Duriung a debate with some Bush supporters who were accusing my “peace-advocacy” as Democratic partisanship, the accusation was made that I did not dissent so much when “NATO killed so many people”. I was not real connected to those events, except that I heard of the etnic cleansings and the mass graves, and the sending of US/NATO forces to step between the murdering factions. I found this article from Sojourners at the time, and found it less than “aspproving” of the US strategy. I tend to lay a great deal of validity and trust with Sojourners to inform me from a “Peace oriented” viewpoint (non-partisan) to assess international situations of which I am largely or insufficently informed. There seems to be little international condemnation of the idea that NATO forces were sent to stem the tide of violence. The fact that NATO resorted to bombing was after repeated warnings against the Serbian leaders, and they simpy did not stop. This hardly seems to be an “inditement” of the Democratic party failure to preserve the peace, given that this is the “unquestioned” tactic of the Cheney-Rumsfieldf led military. But I do not stop there. Walter Wink calls it “A Time To Weep” but when all is said and done, the bombings are ineffective, and ultimately a failure of the philosophy that says:

Surely if we just bomb them a little bit, that will make the government repent. But when that doesn’t happen we say, “Well, we’ll bomb them a little harder. Then they’ll repent. And we’ll bring in Apache helicopters, then they’ll repent. Next we’ll bring in ground troops, then they’ll repent.” There is this ominous series of refrains in the Book of Revelation where all these plagues are visited on the earth. After each one it says, “But they would not repent.” I think we are seeing that in the response of Milosevic. He is not going to repent.

Walter Wink believes in the ultimate victory of non-violence.
A Marshall Plan for the Balkans, Sojourners Magazine/September-October 1999