Next sentence:
International law was circumvented in the name of an alleged higher moral imperative."
Having made a couple of somewhat reasonable points, Johnstone is now working her way back to the fringes of rationality and away from an acquaintance with facts and reality. I love that "alleged." It's the first glimpse of what is going to be the big story in Johnstone's alternative universe--that there was no genocide against the ethnic Albanians of Kosovo or the Muslims of Bosnia, and they were a bunch of unreconstructed fascists and Islamic fundamentalists who had it coming anyway.
But the matter at hand (and no, I will not continue this sentence-by-sentence account indefinitely) awaits--what, the breathless reader might inquire, might be the result of this earth-shattering break with precedent by NATO?
"A precedent was set. When the United States subsequently arrogated the right to bomb and invade Afghanistan on moral grounds, its NATO allies could only meekly offer to tag along. In a world with no more legal barriers to might proclaiming itself right, there was nothing to stop a U.S. president from using military force to crush every conceivable adversary."
You heard it here first--without the the precedent of the NATO war against a leader who had plunged a European nation into several wars marked by systematic military actions against civilians, the world would not have otherwise approved of American military action against the Taliban and Al Qaeda in the immediate wake of the terrorist attack on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon on September 11, 2001. Had NATO not taken military action against the paramilitary forces of the government held prmarily responsible for the first European war in half a century, the world would not have accepted military action against Osama bin Ladin.
Diana Johnstone--what color is the sky in your world?
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