A New Generation Draws the Line: Kosovo, East Timor and the Standards of the West

The conflicts in Kosovo and East Timor, looked at side-by-side by Noam Chomsky, starkly illuminate the strategies of the Western powers in the new century. Chomsky convincingly argues that humanitarianism was not the moving force behind NATO’s intervention in Yugoslavia, and that there, as in East Timor, strategic concerns were dominant while the fate of the civilian population was incidental.