Captain Ed this morning brings up Kosovo [1]. He suggests that for the last eight years the United Nations is been doing nothing but shuffling paper and wasting time. He quotes a WaPo article: [2]
A year of contentious talks on the future status of Kosovo ended Saturday in a bitter deadlock over a U.N. plan that would set the disputed Serbian province on the road to independence.
Serbia’s nationalist prime minister, Vojislav Kostunica, warned of “the most dangerous precedent in the history of the U.N.” if the Security Council — which will have the final say — approves the plan.
Kostunica said the blueprint, which would grant Kosovo supervised statehood and elements of independence including its own army, flag, anthem and constitution, could encourage other independence-minded regions around the world to break away. Serbian President Boris Tadic said he found the idea of parting with the province “unbearable.”
Kosovo has been a U.N. protectorate since 1999, when NATO airstrikes on Belgrade ended a Serbian crackdown on ethnic Albanian separatists in the southern province. The U.N. plan is an attempt to resolve the final major dispute remaining after Yugoslavia’s bloody 1990s breakup.
And then says:
Eight years has changed nothing. The ethnic Albanians still want their own nation in Kosovo, and the Serbians refuse to part with it. Another eight years will probably produce the same result. Neither side will give an inch on the main issue, which is independence for Kosovo. Both sides remain absolutely committed to the outcome they desire and will not negotiate away their demands.
… The UN may or may not have stopped a genocide; it’s safe to assume they did, given the Serbian leadership at the time. However, they have done nothing to resolve the underlying conflict that started the war, and given the diametrically opposed sides in the conflict, they don’t have that capability at all. The UN went in without a plan, and now their only strategy appears to be to bore everyone with an extended deployment of peacekeepers, whose ability to keep the peace has been shown to be somewhat limited in any case. If that really is their strategy, the UN will have to deploy there for generations or centuries, as the 40-year reign of Joseph Tito didn’t solve the underlying crisis, either — and his troops were much more effective in keeping the peace than the blue helmets in Kosovo today.
I’ve gone through all this extensive quoting business, because it strikes me, as a whole, that this little Kosovo escapade, is remarkably similar to what the Democrats are charging we got ourselves into in Iraq. And so, logically, comes the question; “Why the different response?”.
Look, I supported at the time are going into Kosovo. I still think it was a good idea. Assuming, of course, that we didn’t let the UN run things as we ended up doing.
If you factor out the criminal investigations pending against Bill Clinton at the time that we went into Kosovo, both the reasons that we went in, in each case… Iraq and Kosovo, have been remarkably similar, with the exception of the idea that the United States has made far more progress in establishing a working government in Iraq, than the United Nations has managed to do in eight years of trying the same thing, in Kosovo. Yet, the Democrats say nothing about our continued involvement in Kosovo, and scream bloody murder about Iraq. Logical question: Why?
The different reaction may be related to a Democrat being in the White House of the time of the invasion of Kosovo. It may also have something to do with the involvement of the United Nations. It may be a combination of these factors, since both of them seem to lead down the path of world government. They also suggest a connection to the failure of the effort there.
Perhaps, in the end, it is what the juxtaposition of Iraq and Kosovo say about the effectiveness of each path that disturbs the Democrats so.
The United Nations has utterly failed to get the job done in Kosovo. The path that the Democrats counseled at the time of our getting involved with Kosovo, (That is to say, involving the great debate society of Turtle Bay ) is labeled for all time, as an unarguably miserable failure.
Meanwhile, the story on Iraq has yet to be written. For all that our efforts in Iraq have been flawed we have today to have larger success in Iraq, then we have in Kosovo. Yet, we see the Democrats pushing for our failure in Iraq, at all costs.
The opportunity in Iraq was very much an equal of the opportunity in Kosovo.
Is what we’re seeing here, With the leftists attacking every move we make in Iraq, is what we’re dealing with the interational equal of the leftist predilection of their desire for equal outcome, trumping equal opportunity?