What about Luftwaffe pilots celebrating when they shot down a B-17? Not committing war crimes themselves, but protecting a criminal regime.

"Treason doth never prosper: what's the reason? Why if it prosper, none dare call it treason."

replace treason with "war crimes" and it would be as valid.

What constitutes "war crimes" is defined, in practice, by the winners of the war. I wonder if you notice that the winning side in a war never commits "war crimes" and if they do are never punished severely. If the Nazis had won, Roosevelt and Eisenhower would be the "war criminals" (please note the quotes). Stalin is not a "war criminal" in spite of being responsible for the deaths of more people than the Nazis ever killed.

The British were the first to use concentration camps to imprison the Boer women and children where they died like flies. How many British commanders w were prosecuted and punished, do you think?

Even when Americans lose wars, they are never prosecuted for war crimes. This is because American loss of a war does not (yet) involve the enemy invading the United States mainland and conducting prosecutions there.

Btw how many American soldiers were shot for My Lai?

From Wikipedia

My Lai "was the mass murder conducted by a unit of the U.S. Army on March 16, 1968 of 347 to 504 unarmed citizens in South Vietnam, all of whom were civilians and a majority of whom were women, children, and elderly people.

Many of the victims were sexually abused, beaten, tortured, and some of the bodies were found mutilated."

Certainly sounds like a "war crime" to me.

"After a four-month-long trial, in which he claimed that he was following orders from his commanding officer, Captain Medina, William Calley was convicted, on March 29, 1971, of premeditated murder for ordering the shootings. He was initially sentenced to life in prison. Two days later, however, President Nixon made the controversial decision to have Calley released from prison, pending appeal of his sentence. Calley's sentence was later adjusted, so that he would eventually serve four and one-half months in a military prison at Fort Benning."

"Most of the enlisted men who were involved in the events at My Lai had already left military service, and were thus legally exempt from prosecution. In the end, of the 26 men initially charged, Calley's was the only conviction."

So much for "war crimes" and "criminal regimes". Many non Americans believe the Bush/Cheney administration was a criminal regime waging unjustified "aggressive wars of conquest" (one of the main charges against the Japanese after world war 2, btw) Does that make them criminals?

Many Afghans believe that Predator drone attacks that kill civilians are "war crimes". Does that make the American army "criminal"?

Imo not really. "International Law" is much flimsier than the term would have us believe. Without a commonly understood idea of what a "crime" is, it is hard to have a law relating to that crime.

Are you claiming Americans never commit war crimes? Or that they are punished severely when they do? How is an American soldier fighting for his country in Iraq during Gulf War 2 any less "supporting a criminal regime" than this Serb commander downing planes that bomb his country?

Please note that I am not saying only Americans are war criminals or that the Nazis were not.

All sides in a war conduct "war crimes" (as seen by the victims). Who wins and what form the victory takes decides who is a "war criminal" (in terms of getting punished) and who is not.

Excellent comment. This should be linked to every time we talk about the righteousness of this or that country.

The tribunals may have inconsistent moral standards, but I do not.

There's a distinction between a criminal regime and instances of war crimes committed by a country's army. When a country's leaders organize the deliberate and purposeful extermination or forcible relocation of an ethnic population, that's a type of criminal regime. (There are other types, of course.) I would apply this standard to Andrew Jackson, Hitler, and Milosevic, and to the American, German, and Yugoslav governments under them. So while the Luftwaffe and flak gunners didn't kill any Jews themselves, they protected an illegitimate regime. Same for Zoltan, same for the US troops deployed outside the removal operation (for instance, the troops sent to menace the South during the nullification crisis).

When individual units or troops commit war crimes without the authorization of superiors, that's a separate issue. I would have rather seen Calley and his troops face trial in an international court, but there wasn't one then. There is one now, but the US is not yet party to it. I wish it were.

I think there may be evidence that the Bush administration was a criminal regime. I would not have fought for Bush.

I still don't know how to judge Zoltan, though. I'd say the same for a soldier in Iraq or a Luftwaffe pilot. I can appreciate his achievements, but I still raise questions about the morality of them.

Zoltan was operating in central Serbia (not even in its southern part Kosovo).

NATO bombers (USA bombers in this instance, really) were attacking Serbia, and Zoltan was a soldier operating in his own country, defending it against enemy aggression. How can you raise morality questions against that?

And as I already said, the truth about Kosovo is far from what your media told you. Kosovo is now brought down to two functions only:

1. American army base (Bondsteel) 2. Haven for drug lords, and traffickers of people and weapons. Now they've got their own state in the heart of Europe, thanks to USA lobbying practice which is where all of it originated from.

During and after the bombing of Serbia, there was a lot of publicity in certain conservative newspapers in America (particularly the Washington Times) about how the mass graves and such had turned out to be a myth, and about Serbia's historical reasons for wanting to hold sovereignty over Kosovo. The main rationale for this coverage was probably that it was a Democratic war, so a Republican newspaper had to oppose. Still, it exposed a lot of good points that weren't widely publicized elsewhere. (There were also the following arguments: that it's not the job of the US to protect Kosovo anyway, that Clinton was trying to distract people from his own problems, and that Clinton was doing a very bad job of prosecuting the war even if it were justified.)

Ultimately, it doesn't matter whether Serbia was in the right or in the wrong in Kosovo. It's just a bullshit argument to pretend Zoltan was doing something entirely separate from supporting the continued Serbian domination of Kosovo and its people. Either Serbia was in the right (in which case Zoltan would have been perfectly justified no matter what) or Serbia was in the wrong (in which case--since the bombing was an attempt to pressure Serbia to leave Kosovo--protecting Kosovo from bombing turned out to be indirectly supporting the domination of Kosovo.)

Well, we had the Nuernberg trial which at the time pretty much defined what constitutes a war crime. According to it Waffen SS and its members were found war criminals, but Luftwaffe and Wermacht is not. Shall I remind that USSR, who probably had the least reasons to like German armed forces was a juror as well?

You see, this is a thing about definitions. If you stretch them too hard they lose their meaning and you can't usably distinguish the concepts they denote. If you call every opposing soldier a war criminal, then it does only service actual war criminals.