WbS you still haven’t explained what your reasons, other than humanitarian concern and state sovereignty, were for supporting the armed NATO intervention in Bosnia. Even if you saw Bosnia as “sui generis” you still must have had some general principles you applied that enabled you to see it was in fact a unique case.
I obviously would not have been in favour of armed Western intervention to prevent the break up of Yugoslavia or the Soviet Union. I simply raised these two utterly inconceivable scenarios to highlight that Western intervention will only happen when it is perceived to be in the interests of the West.
There are really no other principles at stake and whether you think you would have justified an intervention for other reasons really has no bearing on the actual realpolitik imperialist decision-making process of the US and the other powerful states in NATO as to whether to intervene in any situation or not.
Just as you say ‘It really doesn’t matter what you consider the UN is or isn’t’ but it does matter what the UN actually is, it matters what the actual motives of NATO intervention were and not what you would have liked them to be or what effects you hoped they would have.
This is one of the problems with ascribing benign rationales to imperialist interventions. It makes people expect good outcomes, which are highly unlikely to occur when good intentions are not behind them. And imperialist motives do matter because they affect the short and long term outcomes and that it why they should always be opposed, regardless of the justifications offered.
As Ellen Meiksins Wood put in an article on NATO’s intervention in Kosovo:
“Motives do matter, if only because they tell us a lot about what the actor will and will not do, and what the outcome is likely to be.”
You also say that I “essentially demand only the best of outcomes in all these situations which you then counterpose with the bloody and grim reality as if those are the only two alternative positions rather than there being a continuum of alternatives from best to worst – but I suspect to many of us it was considerably better than the alternative.”
You’re missing the point I’ve been trying to make all along here – that there are more than two options: support ethnic cleansing/Milosevic vs. support imperialist intervention, with us or against us. I am arguing that both of those options are obviously bad and supporting either of them is not a solution.