Neither figure takes into account roughly 100,000 people who are "missing." But I'm sure they've just been hiding in the woods for the past 10 years, or maybe in a large hole that's been covered in dirt to protect them. A conservative estimate is that 6,000 were killed by U.S. and NATO bombs. Again, according to Serbia, and this is their liberal estimate, not their conservative estimate. According to NATO the number is less than 1,500 civilians killed in all of Yugoslavia, not just in Kosovo.
Its strange as well that Clinton complained to Wallace about the neocons attacking him when many of the same neocons in 1999 supported Clintons war on Yugoslavia. There were neocons who supported the war in Kosovo (they like wars). However there was intense opposition from Republicans. I agree Clinton is prone to convenient memory, but implying that he wasn't attacked on this is wrong. After all, he got America involved in a war against a tyrannical dictator who posed no direct threat to the US! Republicans hate that shit. The war was never approved by the U.N. or the U.S. Congress, and in fact violated the War Powers Act. The war was never put to the UN because Russia and China would have vetoed it. Russia has a long history of supporting Serbia, and the last thing either country wants is "sanctioned" separatism. NATO acted outside the purview of the UN, which was at the time hotly debated and possibly illegal (NATO was created to fight the Soviet Union after all, and never before instigated hostile activities). The war was approved by Congress when they passed resolutions authorizing the use of "air and missile strikes in cooperation with NATO against Yugoslavia." Whether or not it violated the War Powers Act is open to debate - hence it was never proven to be in violation - because it was couched as a humanitarian mission.
