they are not going 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 in 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 british eams that cause can't 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 before i see it 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 this season in twelve years i've been writing about the balkans i have not seen more implacable enemy. well how you might know when you use relations although they had very strong and go ahead go ahead yes he just if you if you if you trace back that kind of interaction

they go on to before it even the conflicts explodes and listen to the language of the international community often of course is bush war bush number one's war 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 and skim 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 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 easy to 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 lose your freedom after that short break we'll continue our discussion and western intervention stay r.t. . if you can. still use. the old. wealthy british style. it's time to exclusively go. guys. markets why not. find out what's really happening to the global economy

with max cause or for a no holds barred look at the global financial headlines tune into kaiser report on our tea. leaves. to. see. twenty years ago the largest country in the world to certain places of the. us how did you come to know each began a journey. where did it take the. good

. and. in the future to. welcome back to rostock i'm here labelle remind you we're talking about western backed interventions. and. 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. question 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 on 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 i'm not sophisticated players i've been watching them in the security council for twenty years they knew what 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 ok to say this is that hard and why shouldn't they this would have destroyed by support for the but you know what and also that is the whole issue of sovereignty and that's the entire purpose of having a united nations in the first place is to protect the legal rights of sovereign states the bushie what do you think about that because look if you're a good you look at the resolution we've job raising we've both agreed it was a slippery slope what do you think about the basha about that what 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 sequels to 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 aren't supposed to which isn't supposed to bother assad 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 on this we're going to die. because of your principles that that's just what people have died because the only logical principles that's the problem. they 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 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 and bad was he so what do you think about this whole discussion i don't know spokesman when i get these really you 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 and how this 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 and my god 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 and 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 collision 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 or is it really 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 we go into it now 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's it's a very good point i want to go back to 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 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 a very very little i mean it's to 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 if you are so in this way and so do we intervene and you intervene and that you enjoy interviews or 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 on. the six major problems libya so i think major league is already or should i mean i why you loss of a chance or a reality it was a scene on duty there by the gadhafi regime ok ok i'm going this way you know it's going to christine nationalist risk going to geneva go ahead ahead go. well 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. so show 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 i die on 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 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 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 have gone 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 to 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 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 meet and i wanted to i want to be is that all right do you think that you 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 realized that he could harness the power of resurgence of nationalism to maintain his own power first of all in your case 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 not 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 klaus of it's here the final carve up the present mess in bosnia is due to a deal cooked up between holbrooke and milosevic the republican scare 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 could our feet get their feet was. very unfair on everybody else this was not a 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 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 there the events all in libya evolved over time it took about a month and a half for the international community decide well ok i guess because off he has to go because he cannot contain there if 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 with business as usual with the western powers and that's the danger for any degree general you could have suggested here fred thank 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. if you. want. very first verses of the bible to all human beings are created but sentimental came in god's image and it doesn't say just jews or not just. sixty to seventy percent

of what i did as a combat soldier not to play territories was to do with deterrence doing what we call making our presence felt to go out should somebody so they are not in some doors going 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. a few more. thousand four hundred people in a month and you want to expect that this will have no effect into feet you have to be either extremely naive or it's to me stupid of me not to hear of your religious jew calling another joe i'm not i'm not a really i'm going to. this

is a coming to life from moscow quick check of the headlines. a young girl is among eight people mostly civilians killed in a car bomb explosion in russia's republic of kyrgyzstan six police officers were severely. the explosive was planted in a car parked at a junction in the central district. in greece prepares for more street clashes as the government looks for even more ways to const pending in order to secure a fresh bailout loan from the u. meanwhile german lawmakers are to vote on whether to support expanding the eurozone rescue fund and to write off a large part of greece's dead. thousands of ethnic serbs living in kosovo protest against nato actions in the region as russia has deadlines not to take sides in the context.