Sorry, but this is revisionism ("How Silent Are The 'humanitarian' Invaders Of Kosovo?" ZNet, December 2004) no less than that of the propagandists Pilger is critiquing. He seems to want us to forget that 200,000 Kosovar Albanians (out of a total population of 1.4 million) had been forced from their villages to refugee camps in the mountains or in Albania and Macedonia by the time the bombing started in March 1999. After the bombs started falling, the number was quickly jacked up to 800,000.

An interesting and important piece, but a little irksome. We don't doubt that the CIA and State Department are pulling out all the stops to aid the Yushchenko forces, and this certainly warrants exposure. But the implicit assumption here seems to be that these poor naive Slavic types could never be capable of launching a legitimate opposition movement on their own, so this whole affair must be purely "astroturf" (pseudo-grassroots). We can assure you that Serbia's Otpor was a genuine movement, not just a CIA creation, and we assume the same is true of the Ukrainian movement. In any case, much of the leftist commentary on Ukrainia has been rather glib about the whole matter of electoral fraud--a rather ironic stance, given the dilemma we are currently facing in our own country...