Robert Fisk, in the Palestine Chronicle, discusses the similarities and differences between the war against Iraq and the 1990s battle in Bosnia:
“Bosnia was in Europe, so eventually, we wanted to switch the war off. Iraq is a different matter – we’re in Iraq for oil. If the national product of Iraq was asparagus, we would not be there, I promise. There are parallels with Bosnia, not least indifference towards the Muslim victims – we did nothing for them until the war had consumed a quarter of a million of them – and we don’t care about the Iraqis. But I think there are big differences with Bosnia. There are more parallels, I think, between the NATO-Serb Kosovo war, because that is where we got people used to the idea that bombing civilian trains on railway bridges, bombing hospitals, bombing TV stations was OK. So when we hit lots of civilians in Iraq, it was “well, we were doing that back in Serbia, weren’t we?”. We bombed Aljazeera in Kabul, they bombed Aljazeera in Baghdad, which was not even an Iraqi station. So I think the Kosovo war started off the acceptability of doing these things.”