Neil Craig at A Place to Stand goes for it:

MILOSEVIC’S CRIME WAS TO BE INNOCENT & NAIVE SAYS BRITAIN’S AMBASSADOR

This is a long and not altogether coherent assessment of various replies I have posted on his site arising from his bold claim that the LibDems are complicit in genocide for supporting the NATO military intervention against Milosevic in 1998. Read it. And be amazed.

But I did like this passage:

Enough background – the comparison here is that the minister finds Sir Humphrey eager to cover it up. This causes an argument in which Hacker calls Humphrey a "moral vacuum" which the latter takes well seeing it as high praise & proof of him being a successful civil servant.

Nowadays the situation seems worse – Charles is not a "moral vacuum". Sir Humphrey would never have dreamt of publicly defending such things because vacuums do not do that.

Mr Crawford actively defends actions which he clearly knows were genocidal & evil carried out simply because their target was innocent enough for them to get away with it. He wasn’t born that way – it is a result of a governmental system, meshing perfectly with those in the US & EU systems, which has no ethical basis.

Thank Goodness. Finally. It fell to Neil Craig to help me get to the deep root of my many inadequacies. It’s not genetic – I am a product of my collectivist environment. Nurture, not Nature! The government system is to blame!

Here is my Comment as just posted on his site:

This whole post is based (I think, as far as I can understand it) on a trivial logical fallacy: that if Milosevic was not guileful, he therefore was guileless/innocent.

It’s called the Law of the Excluded Middle: if an elephant is not Big, it must be Small!

Let me put it thus. I believe that Milosevic could have achieved a far better outcome for Serbia and for himself than he did achieve. Why did he not do that?

He was surely deranged, babbling on to himself and his wife and any passing diplomat about his central place in world history, and having a mystic/racist view of Albanian inferiority. He just made no sense on the subject of Kosovo. None. I have this from not only from UK/US colleagues but alsoi hard-nosed Russians who tried to get through to him and have a sensible discussion on Kosovo. They just couldn’t.

So he was not guileful. Nor was he guileless. He was stupid and irrational and possibly mad.


We could have understood and even welcomed an attempt to drive a coherent hard bargain. What stunned everyone was that he offered no bargain at all, other than increasingly outlandish repression.

Your whole Genocide thesis as per this post therefore collapses. Oops.

Charles

PS I still want to hear what your own first-hand experience of this region might be. Maybe … none?

PPS I suspect that we will have no meeting of minds on all this. So I do not propose to comment further here on your many and various claims. Thanks for giving me the space to do so hitherto.