I was happy to get an email today from David Gibbs saying, “I see that the Kosovo article is being noted on electronic bulletin boards, and was prominently featured today on antiwar.com.” He is referring to his groundbreaking article “Was Kosovo the Good War?” in the new issue of Tikkun. Gibbs wrote there:

Now, a decade later, the Kosovo war is recalled as an exemplary case of humanitarian intervention, and is widely viewed as a model for possible interventions in Darfur and elsewhere. Indeed some of the key figures in the Obama administration, notably Samantha Power, have advocated that “humanitarian intervention” on the model of Kosovo should be a basic theme of U.S. policy.

Given the importance of Kosovo as a model for future military actions, it is important to understand more fully what actually happened in this critical case. New information has become available in recent years from the Milosevic war crimes trial and other basic sources — information that casts the war in a wholly different (and not so positive) light. In what follows, I will review some of these revelations, and how they have discredited widely accepted myths about the “benign” character of the Kosovo intervention.

It’s worth reading if you have any interest in the justifications for the Iraq War or the illusions of the liberal foreign policy world about how America can go to war in a more beneficent way.