As President Bill Clinton and his coterie of “experts” and media cheerleaders rejoiced in the first US “humanitarian” bombs on Yugoslavia, Rep. Ron Paul was singing a different tune.
“This cannot be a proud moment for America,” he said on the US House Floor on March 24, 1999.
Rep. Paul continued:
Serbia has not invaded another country, but is involved in a nasty civil war with both sides contributing to the violence. … Meddling in the internal affairs of a nation involved in a civil war is illegal and dangerous.
Ron Paul did not prevail at the time. The bombs continued to fall. But people started to notice and listen. Of course he and others who opposed the US war on Yugoslavia were denounced as “Milosevic apologists” and worse. They just didn’t care enough about oppressed people across the globe, was the argument.
US and NATO bombs on Yugoslavia killed between 500 and 5,000 innocent civilians, but that did not bother the “humanitarians” at all. NATO spokesman at the time Jamie Shea argued that civilian deaths were well worth the price of “defeating evil:
There is always a cost to defeat an evil. It never comes free, unfortunately. But the cost of failure to defeat a great evil is far higher.
But far from defeating evil, they aided and abetted evil. The US-led attack on Yugoslavia was to the direct benefit of the most grotesque of all human rights abusers: the murderers of innocents for the harvest of their organs.
As James Bovard explains in his RPI article featured today, a recent European Union task force found that the KLA was guilty of “unlawful killings, abductions, enforced disappearances, illegal detentions in camps in Kosovo and Albania, sexual violence, forced displacements of individuals from their homes and communities, and desecration and destruction of churches and other religious sites.”
As the neocon and “humanitarian” rush to war with Russia accelerates more than 15 years later, Ron Paul is raising the same objections to war propaganda. And the same types are denouncing him as unpatriotic and “Putin’s best friend.”
Now the world knows that Ron Paul was right back then, and thankfully many more understand that he is right today. Watch this Ron Paul Rewind closely as a cautionary tale for all of us today:
